THE DRUG WE USE THAT SUPPORTS TERRORISTS

Suppose no American ever again drank alcohol. Think of the good that would
do. Thousands, perhaps millions, of deaths and injuries from drunk driving
would be avoided. Fewer men would beat up their wives in drunken rages.
Home life would be improved.

So why don't we just prohibit the sale and consumption of alcohol in our
country? The answer is so simple and obvious that the reader is annoyed
that I should raise the question. We tried that; it didn't work. Human
beings are weak. Some of them feel the need of alcohol, and they will get
it, regardless of what tie law says.

Besides the fact that it simply didn't work, there were other drawbacks
to Prohibition. The wealthy and the elite got their booze, one way or the
other, and seldom if ever went to jail. The same was not true of the poor
and unfortunate. In addition to the other problems, people often got
alcohol that was contaminated, and went blind or died from drinking it.
Obviously, if there is no legal alcohol, there are no government standards
for its production. The police, trying to enforce laws they themselves
didn't believe in and often violated, became corrupted from the large
quantities of easy money available from the criminal types who ran the
bootleg factories and speakeasies.

The consumption of marijuana by Americans, like the consumption of alcohol
and tobacco, and like gambling, probably does more harm than good, so why
don't we just prohibit the sale and consumption of marijuana? We do.

The question should be, "Why do we allow the sale of some harmful
substances, trying to control them to some extent, and prohibit the sale of
others?"

Nobody can come up with any answer other than "Because we do."

Marijuana is not as addictive as tobacco. Drivers under its influence are
far less likely to kill themselves or others than are drivers under the
influence of alcohol. Yet our government, under all recent administrations,
has been engaged in an incredibly costly "War on Drugs." The result has
been to fill our jails with people who, for the most part, used small
quantities of pot or cocaine.

If you don't think the so-called "drug war" has corrupted our police, you
haven't been looking at the news from Schenectady over the past couple of
years. Longstanding civil protections have gone by the board. Police
departments are finding the drug war a source of new-found wealth. I'm
not talking about bribery by drug although that exists, but about the
confiscation of cars, boats, and real estate with out due process that is
legal under existing drug laws.

We may never know if 9/11 could have been prevented, or how it could have
been prevented, but we know this: From the time John Ashcroft took office
until the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, there was just about no talk about
terrorism in the Justice Department, but mil lions and millions of dollars
and -hours were expended in the war on drugs.

Let a state pass a referendum making marijuana legal for terminally ill
patients, and Mr. Ashcroft's minions descended on it in force, harassing
old ladies who were bald from using chemo.

The drug warriors don't object to lying to serve their ends.

Just the other day, Bush's drug czar warned parents that marijuana has
potency levels 10 to 20 times stronger than in earlier times." Funny, the
latest U.S. government study says that it's about twice as strong.

Nothing is more revolting than those ads that say that taking drugs helps
terrorists. Under the Taliban, opium production in Afghanistan was illegal.
The drug lords of Colombia are capitalists, not religious fanatics.

The drug you're hooked on that helps al-Qaida terrorists is -- gasoline.
Money that goes to Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries for
petroleum finds its way very quickly to Osama bin Laden.

And that's a fact.