Pubdate: Wed, 20 Dec 2000
Source: MidWeek (HI)
Copyright: 2000 RFD Publications, Inc.
Contact:  (808) 247-7246
Address: RFD Publications, 45-525 Luluku Road, Kaneohe HI 96744
Website: http://www.midweek.com/
Author: Michelle Malkin

THE REAL COST OF THE DRUG WAR

Actor Robert Downey Jr. is California's glassy-eyed poster boy for the
failed war on drugs.  After numerous arrests dating back to 1996 and several
fruitless attempts by the courts to rehabilitate him, Downey served a year
in state prison.  Barely three months after his release, the Hollywood
celebrity was arrested again on Thanksgiving weekend for possession and use
of cocaine and methamphetamine.

Downey's troubles are the butt of water-cooler jokes around the country. 
But to anyone who has seen a loved one struggle with addiction, there's
nothing funny about his plight.  Downey is a hopeless junkie whose father
reportedly introduced him to marijuana when he was just 6 years old.

Law enforcement officials may think it's good social policy to make an
example of the actor's weaknesses.  Downey's case, however, simply
underscores that the drug war is a costly and selective form of government
paternalism that has done far more harm than good.

A new book of essays issued by the libertarian Cato Institute, After
Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century, sheds
harsh light on what eminent economist Milton Friedman calls the "social
tragedy" of drug prohibition.  In his foreword to the book, Friedman points
out that the list of illegal drugs includes marijuana - "for which there is
no recorded case of a human death from overdose in several thousand years of
use" - but excludes alcohol, "for which the annual death toll in the United
States alone is measured in the tens if not hundreds of thousands."

Friedman decries the looming conversion of the United States into a police
state as a result of draconian drug war tactics.  "The annual arrest of
nearly a million and a half people suspected of a drug offense, most of them
for simple possession of small quantities, is frightening evidence of how
far along that road we have already gone."

Most of those behind bars, unlike Downey, can't afford to post bail or hire
competent lawyers.  Julie Stewart of Families Against Mandatory Minimums
points out that drug offenders now make up 60 percent of the federal prison
population, up from 38 percent 14 years ago. In 1998, 57 percent were first
offenders and 88 percent had no weapons.  "We are not catching drug
kingpins," Miss Stewart writes.  "We are catching the little guys, the
girlfriends, the mules, and we are sending them to prison for 5 years, 10
years, and often much longer."

Until recently, the government often mocked drug war opponents as a motley
crew of free-market intellectuals, ex-hippies, and potheads.  But cops on
the front lines of the drug war, firsthand witnesses to its futility, are
joining the critics.  David Klinger, a former police officer in Los Angeles
and Redmond, Wash., writes of his evolution in thinking about drug policy:
"At some point in my first months on patrol, after handling hundreds of
calls that involved drugs, and after arresting scores of people for
possessing various sorts of illegal stuff, I began to have doubts about what
my peers and I were doing.  I saw violent criminals walking the streets
because the jail space they rightfully deserved was occupied by nonviolent
drug offenders."

"I started seeing most of the people I dealt with who had some association
with drugs either as broken souls who made self-destructive choices or
harmless people who indulged their appetites in moderation - but not as
crooks who needed to be punished."

Klinger, now a criminology professor, concluded from his years on the
street: "We cannot protect free adults from their own poor choices, and we
should not use the force of law to try."

Black and white, young and old, famous and nameless - Americans from all
walks of life can identify with the broken soul of Robert Downey Jr.  His
addiction is his own prison.  His public humiliation is its own life
sentence.  The war on drugs is an expensive quagmire that needlessly
punishes people who have already punished themselves beyond repair.
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