Pubdate: Wed, 09 May 2001 Source: Colorado Daily (CO) Copyright: 2001 Colorado Daily Contact: P.O. Box 1719, Boulder, CO 80306 Fax: (303) 443-9357 Website: http://www.codaily.com/ Author: Paul Danish WAR ON DRUGS IS FAILING Congressmen regularly argue that the country can cut taxes without reducing spending by getting rid of the waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal budget. Well, they have a point there. There is approximately $170 billion of waste, fraud, and abuse programmed into the federal budget over the next 10 years that could be eliminated with the stroke of a pen. It's called the War on Drugs. Federal spending on the drug war is currently running about $17 billion a year. At that rate, about $170 billion will be poured down this particular rat hole in the next 10 years, the planning period for federal taxing and spending that's being used to generate the numbers in President Bush's tax cut. During the same period, the states will spend about twice as much - about $300 billion - but that's another story. The $170 billion federal component of the drug war represents a substantial part of the difference between the tax cut Bush asked for and the tax cut he is likely to get out of Congress. Looked at another way, the money being wasted in the War on Drugs represents the cost of the ballistic missile defense system Bush wants to build, or the cost of the prescription-drug benefit the Democrats in Congress would like to pass. Any way you look at it, it is a lot of waste, fraud and abuse. The War on Drugs is waste by the most elementary measure of waste - it isn't working. The drug war attempts to do two things: reduce the supply of drugs and reduce the demand. The easiest way to measure success in supply reduction is to look at the price of drugs; if the supply goes down the price should go up. By that measure, the drug war is a stunning failure; in the last 10 years the price of marijuana, cocaine and heroin went down, not up. (The decline started during the administration of George Bush, incidentally, and continued during the Clinton administration. Drug war spending during the four years of the George Bush administration was around $40 billion; during the eight years of the Clinton administration it was more than $ l00 billion.) As for demand reduction, the major surveys that measure drug demand have shown it remaining steady or going up for a decade. It is inconceivable that anyone in the private sector would be allowed to fail as miserably, and lose as much money, as the stewards of the drug war have and still be allowed to keep their jobs. But Congress' only response to the drug war's record has been to throw more money at it with no change in policy, compounding the waste. What about fraud, then? The drug war is shot through with it. For example: The reports that were used to criminalize marijuana in the 1930s deliberately misrepresented its addictiveness and its ability to cause users to become violent. Later, the addictiveness of crack cocaine was deliberately overstated in order to justify harsher sentences. The myth of the crack babies also turned out to be a lie. Reports of new more potent strains of marijuana also were shown to be a myth. Toward the end of his life, the late John Ehrlichman, one of Richard Nixon's closest advisors, flatly stated that Nixon began the War on Drugs as a way of attacking his enemies in the counter-culture, not out of any concern about the harmful effects of drugs. In addition to the intellectual fraud that underlies the drug war, there is the plain old corruption that it engenders, both in the criminal justice system and throughout society. And abuse? There is not enough room in this paper to begin to chronicle the abuses that have been committed in the name of the drug war. Ever, year about three quarters of a million Americans are arrested for drug use, about 400,000 for using marijuana (a "crime" which at worst is about as serious as drinking beer). As a result of the drug war, the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the developed world. Most of the crime that is attributed to drug use turns out to be attributable not to drugs but to drug prohibition. In addition, a huge amount of casual repression and distrust has been introduced into American society - from urine testing, to road blocks, to the shredding of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure and Fifth Amendment protections against property seizure, to encouraging children to denounce their parents to the authorities. And on and on. If this isn't abuse, what is? Prohibition used to be called the Noble Experiment. The characterization is overly generous, but at least America had the wit to realize after 15 years that the experiment was a failure and ended it. Well there is nothing noble about the War on Drugs, and its end is long overdue.