Pubdate: Thu, 28 Dec 2000
Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO)
Copyright: 2000 St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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Author: M.W. Guzy
Note: Note: M.W. Guzy, St. Louis, is a regular contributor to the 
Commentary page. He is retired from the St. Louis Police Department.

WE LOSE THE WAR WHEN WE SEE IT AS ONE

It has become fashionable in intellectual circles to declare that we have 
lost the "War on Drugs." There seems to be growing agreement among the 
Commentariat that decades of effort, entailing countless arrests and untold 
billions of dollars, have done little to stem the tide of illegal 
narcotics. A popular metaphor is to liken the struggle to the Vietnam 
conflict -- a quagmire of futility from which there can be no honorable exit.

Many reasonable people have despaired of the effort and now suggest that 
it's time to give up. If the War on Drugs is Vietnam, then legalization is 
the Fall of Saigon. Before we willingly submit to another humiliating 
defeat, it's worth considering a couple of observations about the nature of 
"war" and the history of "drugs."

War is an inherently contradictory enterprise. The Revolutionary War, for 
instance, was waged for the expressed purposes of ensuring "life, liberty 
and the pursuit of happiness." The men who fought the armed campaign for 
these ideals subsequently placed their lives in peril, forfeited their 
liberty to the dictates of military service and abandoned the pursuit of 
happiness to the grim necessities of combat.

Clearly, the only reasonable justification for war is the hope of eventual 
peace. Sane combatants fight for an end to fighting. Thus understood, the 
so-called War on Drugs was doomed from the start. So, too, was the war on 
murder. Killing your fellow citizen has been illegal since biblical times. 
Cain slew Abel and was exiled for his misdeed. That solution didn't solve 
the problem, and now, several millennia later, people still kill each other 
with discouraging regularity.

Every major police department has a Homicide Division whose sole purpose is 
to investigate these events at considerable expense to the public coffers. 
Despite our failure to eliminate mayhem, I'm unaware of serious 
commentators who suggest that we should legalize murder. Maybe violence is 
simply a facet of the human predicament -- a vice that societies must deal 
with as part of the cost of doing business.

If the propensity to violence is an innate human characteristic, so is the 
"pleasure principle." That theorem states that people tend to do things 
that feel good. Unfortunately, some of these pleasurable activities have 
harmful side effects for society at large. Proponents of legalizing drugs 
seldom mention that we've already tried that strategy. History recounts 
that opium was brought to the American frontier by Chinese railroad 
laborers. At the time, it was perfectly legal. Heroin enjoyed a brief 
popularity as an ingredient in cough syrups and elixirs. Not 
coincidentally, there were more heroin addicts in New York in 1900 than 
there were during the freewheeling '60s.

When LSD was introduced into the mainstream, cops were powerless to prevent 
its usage. The designer drug Ecstasy was legal until 1985. All of these 
substances came to be outlawed because of the deleterious impact they had 
upon public order. Lifting the ban against them will not solve the problems 
that got them banned in the first place.

One argument in favor of legalization states that by eliminating the 
sanctions against narcotics we would take the profit motive out of their 
distribution. I've never understood how that is supposed to work. What 
product can you name that is sold without profit? Who would supply the 
newly legal demand for drugs? We are currently in the process of suing 
cigarette manufacturers for billions because of the long-term health 
effects of their product. Can you imagine the product liability associated 
with marketing PCP and crack cocaine?

Getting criminals out of the drug trade is like trying to get the spots out 
of Dalmatians. August Busch III, president of Anheuser-Busch Breweries, 
manufactures a product that contains the only legal intoxicant, alcohol. He 
recently had the audacity to mention that college kids drink beer and to 
suggest that we might do better to acknowledge that obvious fact rather 
than pretend that it didn't exist. Busch's proposal elicited howls of 
protest from critics who claimed that he was merely trying to sell more 
beer at the expense of public welfare. Perhaps. Then again, maybe Mr. Busch 
believes that it's difficult to formulate sound public policy with your 
head in the sand.

Repealing drug laws will make potentially lethal narcotics as commonplace 
as draft beer at a frat party. Because society's younger members are the 
most prone to experimentation, future generations will look back on the 
current state of affairs as "the good old days." The problem with the War 
on Drugs is not its intent, but its name. Cops don't wage war; they enforce 
laws necessitated by human folly. That's why they have a pension plan.
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