DRUG WARRIORS MAKE MILLIONS OFF MARIJUANA

THE MONEY IN illicit drugs doesn't all go to bad guys carrying AK-47s and
driving BMWs. About $69 billion of it last year went to police, federal
agents, judges, jailers and other drug-law enforcers across the United
States. These are the good guys, but most are not so good that they will
admit that the war on drugs is a waste of money and lives. The war is how
they make a living.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer wasn't thinking about the billions
when he played the innocent during the recent arguments on medical
marijuana. Breyer conceded that he didn't really know whether marijuana
helped cancer patients in ways that pills do not. But it puzzled him, he
said, that the patients' lawyers didn't just go to the federal Food and
Drug Administration and insist, "You must take it off the list [of banned
drugs] if it has an accepted medical use and it isn't lacking in safety."

Sounds like common sense: Make a scientific evaluation of medical
marijuana, and then decide whether or not it belongs in the people's
medicine cabinets.

But that's not going to happen. A week later, the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration told Prof. Lyle Craker, a horticulturist at the University
of Massachusetts, that he couldn't grow marijuana for the purpose of making
such an evaluation.

Craker is an expert on medicinal plants. (Over 25 percent of all
prescription medicines are plant-based.) He wanted to grow the type of
marijuana needed for secondary clinical trials -- which are run by
DEA-licensed medical professionals.

Observe how DEA bureaucrats draw a perfect circle of frustration. They say
that researchers should instead use marijuana grown at a University of
Mississippi lab. But the marijuana there is low-quality and worthless to
the scientists.

Then they tell Craker that there's no need for his improved marijuana,
because no one is doing secondary trials, anyway. But people aren't doing
secondary trials because they can't get the plant material to do them with.
"It's kind of silly here," Craker concludes.

DEA officials are not biologists and have no idea what distinguishes one
type of marijuana from another. But that's not the point of the exercise.
The point is to stop any activity that might eventually hurt business.

Do the math: The DEA has nearly 11,000 employees and a $2 billion budget.
America last year arrested 1.6 million people for nonviolent drug offenses.
Half were for marijuana (with 80 percent for possession). The number of
marijuana arrests, 734,000, nearly equaled the population of South Dakota.
Imagine what legalizing marijuana would do to the DEA's cash flow.

Marijuana has yet to kill anyone, yet anti-drug advocacy groups like the
Partnership for a Drug-Free America portray it as a scourge. And why not?
Condemning marijuana helps score $20 million in annual revenues for the
Manhattan-based nonprofit. Its president makes a quarter of a million, and
the next five highest-paid employees rake in close to $200,000 apiece.

There's far less money in opposing the war on drugs. Just ask Jack Cole, a
former undercover narcotics agent who helped found a group called Law
Enforcement Against Prohibition. The members are mostly cops, judges,
corrections officers and former DEA agents who think that the "war" amounts
to throwing $69 billion down the rat hole.

In his 26 years with the New Jersey State Police, Cole saw the drug problem
getting worse, as spending on the war mushroomed. The prohibition on drugs
has created "obscene profits" for criminals, he notes. For example, the
value of heroin increases 17,000 percent from the time it leaves the farmer
in Afghanistan to when it sells on American streets.

"When I arrested someone for robbery or rape, I was taking someone
dangerous off the streets," Cole says. "When I arrested someone for selling
drugs, I was creating a job opening."

Cole's group offers a simple plan: Legalize all drugs. The federal
government could give addicts the drugs they crave, then treat them.

"Medical marijuana would be Drug Policy Reform 101," Cole says. "This is
the very least anybody can do for anyone."

But the smallest retreat is billions in lost revenues for the warriors. And
that's why the bureaucrats and every player in this war will fight against
legalizing medical marijuana, for as long as it takes.