END THIS ABSURD WAR

The veteran sitting across the table from me looked weary after
delivering yet another speech against a war that has neither a point
nor, apparently, an end. It was started years ago by a Republican
president, long since discredited, the veteran noted. Yet the
Democrats who until a few weeks ago controlled both the White House
and Congress didn't raise a finger to stop it. "I don't understand
how much more money has to be wasted or how many more lives have to be
ruined before we admit it's been a huge mistake," Kyle Vogt told me.
"We can end this thing with the stroke of a pen."

He wasn't referring to Iraq or Afghanistan, but America's truly
endless war, the war on drugs. Declared 40 years ago by President
Nixon, it chews up $41 billion in government spending each year while
sending two million Americans to jail. Yet Nixon's goal of a drug-free
America ("the final issue is not whether we will conquer drug abuse,
but how soon") seems no closer to anyone but the drug warriors themselves.

"All these years later, the people running the drug war keep
promising us the same thing they have from the beginning, that they
can decrease drug use," Vogt said. "They just need a little more
time and a little more money. Why do we listen? We wouldn't tolerate
that from a physician who was treating us and not making us any better.

"And if everything your physician told you to do made your illness
worse, you'd quit doing it and find another doctor."

Vogt, who served four years as a military policeman on a Maryland army
base, speaks as a veteran of the front lines of the drug war. He's one
of an increasing number of former drug warriors turned doves. Their
organization, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), includes
some 4,000 people -- from beat cops through Gary Johnson, the former
governor of New Mexico -- who once played roles in enforcing drug laws.

I caught up with Vogt in a Fort Lauderdale coffee shop recently after
he spoke to Broward County's Libertarian Party. He told me that if
LEAP membership weren't career suicide, its roster would be full of
current policemen, prosecutors and judges as well.

"I talk to law-enforcement people all the time," he said. "I'd
guess eight out of every 10 are totally against this prohibition
policy we follow on drugs. And every single one of them is baffled
that we put people in jail for marijuana. Marijuana doesn't kill
anyone, while we see that in the case of alcohol all the time."

Baby Boomers, most of whom used marijuana themselves when they were
younger, like to kid themselves that the war on drugs that they've
wholeheartedly supported as adults is aimed not at marijuana but
harder drugs, and not at users but traffickers.

But the cold fact is that U.S. drug-enforcement policy overwhelmingly
targets not drug lords but the people to whom they sell. FBI
statistics for 2007 show that more than 80 percent of U.S. drug
arrests that year were for possession rather than sale, and that there
were nearly twice as many arrests for marijuana as for heroin and
cocaine combined.

When he was a military policeman, Vogt thought arresting people for
using marijuana was weird: "If we were called to a domestic dispute
or a hostage situation, we worried about alcohol, not marijuana,
because it's alcohol that makes people crazy." But it wasn't until
after he left the military and opened a construction business in Port
St. Lucie that he turned into an active opponent of marijuana laws.

"My son was arrested after a cop saw him smoking a joint in a parked
car," Vogt said. "He had to pay a fine of a couple of hundred
dollars, which is not such a big deal, at least not for us. But
college scholarships? Forget it. My son can't even get a simple job.
He goes online to fill out an application to work at a hamburger
chain, and he gets to that little box that says, 'Have you ever been
arrested?' And when he clicks yes, the next thing he sees on the
screen is, SESSION ENDED."

The worst, Vogt fears, is yet to come. He looks south across the
border to Mexico, now the most murderous country in the world as a
result of warfare between drug cartels competing for the U.S. market,
and sees a grim vision of America's future.

"Prohibition creates crime and violence in our society that need not
exist, except for the policy of prohibition itself," he said, shaking
his head. "We tried this with alcohol, and we had gangsters, just
like Mexico does. And when we replaced Prohibition with a system of
regulation and control, we got rid of the gangsters. You don't see
Coors and Budweiser doing drive-by shootings or planting car bombs to
increase their market share."