HOW MANY 'BURBS MUST THE DRUG WAR BURN, BEFORE WE CALL IT A BUST?

The latest drug-war scare, from Solicitor General Lawrence MacAulay and
others, is that terrorists may be using drug money to finance their evil
deeds. If so, you can see why. Terrorism, like any real crime, produces
victims rather than satisfied customers, so it's not exactly
self-financing. The drug trade, by contrast, turns a regular profit because
it involves transactions so mutually satisfactory that buyers and sellers
will risk jail to conduct them. If this fundamental moral difference
doesn't inspire today's Puritans to draw a legal distinction between them,
perhaps its practical implications will.

Let us grant for purposes of argument that drugs cause grave harm to users
and that users, even if adults, must not be allowed to weigh the
consequences of a shorter but merrier life for themselves. Let us grant
that if we could stop drugs at no cost (except to users who'd rather be
high) we should. Let us even grant that it's worth paying some price,
including harm to innocent bystanders, to stamp out illicit drugs. Will the
drug warriors concede in return that there is in principle some point at
which the costs come to outweigh the benefits? If, for instance, we were to
start letting police shoot people on sight who they suspected of
involvement in the drug trade?

It is important to separate the harm inherent in drug use from the harm
inherent in Prohibition. Ottawa police Chief Vince Bevin just assured our
editorial board that illegal marijuana-growing operations might very well
explode and burn down the rented houses in which they take place. But it's
only because these "grow-ops" are illegal that they do dangerous things
like bypass the main electric panel, leave hot lamps unattended and so on.
I'm not entirely convinced Kanata is about to burst into flames. But if it
is, how many homes must burn down before we decide it's better to let some
stoner vegetate in his basement than see innocent kids incinerated by the
classful?

Or suppose the war on drugs were corrupting the police and bringing the law
into disrepute. We'd repeal it, right? This example is not hypothetical: In
the U.S., alcohol prohibition was repealed for precisely this reason. And
at least the rum runners wanted money for purposes that were not themselves
illegal, like fast cars, flashy women and fancy homes. The people they
killed were rivals in the trade, crooked employees or, to a much lesser
extent, law-enforcement officers. They didn't target innocent civilians and
regarded killing them as a public relations disaster. Even so, the cost of
Prohibition clearly exceeded the benefits.

Well, today's drug war does all the harm of Prohibition. And now we're told
it also makes the drug trade a lucrative source of funds for people whose
ultimate aim isn't to party like Capone but to fly airplanes into buildings
like bin Laden. And this is an argument for it?

If so, here's another. Prohibition also helps terrorists by creating
smuggling routes for drugs that they can then exploit to move people,
explosives, anthrax and other horrors. Drug smugglers can systematically
corrupt customs officials, buy speedboats and so on because, again, the
drug trade produces not aggrieved victims but satisfied customers and
profits. Terrorists can't. But once burly men with no visible means of
support develop reliable clandestine routes across the border, it's as easy
to sneak in a suitcase nuke as a suitcase full of heroin or hash oil.

I'd even warn the Ontario government not to raise cigarette taxes. The war
on tobacco is the kid brother of the war on drugs because the anti-smokers
aim to stop adults from using a psychoactive substance that is bad for
them, but without an outright ban. The absence of such a ban reduces the
profits from smuggling tobacco, but also the risks, because a smuggled
cigarette smells just like a legal one once you're smoking it, whereas
marijuana smoke always indicates a crime. So high cigarette taxes cause
smuggling every time they're tried. Surely the last thing we need right now
is people systematically drilling holes in the already porous U.S.-Canadian
border.

In short, the drug war not only brings the law into contempt and threatens
public safety, it also funnels money to terrorists and helps them move
between countries. And people want more of it?

I say a virtuous choice must be a choice to be virtuous, so I'd repeal the
drug laws on moral grounds. But put aside my distaste for paternalism. If
fighting the war on drugs increases the danger of losing the war on terror,
surely it's doing far more harm than good.