THE FOLLY OF OUR DRUG POLICIES

What We've Learned--and Failed to Learn--From the Nation's War On Drugs

People learn from experience, but the process can be very slow. In 1973,
New York enacted what were known as the Rockefeller drug laws, which
imposed some of the harshest sentences in the country. The other day, Gov.
George Pataki signed a bill retreating from that draconian approach. It
only took 31 years, billions of dollars, and thousands of lives that were
wrecked because of youthful mistakes and very bad luck.

Under the Rockefeller laws, low-level drug possession could get you life in
prison, even if it was your first offense. If you were lucky, you might get
off with the minimum sentence--15 years. Yet this approach made for a poor
deterrent: According to federal data, illicit drug use is just as common in
New York as it is in the rest of the country.

Thanks to these brutal penalties, New York prisons house 19,000 people
convicted on drug charges, or one of every three inmates. The vast majority
of them are small-time offenders with no history of violence.

The belated recognition of these failures exemplifies the history of the
drug war. It has been a perennial failure, but to a large extent, we
persist at it. Citizens in many states adopt humane and comparatively
libertarian policies on drugs while voting for presidents (Democratic and
Republican alike) who regard even pot as a ghastly menace that must be
fiercely resisted.

Americans have curiously mixed attitudes about drug crimes. On the one
hand, we blithely elect people to high office who did things that, had they
been caught, might have earned them prison time. (In 2000, remember, George
W. Bush was careful not to deny ever using cocaine.) On the other, we tend
to see the stiff sentences given to those who were caught as fitting
punishment for their contemptible behavior.

In this realm, ideology has a way of overriding mere facts. We have
learned, for example, that marijuana is a comparatively benign drug that
has few risks and some apparent benefits. In 1999, a National Academy of
Sciences panel said pot has "potential therapeutic value" for "pain relief,
control of nausea and vomiting, and appetite stimulation." The New England
Journal of Medicine has endorsed medical marijuana.

Ten states have also approved the idea. Yet the Bush administration, like
the Clinton administration before it, has spurned the idea. Not only has it
actively fought state initiatives to let sick people get relief from
cannabis, it has obstructed research to help patients.

Recently, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration rejected an application
from a researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who wanted
to conduct clinical trials to establish whether marijuana should be
available by prescription. The project would have required the university
to produce its own supply, which the DEA refuses to allow. If researchers
want the stuff, it says, they'll have to get it from the only federally
authorized source, a farm at the University of Mississippi.

But if you hope to get approval from the federal Food and Drug
Administration to market a drug, as these researchers did, you have to be
able to produce and test the substance you propose to sell. You also need
to assure high quality--which the government's product is not. A 2002
report from the Missoula Chronic Clinical Cannabis Use Study noted that
some test subjects regarded it as "the worst marijuana they had ever sampled."

You can imagine that news breaks a lot of hearts at the DEA. The agency is
plainly not interested in studies that might lead to a change of policy on
pot. In rejecting the application, it said clinical trials to examine the
safety and effectiveness of the drug are impossible because they "must
utilize smoked marijuana, which cannot be the permitted delivery system for
any potential marijuana medication due to the deleterious effects."

Talk about bizarre logic. Without allowing a study, the DEA knows that
smoking pot is too bad to be good. But the drug warriors are wrong on the
basic fact: Clinical trials are already being conducted in California,
using devices called vaporizers that allow ingestion without smoking.

The result of the DEA decision, says the Marijuana Policy Project, is to
"block the only proposed research project that could lead to marijuana's
FDA approval." The DEA would prefer that we not get information that might
cause us to change our minds.

In time, the steady accumulation of evidence about the value of medical
marijuana may overcome such opposition--just as the experience under the
Rockefeller drug laws forced a retreat. Someday, the folly of the entire
drug war may bring it to an end.

But don't hold your breath.