ENDING THE WAR ON DRUGS

A growing chorus of people in a position to know - judges, retired law
enforcement people, politicians, journalists - say the War on Drugs is
unwinnable; that despite all the money and the incarcerations and the
foreign policy maneuverings we haven't succeeded in materially lessening
either supply or demand since President Nixon declared a federal war on
drugs in 1969. On the one hand, avowed conservatives including William E
Buckley George Schultz, and the Republican governor of New Mexico, and on
the other hand, the national American Civil Liberties Union-people who
rarely agree with each other - agree that this "war" should end.

If these informed people are against this war, why is anybody for it?
Basically because the government tells them to be. Most people don't have
time to evaluate risk for themselves; we trust the government to evaluate
the safety of the meat we buy the medicines that can be prescribed, even
the materials from which children's clothing can be made. But government
experts are fallible, like everyone else - only when the government makes a
mistake in banning something, it's almost impossible to change.

Remember the drug thalidomide? It produced terrible deformities in babies
when taken by pregnant women.

Clearly no pregnant woman should take it. At the same time, it was the only
known drug that could treat leprosy - not a widespread scourge in the
United States, but hardly unknown either. After the scandal, any use of
thalidomide was forbidden in the United States for decades - until very
recently, in fact. when officials decided to reevaluate thalidomide in
light of its other beneficial properties and perhaps allow it to be
prescribed again - not just to pregnant women. It's quite apt that this has
been called "The War on Some Drugs."

Are the forbidden drugs more dangerous to health than those that are
legally allowed?

Not at all. Experts seem to agree that the legal drugs alcohol and tobacco
are much more destructive to health than heroin, cocaine, or, of course,
marijuana.

Opiates and marijuana have been in use through history, but
pharmaceutically created drugs arrive on the scene and are encouraged or
banned by the government for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

At least two drugs that are now controlled substances, LSD and MDMA
(Ecstasy), began life as psychotherapeutic drugs before they were banned
because of recreational usage.

Several other psychoactive drugs - Prozac, Paxil, and Ritalln, to name a
few - are not only allowed by the government but often promoted by official
institutions. So, of course, is methadone.

Battle now rages around marijuana because of its medicinal value. Marijuana
is apparently highly effective against the persistent nausea many cancer
and AIDS patients experience. For many years some doctors have unofficially
urged these patients to use medical marijuana.

Now with the success of some political campaigns to legalize such use, the
battle is being joined.

The widely publicized fate of the bestselling author Peter McWilliams is a
horrific case in point.

McWilliams, a terminal AIDS patient, was brought into federal court in 2000
for growing and using marijuana, a practice that has been legal in his
state of California since 1996. He was forbidden to tell the jury that what
he did was legal in the state, that he had AIDS, or that marijuana was all
that could prevent his vomiting up his medication. In order to get bail
during his trial, he was forbidden to use the drug, and was tested
periodically to make sure he complied. He was convicted, and while awaiting
sentencing, he choked at home on his own vomit and died.

Now, as of last October, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has
prohibited as "controlled substances" all products made from hemp (the
marijuana plant) that contain any trace of the active ingredient mc. Not
that the DEA thinks that cloth and rope and hand creme and dietary
supplements will make anyone high, but edible products made from hemp can
sometimes give false positives in drug testing.

So they are all banned. Well, not quite all. Cloth and rope and,
provisionally toiletries are exempt from the ban, courtesy of your government.

Inconsistency is the least of the problems the War on Drugs has brought us,
of course.

The statistics are ubiquitous and disturbing civil liberties violations;
random searches on highways and in public places; warrantless searches;
questionable killings; asset forfeiture (seizing property on suspicion of
its being involved in a crime and requiring owners to sue to get it back);
domestic government expenditures that escalated from millions per year in
the seventies to billions today', and the racist effect - 57 percent of
those serving time in federal and state prison for drug offenses are Black.
I won't even mention the foreign policy repercussions. The effect on
respect for the law of course, has been bad - exacerbated by the mandatory
minimum sentences that have overcrowded our prisons even while the judges
compelled to impose them have denounced them from the bench.

Why has this war been so horrendous? The very prohibiting of something that
people find pleasurable creates a market by making it harder to get.
Experts know that, too, In 2000, the president of Uruguay Jorge Batlle,
began calling for the legalization of drugs (especially cocaine), first at
the Tenth Latin American Summit of Heads of State and then at the
inauguration of President Vincente Fox in Mexico, saying that "while this
substance has this fantastic market value" no mechanism "can impede its
trafficking," When drugs are legalized in the United States, be says, they
will lose their value, and Latin American leaders should call for that day
to protect their countries.

Meanwhile, here at home in December, Judge Richard A. Posner suggested in
the Atlantic Monthly that, while terrorism may lead to some curtailment of
civil liberties, if we take the opportunity to challenge the War on Drugs
(which be calls a "big flop" that targets a consensual activity with
consequently few complaining witnesses and therefore requires intrusive
police surveillance and action), we could minimize any net decrease in
civil liberties.

The answer as to why we haven't insisted on doing this is not just that we
don't know what the experts know. It's that we find it hard to imagine
changing the status quo. In the nineteenth century when John Stuart Mill
was protesting the subjection of women, he said that you can't expect
people to "give up practical principles in which they have been born and
bred and which are the basis of much of the existing order of the world, at
the first argumentative attack which they are not capable of logically
resisting."

The argument cannot be resisted - it can be shown to be true. The practical
principle we have accepted without question is that practices that are bad
should be illegal.

The practical principle we overlook is that when pleasurable consensual
practices are made illegal some people may indeed be deterred, but others
will try to get around the legal barriers - and there is then money to be
made. Those who are for the war hope to end drug use, as evil. Those who
are for ending it realize that we are fighting a war against our own
society. We can make our society more and more unbearable, but we cannot
win this war.