MISFIRES IN DRUG WAR VICTORIES ELUSIVE, CASUALTIES MANY AFTER 40 YEARS

Fighting an exhausting, expensive war with little progress to show
draws into question the strategy and wisdom of continuing the fight.

So it goes with this nation's most wearisome and longest-declared
war: the war on drugs.

This month is the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon's
famous call for a national offensive against drug abuse, which he
called "public enemy number one."

It often feels like the enemy is winning. The reasons are many.

Despite estimates that the war has cost up to $1 trillion, use of
illicit drugs is holding steady or showing sharp increases in
different groups. In the past 20 years, a national study found,
illicit drug use has been climbing among all ages of young people.

It reached 24 percent of high school seniors in one broad sample last
year. This is not progress.

At the same time, jails and prisons remain stuffed with drug
offenders, with estimates that one in five of the nation's 2.4
million inmates are convicted users, dealers or traffickers.

In Texas, more than 16,000 state prisoners were locked up last year
for possession alone, at a cost to taxpayers of about $50 a day. Add
probationers and parolees, and the number of drug offenders under
state control in Texas exceeded 125,000.

The human toll of the illegal drug trade has spilled over to Mexico
in tragic proportions. An estimated 36,000 people there have died in
gangland violence since 2006.

Though Nixon put an early emphasis on drug treatment, that approach
is a distant memory. The "treatment gap" has left 2 million Texans
without help today to break the cycle of drug or alcohol abuse,
according to recent federal estimates.

The nation's tangle of drug laws is increasingly conflicted. Sixteen
states have legalized marijuana for medicinal purposes, though
federal laws still make possession, production and sale a
prosecutable crime. While backing off of medical marijuana users, the
Justice Department is pushing back at local commercial growers who supply them.

Fed up with the legal jumble - and it's hard not to be - two members
of Congress, Republican Ron Paul of Texas and Democrat Barney Frank
of Massachusetts, filed a bill last week to take the federal
government out of the picture and leave marijuana regulation to the states.

Little wonder the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously passed a
resolution last week declaring the government's 40-year-old war on
drugs a failed policy and the "principal driver of mass incarceration
in America."

The mayors called for an independent commission to perform a
comprehensive review of the justice system and recommend wide-ranging
reforms. The city leaders want a new approach, one that is "less
expensive, more humane and more effective ... to deal with drugs and crime."

This is a good approach - not quite a cease-fire, but a critical
examination of the drug fight before more billions are squandered.

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