BAD COMBINATION

Columnist Robert D. Novak recently made the ludicrous suggestion that
President George W. Bush should intertwine the war on terrorism with the
nation's failed war on drugs.

Novak reasoned that since states are less willing to sponsor terrorism
these days for fear of an international response, terrorists are raising
the money needed for their nefarious deeds through trafficking in illegal
drugs.

Novak is, in this regard, correct. The Taliban used the sale of heroin to
raise money. In addition, the Taliban ironically received money from the
United States by merely promising to fight drugs; money that was used to
kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

However, Novak is wrong in his solution. He accepts the false premise that
government can eliminate commerce in drugs by killing and imprisoning
people who choose to buy or sell narcotics and other drugs.

The answer is not to tie the war on terrorism to the failed war on drugs.

Terrorists use the profit from drug sales. The only way to stop that
activity is to eliminate the profit margin. By legalizing drugs and ending
the nonsensical prohibition, the cost of drugs would decrease and the
United States would effectively eliminate funding for terrorists - along
with reducing the U.S. crime rate, prison overcrowding and a host of other
domestic problems caused by the failed war on drugs.

It's time to stop this futile effort to save people from themselves. Drug
abuse is not a criminal problem, but a social one.

Law-abiding citizens have lost many civil liberties in the name of the drug
war. Police officers have become soldiers in a war with a military
mentality. Drug raids are conducted by officials wearing masks. Property is
seized without a conviction. The Bill of Rights is but a speed bump to drug
warriors.

What a peaceable person decides to put into his body is no business of
government. The United States should focus its war on terrorism against
terrorist and not against the use of drugs by American citizens.