PANEL: POT BAN USELESS

The crackdown on the export of marijuana from Colombia is a good example of
how drug control policies can do more harm than good, panelist Sanho Tree
said Thursday in a discussion of "Margaritas and Marlboros: Alcohol and
Tobacco Policy" at the Conference on World Affairs.

After facing harsher consequences for their crime, marijuana traffickers in
Colombia began to smuggle more potent drugs such as cocaine, said Tree, a
fellow and the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Institute for
Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. The project works to replace the punitive
"war on drugs" with alternatives addressing root causes of the problem.

A commonly held misconception is that those opposing drug prohibition want
to freely distribute them, Tree said.

"Some people would say you just want to sell heroin at 7-Eleven," Tree said.
"Well, you can get it behind the store anyway."

The answer is greater regulation, Tree said.

The prohibition policy is colored by racial and socioeconomic
discrimination, said Robert Granfield, an associate professor of sociology
and research associate at the Research Institute on Addiction at the State
University of New York at Buffalo.

Prohibition in the 1920s targeted a large immigrant population that
threatened the elites. Outlawing alcohol was "an attempt to impose, in a
very coercive way, a moral belief on a group of low-status individuals,"
Granfield said.

One out of every four black men in America is either in prison or on parole,
and a large portion of them are charged with nonviolent, drug-related
crimes, said panelist Terry McNally, a media consultant.

One of the most effective ways of deterring drug use is through "social
norming," Granfield said.

Its goal is to disseminate actual rates of drug use, he said. The
information can act as a deterrent because if people think that using drugs
is not the norm, they are less likely to do so, he said.