STOP THE DRIVE TO LEGALIZE DRUGS

Maybe the cost of incarcerating drug offenders has become too great
for strapped government budgets to bear. Maybe it's a libertarian
impulse -- why should the government tell us what we can shoot, smoke
or snort? Maybe it's because the generation that smoked dope and
dropped acid on camera at Woodstock is the Establishment now.

For whatever reason, a push is under way to call a truce -- surrender,
really -- in the war on drugs. But Louisiana's recent experience, which
led to the necessary but bizarre decision to outlaw certain bath salts
and plant food, raises questions that should stop the drive to legalize.

Gov. Bobby Jindal exercised his power to outlaw, effectively but
temporarily, five chemicals found in certain bath salts and plant food
sold to the head shop trade under names like "White Dove." A series of
more than 300 reports from emergency responders across the country
indicated that people were overdosing, if that's the word, on
substances containing those chemicals, which act as hallucinogens.
More than half those calls, 157, involved Louisiana patients.
Responders reported a variety of physical and psychological symptoms,
including heart palpitations, paranoia and hallucinations.

The idea behind legalization is that the only monument in the war on
drugs will be its monumental failure. We've done little to stop drug
abuse, the argument goes, but we have managed to create massive gangs
and cartels. A third of Louisiana's incarcerated population is in jail
for drug offenses, by some estimates, and a significant portion of
violent and property crimes are believed to be linked to drugs, too.

The legal-drug paradise envisioned by legalization advocates has safe,
legal drugs of regulated potency and safety available, inexpensive but
taxed, to those who just can't say no.

But on the bottom line, this argument rises or falls with the
rationality of those who escape rationality for fun. Even assuming
that a drug user is less likely to overdose on legal heroin, less
likely to waste the mortgage money on legal cocaine, and less likely
to kill someone in a car crash while high on legal marijuana, we still
have a line to draw.

Should we be so broadminded that we legalize the chemicals that turned
up in the bath salts, and ignore the dangers they pose to those
foolish enough to abuse them get high? If we don't, why legalize so
many other drugs that pose such dangers to the public health?