U.S. SHOULD FOLLOW EUROPE'S LEAD IN DRUG-LAW REFORM

ONE OF THE MANY challenges facing a post-Taliban coalition government
is the corrupting influence of drug trafficking.

Afghanistan is the world's largest producer of opium, the raw material
used to make heroin. According to the State Department, both the
Taliban and the Northern Alliance have financed their activities by
taxing the opium trade. A recent State Department report blames the
Afghan drug trade for increased levels of global terrorism and notes
that the production of opium "undermines the rule of law by generating
large amounts of cash, contributing to regional money-laundering and
official corruption."

Paradoxically, Afghanistan's brutal Taliban regime was able to reap
obscene profits from the heroin trade because of drug prohibition, not
in spite of it. The same lesson, unfortunately, applies here at home.

Just as alcohol prohibition did in the early 1900s, the modern-day
drug war subsidizes organized crime. An easily grown weed like
marijuana is literally worth its weight in gold in U.S. cities. In
Colombia, the various armed factions waging civil war are financially
dependent on America's drug war. The illicit trade keeps prices high
and a cartel reaps the profits. While U.S. politicians ignore the
historical precedent of alcohol prohibition, Europeans are instituting
harm reduction, a public health alternative that seeks to minimize the
damage associated with both drug use and drug prohibition.

There is a middle ground between drug prohibition and legalization. On
the cutting edge of harm reduction, Switzerland's heroin maintenance
trials have been shown to reduce drug-related disease, death and crime
among chronic addicts. Modeled after U.S. methadone-maintenance
programs pioneered here in New York, the trials are being replicated
in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.

In England, where more than 90 percent of heroin comes from
Afghanistan, the Association of Chief Police Officers is hoping to
break the link between heroin and crime by re-instituting heroin
maintenance. The practice of prescribing heroin to addicts was
standard in England from the 1920s to the 1960s. In response to U.S.
pressure, prescription heroin maintenance was discontinued in 1971.
The loss of a controlled distribution system and subsequent creation
of an unregulated illicit market led the number of heroin addicts to
skyrocket from fewer than 2,000 in 1970 to roughly 50,000 today.
England's top cops say that the drug war is part of the problem. A
spike in street prices leads desperate heroin addicts to increase
criminal activity to feed their habits. The drug war doesn't fight
crime; it fuels crime.

Portugal has decriminalized all drug consumption in order to shift
scarce resources into treatment. Based on findings that prisons
transmit violent habits rather than reduce them, a majority of
European Union countries have decriminalized soft drugs like
marijuana. Switzerland is now on the verge of taxing and regulating
the sale of marijuana to adults. The reason? Something often heard
during election years when opportunistic politicians seek to scare up
votes: the need to protect children from drugs. Acknowledging the
social reality of marijuana use, pragmatic Swiss policymakers argue
that taking control of the most popular illicit drug out of the hands
of organized crime will reduce exposure to heroin and other hard drugs.

America won't likely tax and regulate the sale of marijuana anytime
soon, much less institute heroin maintenance, because politicians here
are afraid to appear "soft on crime." But they wind up supporting a
$50-billion war on consensual vices that finances organized crime at
home and terrorists abroad. According to many drug policy experts,
U.S. insistence on the prohibition model is the single biggest
obstacle to reducing Afghanistan's reliance on the opium crop as a
means of generating hard currency.

This country, founded on the concept of limited government, is using
its superpower status to export a dangerous moral crusade around the
globe. The vast majority of Afghan-produced heroin is consumed in
Europe. If Afghanistan is to rebuild a civil society without the
corrupting influence of drug trafficking, the United States needs to
adopt a laissez-faire approach to harm reduction in Europe. Universal
access to methadone and heroin maintenance in Europe would deprive
organized crime of a core client base. This cutback could render
heroin trafficking unprofitable, spare future generations the scourge
of addiction and undermine the funding of any remnants of the Taliban
regime.