DUMP THE WAR ON DRUGS

When David Simon, creator of HBO's late dramatic crime series "The
Wire," heard that Attorney General Eric Holder wanted to see the
series return for a sixth season, he offered the nation's top
prosecutor a deal.

He'll start working on a sequel season, Simon responded in an email to
the Times of London, "if the Department of Justice is equally ready to
reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided,
destructive and dehumanizing drug prohibition."

Holder was not available for comment, but it's a safe bet Simon's deal
asks too much of the Obama administration. Despite declarations to the
contrary, Team Obama appears to be stuck in the 40-year-old rut better
known as the "war on drugs."

That's how long it has been since President Richard Nixon on June 17,
1971, announced $155 million in new anti-drug funding that he would
later call "the war on drugs." A third of the funds would go after
drug traffickers and two-thirds of it would be aimed at treatment and
rehabilitation. That's called a balanced approach, but it didn't last
long.

The lock-'em-up side surged with the mandatory-minimum sentencing
under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, largely in reaction to the rise
of a crack cocaine epidemic and related street violence.

Among the results, a 100-to-one sentencing disparity between crack
cocaine and powder cocaine offenses that boosted incarceration rates,
particularly of African-Americans -- producing statistics that Michelle
Alexander, an Ohio State University legal scholar, calls "The New Jim
Crow" in her well-researched book with that title.

I come not to praise drug use. I condemn it. But some drug fights work
better than others.

A new report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy, which includes
former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, President Ronald
Reagan's secretary of state, George Shultz, former Federal Reserve
Chairman Paul Volcker and the former presidents of Mexico, Brazil and
Colombia, calls the global war on drugs a costly failure "with
devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world."

They urged the Obama administration and other governments to try new
ways of legalizing and regulating drugs, especially marijuana, to deny
profits to drug cartels and focus law enforcement on violent
offenders. The White House immediately responded: No way.

So did the government of Mexico, which is allied with the U.S. in a
war against drug cartels that have killed more than 38,000 people in
Mexico in the last five years.

Obama's drug office fired back with statistics that claimed huge
declines in drug use since the peak of the late 1970s. But
correlations between those declines and the drug war are highly
disputed. What's indisputable is the increased incarceration of
millions of Americans, many for simple possession.

To his credit, Holder has called for the U.S. Sentencing Commission to
release some of the 12,000 federal prisoners who were sentenced or
arrested for crack cocaine before Congress changed the sentencing law
last year to reduce the disparity between crack and cocaine. Holder
recommended early release for 5,500 prisoners whose crimes did not
involve the use of weapons and who did not have long criminal
histories. The releases, which could begin this year, would be a good
start.

But why, we should reasonably ask, should people be subject to prison
terms if their only offense is their use of illegal substances?

"Drug addiction should be handled as a health issue," says Neill
Franklin, executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
The organization released a report Tuesday that finds the Obama
administration carrying on the drug war as usual. That includes Drug
Enforcement Administration raids of legal medical marijuana clinics at
a higher rate than the George W. Bush administration did, despite
pronouncements that states would be allowed to govern themselves on
that issue.

LEAP favors drug legalization and strict regulation. That means,
arrest the sellers and send users to treatment. "It's easier to beat a
drug addiction," Franklin observed, "than to beat the devastating
impact of a prison sentence."

Franklin is a former narcotics officer with the Maryland State Police
and the Baltimore Police Department. He finds it tragic that Obama,
the first president to be elected after revealing his youthful drug
indiscretions, has not done more to help today's nonviolent offenders
get a second chance. So do I.