THE TRUE VILLAIN IN OUR DRUG WAR IS PROHIBITION

The Office for National Drug Control Policy spent $3.2 million for Super
Bowl ads claiming that people who buy drugs are supporting terrorists. But
that's not the real story. The real story is that the profits in the drug
trade garnered by gangsters and terrorists is a product, not of the drugs,
but of the laws prohibiting the drugs.

Almost nine out of 10 of us use the addicting, mind-altering drug caffeine,
but coffee sales don't fund terrorists. A quarter of all adults are
addicted to nicotine, but cigarette sales don't fund terrorists. Two-thirds
of the country uses the psychoactive drug alcohol, but since 1933, alcohol
sales haven't supported terrorists or criminals.

Why? Beer sells for a few dollars a six-pack and vodka can be bought for
less than $10 a liter. Coffee and tea sell for pennies an ounce, and even
cigarettes with their taxes are only about $3 an ounce. There's no excess
profit for terrorists in those prices.

But marijuana goes for $100 an ounce and cocaine for $10,000 a kilogram.
Heroin weighs in at well over $100,000 a kilogram. People will kill and
risk prison for those profits, and there's plenty of money to support
terrorists and gangsters and buy crooked cops to protect the deals.

The villain is prohibition. End the black market by selling legal marijuana
for the price of cigarettes and heroin for the price of aspirin (the price
at which it is sold when legal). Drug dealers and terrorists will go away
because there will be no money for them.

The experience with alcohol prohibition showed that when prohibition ended,
gangsters got out of the business. What is more, legal beer distributors do
not settle their business disputes with machine guns; they use the courts.
Ending the failed prohibition against marijuana, ecstasy, cocaine, heroin
and select other drugs -- regulating their sale and use the way we do that
of caffeine, alcohol and nicotine -- would remove the dangerous drug
dealers, the vicious smugglers, the crooked cops and, yes, the al-Qaida
terrorists from our society just like ending alcohol prohibition ended the
reigns of Al Capone and Myer Lansky.

And the terrorists? They would continue to get their money from religious
contributions, from the sale of honey (a major source of Osama bin Ladin's
income) and from oil. They use drug money because prohibition makes it easy
for them, but it is not a major source of their income.

Ending drug prohibition would not end the problems created by those few
drug users who cannot control their use; but neither has drug prohibition
ended them. We probably have more heroin addicts now than we did in 1914
when we first prohibited it.

The problem is that now we have both drug problems and drug prohibition
problems: large sums of money going to gangsters and terrorists, corrupt
public officials, drive-by shooting and crack houses, HIV and hepatitis C
infections from the inability to buy syringes and more than 700,000 arrests
last year for the mere possession of marijuana. We have not been able to
stop the problems caused by the misuse of drugs, but we do not have to
compound those problems with the miseries caused by foolish and ineffective
laws of prohibition.

Our country is again facing budgetary deficits, a large part of which are
caused by the $1 billion a month that the war against terrorism is costing.
At the same time, the federal government is spending $20 billion a year on
the war on drugs, an amount that would more than make up for the cost of
the war on terrorism.

About $25,000 a year would be saved for each drug user not sent to prison;
700,000 young marijuana users would not be branded as criminals for the
rest of their lives, and drug misuse could be attacked as the medical
problem it is instead of being treated as a crime. Fight terrorism; stamp
out prohibition.

Terrell is a professor at South Texas College of Law who teaches
controlled-substances law.