OBAMA FINALLY CONFRONTING PROBLEM OF DRUG PROHIBITION

Last Thursday, President Barack Obama took questions submitted online
in video and text format in the spirit of his State of the Union
address two days earlier.

The President has conducted these in previous years, but this year's
town hall was a bit different.

The most popular video this year was one from retired deputy sheriff
MacKenzie Allen, a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
(LEAP). He took his time to ask the president whether there should
come a time for us to discuss the possibility of legalization,
regulation and control of all drugs in hopes of an alternative to the
current system of zero-tolerance prohibition. Where the President
would've laughed this question off to the anxious-to-please audience
in D.C. in years past, this year he chose to air and answer Mr.
Allen's question.

In his answer, President Obama called the policy change an "entirely
legitimate topic for debate" and stated his desire to move to a more
public health-centered approach rather than prosecution and
incarceration. This is significant because since the beginning of the
administration, the President and his Drug Czar, Gil Kerlikowski
claimed that "legalization is not in [their] vocabulary."

Drug prohibition costs the federal government $15 billion per year.
Although dwarfed in comparison to the $600 billion or so that we pay
for Social Security, the drug war bureaucracy has not been immune to
the waste and bloat that plagues many programs, including SSI.
Federal departments like the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the
Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) have existed for
several decades, yet their spending yields almost no discernable results.

After 40 years of increasing enforcement and interdiction efforts
(and stagnant funding for education and harm-reduction), little has
been accomplished as far as reducing youth use-rates and organized
crime in our inner cities.

To assess cost effectiveness, drug prohibition can be evaluated on
multiple criteria, but I feel its only right to use the government's
own criteria. Nowadays, the government combats drugs using two sets
of tactics: reducing demand and reducing supply.

Demand reduction takes the form of drug education programs like DARE
and Congressionally-mandated advertising campaigns like the National
Youth Anti-Drug Campaign. Supply reduction tactics include domestic
interdiction efforts to intercept drugs crossing the border of Mexico
and international eradication efforts such as Plan Columbia in 1999
to spray coca fields.

In actuality, neither of these methods has produced results that
justify the enormous costs of the massive police and prison
bureaucracy needed to maintain them.

Demand reduction in prohibition means changing the minds of those who
choose to use drugs, whether that use harms the user or not. This
policy relies on citizens to magically start listening to government
messages about drugs and react accordingly, a similar strategy to
herding cats. What our government doesn't comprehend is the innate
human desire to alter one's consciousness. People have sought after
intoxicating substances in nature since they stepped foot on earth
and won't be stopping anytime soon. Indeed, demand for drugs rarely changes.

Reducing harms associated with drug use starts with an open, honest
conversation about drugs and in providing medical help for those who
become addicted.

To assess supply reduction efforts, assuming an unchanging demand for
drugs, we can look for a change in the price of drugs to observe
changes in the market; such is the case with a black market in which
consumers are kept in the dark concerning product quality and the
production process. We see that in 1982, the price of a gram of
cocaine was $667; in 2007 it was $122. If prohibition had effectively
reduced the supply of cocaine in the market, the price would've
increased, not decreased by two-thirds over 25 years.

This trend continues for other illegal drugs as well.

Unfortunately for us, drug prohibition didn't work (nobody remembers
the 1920's?). The time is now to adopt measures that effectively
reduce harms associated with drug use instead of ignoring it. The
time is now to end the unjust imprisonment of millions of otherwise
law-abiding citizens. The time is now to cut budgetary waste and
restore the right of free ingestion for all people.

A burgeoning drug war bureaucracy threatens not only the fiscal
health of our nation, but the liberty of its citizens, the most
precious thing we entrust to our government.