DRUG WAR

Billions For What?

Average folks find it hard to understand why a small minority of
Americans desire to dope themselves into oblivion with narcotics. But
this need is quite real, because illicit drugs are a gigantic U.S.
industry, and the police war on drugs is a billion-dollar public burden.

The narcotics realm keeps evolving. A few years ago, heroin was the
favorite mind-blaster, then crystallized "crack" cocaine grabbed the
spotlight, then OxyContin painkillers took center stage, and now "meth
labs" making methamphetamine are the current menace. All the while,
mild marijuana remains a bigger mainstay than the others.

Sometimes we think the police crackdown on these substances does more
harm than the substances do. Taxpayers shell out billions to pay for
the war. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are locked in cells,
wrecking their lives and costing more billions.

Consider today's frenzy over meth labs. New York Times columnist John
Tierney wrote last week:

"Amphetamine pills were easily available, sold over the counter until
the 1950s, then routinely prescribed by doctors to patients who wanted
to lose weight or stay awake. It was only after the authorities
cracked down in the 1970s that many people turned to home labs,
criminal gangs and more dangerous ways of ingesting the drug."

In other words, criminalizing meth turned it into a gangster mess. The
same held true of alcohol in the 1920s, when Prohibition temporarily
made booze illegal -- spawning an era of illicit "speakeasies" and
rival alcohol gangs, eventually creating the Mafia. The cure is worse
than the original problem.

The federal government's National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows
that tobacco and alcohol are much worse menaces to America. A recent
poll found that 3 percent of people used heroin in the past month, 5
percent used meth, 8 percent used crack, 10 percent took painkillers
to get "stoned," 15 percent used marijuana -- but 37 percent smoked
cigarettes and 60 percent drank alcohol.

Cigarettes kill an estimated 400,000 Americans per year, and alcohol
takes a grim toll in car crashes, home fires, broken families, lost
jobs and the like. Yet these substances are legal -- while less-
dangerous ones are a crime. It doesn't make sense.

Other nations don't wage all-out drug wars the way puritanical America
does. They don't lock millions of their citizens in prison. We think
America should ease up.

For example, marijuana -- less harmful than tobacco and alcohol --
should be legalized, as tobacco and alcohol are. That would empty vast
amounts of prison space, and save taxpayers huge sums. Also, it would
give West Virginia a prosperous, legal, hilltop industry.

Why continue a police war that creates organized crime, when none
would exist otherwise?