WAR ON DRUGS: YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WASTE

No one looks forward to April 15, but most of us pay our taxes willingly.
After all, our dollars buy important things, from highways to
missiles. But what if for decades we spent hundreds of billions of dollars
on a program without bothering to find out if it actually worked?

Or worse, what if we kept pouring money into a proven failure? We are doing
precisely that with the War on Drugs.

That is the inevitable conclusion of a devastating National Research
Council report commissioned by the White House drug czar's office and
released one year ago -- and ignored by the press and policymakers.

Titled "Informing America's Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don't Know
Keeps Hurting Us"

Aavailable online at: http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10021.html -- the NRC's
analysis concludes that we are not even collecting the data that would tell
us whether present anti-drug strategies are working.

More startling, the data we do have doesn't support the central pillar of
U.S. drug policy: Arresting and jailing drug users.

"Existing research," the NRC writes, "seems to indicate that there is
little apparent relationship between severity of sanctions prescribed for
drug use and prevalence or frequency of use."

The researchers particularly noted that the 11 states that have greatly
reduced penalties for marijuana possession have not seen increased use.

Bush administration budget chief Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr., explained to the
Washington Post in January that the administration would rate federal
programs as "effective, ineffective and in-between," steering more money to
programs that work and less to those that don't. Logically, this should
lead to a major rethinking of anti-drug efforts.

It hasn't. Bush's budget tinkers a bit, but still allocates two-thirds of
anti-drug funds to the same old failed law-enforcement efforts.

MARIJUANA -- legal under federal law until 1937 -- provides a telling
example: According to government figures, only about 2 percent of Americans
born before the ban took effect had used marijuana by the time they turned
21. But of those born 20 years later, from 1956 to 1960, more than 50
percent tried marijuana by age 21.

Since then, the percentage has consistently remained at least 2000 percent
above pre-ban levels.

Federal anti-drug expenditures rose from $11.5 billion in 1992 to nearly
$19 billion in 2002. The result? According to government surveys, in 1992,
33.3 percent of Americans had used at least one illicit drug. By 2000 that
figure had risen to 38.9 percent. That year, the United States arrested
646,000 people for simple possession of marijuana, an all-time record.

But is marijuana really so dangerous that this draconian approach is
needed? In March 1972, a national commission appointed by President Nixon
declared, "The Commission is of the unanimous opinion that marijuana use is
not such a grave problem that individuals who smoke marijuana, and possess
it for that purpose, should be subject to criminal procedures."

This conservative group found that criminal prohibition actually undercuts
efforts to discourage use and to curb misuse of marijuana.

In 1995, The Lancet, one of the world's most prestigious medical journals,
stated flatly, "The smoking of cannabis, even long term, is not harmful to
health," and called for decriminalization. This March, the Canadian Medical
Association did the same. Almost simultaneously, the British government's
scientific advisory panel on illegal drugs reported, "The high use of
cannabis is not associated with major health problems for the individual or
society" and recommended ending arrests for marijuana possession.

The experts have spoken, but the waste of our tax dollars continues.

Bruce Mirken, a longtime health journalist who has written for Men's
Health, AIDS Treatment News and the San Francisco Chronicle, is director of
communications at the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C. --
http://www.mpp.org