THE HIGH PRICE OF PROHIBITION

Forty years ago, President Richard Nixon announced that "public enemy
number one in the United States is drug abuse." Declaring that "the
problem has assumed the dimensions of a national emergency," he asked
Congress for money to "wage a new, all-out offensive," a crusade he
would later call a "global war on the drug menace."

The war on drugs ended in May 2009, when President Obama's newly
appointed drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, said he planned to stop calling
it that. Or so Kerlikowske claims. "We certainly ended the drug war
now almost two years ago," he told Seattle's PBS station last March,
"in the first interview that I did." If you watch the exchange on
YouTube, you can see he said this with a straight face.

In reality, of course, Nixon did not start the war on drugs, and
Barack Obama, who in 2004 called it "an utter failure," did not end
it. The war on drugs will continue as long as the government insists
on getting between people and the intoxicants they want. And while it
is heartening to hear a growing chorus of prominent critics decry the
enormous collateral damage caused by this policy, few seem prepared to
give peace a chance by renouncing the use of force to impose arbitrary
pharmacological preferences.

"The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for
individuals and societies around the world," a recent report from the
Global Commission on Drug Policy concludes. "Political leaders and
public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what
many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly
demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug
problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won."

Each year that we fail to face this reality, the report says,
"billions of dollars are wasted on ineffective programs ... millions
of citizens are sent to prison unnecessarily" and "hundreds of
thousands of people die from preventable overdoses and diseases."

This strong criticism of the status quo was endorsed by the three
former Latin American presidents who organized the commission --
Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Cesar Gaviria of Colombia and
Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico -- and 16 other notable names, including
former Secretary of State George Shultz, former Federal Reserve
Chairman Paul Volcker, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, former
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, former NATO Secretary General
Javier Solana, Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and Virgin Group
founder Richard Branson.

The alternatives suggested by the commission are less impressive. The
report calls for easing up on drug users and low-level participants in
the drug trade, while cracking down on "violent criminal
organizations." But it is prohibition that enriches and empowers such
organizations while encouraging them to be violent -- a point the
commission acknowledges.

As a new report from Law Enforcement Against Prohibition notes
regarding the escalating violence that has left some 40,000 people
dead since Mexican President Felipe Calderon began an anti-drug
crackdown in 2006, "This is a cycle that cannot and will not end until
prohibition itself ends."

It is also prohibition that breeds official corruption, makes drug use
more dangerous than it would otherwise be and undermines civil
liberties -- all problems the commission highlights. Furthermore, a
policy of decriminalizing possession while maintaining the bans on
production and sale is morally incoherent: If drug use itself is not
worthy of punishment, why should people go to prison merely for
helping others commit this non-crime?

In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed piece, Shultz and Volcker liken
the war on drugs to alcohol prohibition, approvingly quote Milton
Friedman's argument that "illegality creates obscene profits that
finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords" and "leads to the
corruption of law enforcement officials," and then recoil in horror
from the logical conclusion, saying, "We do not support the simple
legalization of all drugs." If illegality is the problem, legality is
the solution.