REGULATION - NOT PROHIBITION - INCREASES CONTROL OVER POT

Chicago Police Sgt. Tom Donegan has provoked a useful debate by
suggesting that people possessing small amounts of marijuana should be
fined rather than arrested and jailed. Donegan's idea is a useful step
that doesn't go far enough.

In fact, a strong factual and scientific case can be made that the
best way to reduce the harm associated with marijuana is to junk our
current policy of prohibition and replace it with a system of
common-sense regulation.

That's not as radical an idea as it may seem. Such a system has been
in place in the Netherlands for nearly three decades and is working
well. In Alaska, where the courts have ruled that the state
constitution gives citizens the right to possess small amounts of
marijuana in their homes for personal use, voters will shortly decide
on a ballot measure that would pave the way for a system of marijuana
regulation in that state.

Marijuana regulation would focus law enforcement resources where they
belong: on behavior that puts others at risk, such as driving under
the influence or selling marijuana to kids. Just as important, it
would increase society's control over marijuana. Prohibition
guarantees that we have no control.

We've been down the prohibition path with alcohol, and it failed
dismally. Drinking declined a bit, but any benefits were swamped by a
huge increase in crime and violence generated when prohibition handed
the liquor market over to gangsters. Crime bosses got rich, the murder
rate skyrocketed, the prisons filled and deaths from tainted booze
soared (after all, you can't enforce purity standards on a banned product).

The record of marijuana prohibition has been even worse. Alcohol
prohibition reduced drinking slightly, but, according to the U.S.
government's own figures, use of marijuana by young people under 21
rose more than 2,000 percent after America banned marijuana in 1937.
Government surveys show that nearly 100 million Americans have now
used marijuana, an all-time record. And despite a recent slight
decline (much hyped by Bush administration officials), marijuana use
by teenagers remains near record levels.

The striking thing about the European countries that have
decriminalized marijuana possession is that every single one of them
has a lower rate of marijuana use than the United States. In its
landmark 2001 report, "Informing America's Policy on Illegal Drugs:
What We Don't Know Keeps Hurting Us," the National Research Council
looked at the data and concluded -- largely based on the experiences of
the dozen U.S. states that have adopted laws similar to Sgt. Donegan's
proposal -- that stricter laws and tougher punishments have little or
no effect on marijuana use.

Those who support criminal penalties for marijuana possession often
justify them based on the so-called gateway effect -- the idea that
use of marijuana leads people to try hard drugs such as cocaine and
heroin. But a White House-commissioned study by the Institute of
Medicine found: "There is no evidence that marijuana serves as a
steppingstone [to hard drugs] on the basis of its particular
physiological effect."

Recent research suggests that it is marijuana prohibition, not
marijuana itself, that causes the "gateway effect," by forcing
marijuana into the same illicit drug marketplace as cocaine, speed and
heroin.

Look at the Netherlands, where adults are allowed to possess small
amounts of marijuana and purchase it from regulated merchants rather
than from the criminal underground. Not only are marijuana use rates
far lower than in the United States, so are rates of hard drug use. A
study in the May 2004 American Journal of Public Health that compared
marijuana users in Amsterdam with those in San Francisco, where
marijuana remains illegal, found no difference in the patterns of
marijuana use in the two cities. But marijuana users in Amsterdam,
with access to a regulated market completely separate from the hard
drug trade, were far less likely to use cocaine, opiates, amphetamines
or Ecstasy.

It is time to listen to science and history, junk our failed
experiment with marijuana prohibition, and replace it with a system of
responsible regulation.