HARD STUFF

Get Real About Dealing With Illegal Drugs

Along with abortion, gun control and gay marriage, drug legalization
is one of the truly thorny issues confronting American society. It
raises contentious questions touching on criminality, morality, health
and addiction, immigration, even national security.

Like the other issues, drug legalization frequently resists rational
discussion. For the most part, people have their minds made up.

There's compelling reason to change that mindset and put drug
legalization on the table for reasoned discussion and debate. The
illegal drug trafficking through Mexico has become murderous -- and
expensive. It's simply unconscionable to allow the status quo to
continue. And doing so will require forthright attention to the issue
of demand for illegal drugs in this country -- the engine that drives
the drug violence.

If America's leadership is looking for a scholarly basis on which to
begin such a discussion, it will find it in the recent report of the
Global Commission on Drug Policy.

The commission has true stature. It is made up of former presidents of
Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, as well as former U.N. Secretary General
Kofi Annan and former U.S. officials George Schultz and Paul Volcker.

It recommends, in part: "Political leaders and public figures should
have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge
privately: that the evidence ... demonstrates that repressive strategies
will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not,
and cannot, be won."

Such an admission would be both powerful and therapeutic - a gateway
to candid conversation.

The problems of the status quo are self-evident. Criminalizing drug
use has filled American prisons at an enormous and unsustainable cost,
even as it has enticed criminals into drug trafficking by forcing
market prices higher than they would be under a legally monitored system.

Meanwhile, the toll is tragic: More than 34,000 have been murdered in
Mexico since 2005, and hundreds of thousands of drug users have been
sentenced to lives of misery in addiction.

The commission recommends that governments "end the criminalization,
marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do
no harm to others."

That approach is guaranteed to encounter resistance from many in this
country. So be it. This conversation can't wait.