BORDER SKIRMISHES MARK FAILED POLICY

Border security seems to be in the news these days. The focus usually
is on people coming into this country from Mexico and Central
America. Little media attention is paid to drug-smuggling operations,
so little attention is paid by the American people to a failed border
policy that has been going on for decades -- skirmishes in the drug
war.Since January, nearly 50 people have been killed in the border
city of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico. On Tuesday, a state police chief was
killed and two other officers wounded when their car was fired on by
well-armed assailants. The ambush-style shootings are being blamed on
drug lords battling over smuggling routes into the United States.
These latest victims can be added to the rising costs of an American
drug control policy that does little to keep drugs off the streets in
U.S. cities, while racking up huge bills.

Drug warriors in this country like to trumpet their successes in the
media, posing with large caches of drugs and weapons they've taken
from smugglers and dealers. And for that dangerous work they are to be lauded.

But the larger picture shows that for all the foot soldiers' risky
work, the supply of available drugs seems little changed. Don't blame
that on the folks on the front lines; the fault lies further up the
chain of command and is the result of a faulty premise.

The drug war is based on the idea that if the government wishes
something to go away, it can simply outlaw it. Apparently those in
charge of the nation's drug policy were absent from history class the
day Prohibition was covered. It didn't work in the 1920s and it's not
working now, because it ignores one of the basic tenets of freedom:
so long as the rights of others are not harmed, what one does with
one's own body is not the business of government.

An argument can be made that by spending, say, the rent money on
drugs, parents expose their children to the possibility of
homelessness and a host of other woes. That's true, but it's a
societal problem rather than a legal one. And making drugs illegal
hasn't kept people from using them.

Defenders of the drug war will point to the Nuevo Laredo victims and
ask if their rights were not violated by drug lords. Of course they
were, but that's a result of drug prohibition, not drug use. Drug
lords are willing to kill to protect their business because of the
huge profits involved in the drug trade. Those profits are in direct
correlation to the risk involved. That's basic economics.

In the drug trade, the risk comes from dealers attempting to
monopolize the market and government officials trying to close the
market. In the absence of prohibition, the threat of arrest would be
eliminated and danger from other dealers would be reduced because the
profits would be smaller.

In a free society, people should be free to make choices with little
or no interference from government. Many, if not most, Americans
don't see a need for government to meddle in their lives. After all,
most of us are upstanding citizens, right? Ah, but those other folks;
they need the nanny government to look out for them and limit their
choices. Actually, very few of them need someone else to look out for
their best interests. And in even fewer cases would the government be
the proper custodian. Now might not be the time to legalize drugs,
but it's certainly the time to honestly evaluate our current policy,
because it's not working.