Pubdate: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 Source: Australian, The (Australia) Copyright: 2005sThe Australian Contact: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/files/aus_letters.htm Website: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/35 Author: Phillip Adams Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization) ANOTHER US-LED WAR WE CAN'T HOPE TO WIN DRUGS to Bali, coals to Newcastle. This wretched case highlights two important issues of politics and public policy. Both at their worst. First, the moral horror of capital punishment. Second, the endless moral panic driving drugs, a local and international issue. Many of us oppose the death penalty in all circumstances. I even regretted Israel's decision to execute Adolf Eichmann. That prime example of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil", that human black hole should have been left alive. As should Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and any other monster you care to name. Try them, find them guilty, imprison them for all eternity. But don't kill them like the dogs they are, like they've killed others. Keep them in a cage, if you must, parade them through the streets, but don't degrade yourselves with an act of official murder. Least of all for the crime of drug smuggling. The crime that shouldn't be a crime at all. The crime that more than any other on this sad, silly earth of ours preoccupies the police, clogs the judicial and penal systems, chokes the courts and crowds the prisons. The prisons we can't build fast enough. Were drugs to be decriminalised in this country, we would regain something of our collective sanity. Were it to happen in the US, where this insane war against drugs was first declared, millions of kids, overwhelmingly African-American, could be decriminalised as well. Then a state such as California could stop spending more money on jails for its young than it does on funding new universities. Prohibition and interdiction of drugs has proved to be as foolish and futile as prohibition of booze. If anything, it encourages the black market in narcotics, pushing the pushers to push harder while pushing up the prices. And, of course, upping the ante on police corruption. A public health problem becomes a cause celebre for grandstanding politicians. If we can't keep drugs out of our prisons, with their high walls and thick bars, with all the screws, surveillance and cavity searching, then what hope have we of keeping drugs out of Australia, with its thousands of kilometres of unguarded coastline? With millions of tonnes of unexamined containers piling up at our ports? With countless unsearched visitors arriving at our airports? That's right. Absolutely none. No hope at all. So what that some of it is discovered en route, to be proudly displayed to the television cameras, along with hyped-up street prices. All that nonsense about the seizure being worth $2 million, $3million, $5 million. Thanks to market forces, the shipment will be replaced and the street price, at least for the short term, will increase, forcing addicts to steal more TVs and DVD players. Watching all that effort to grab a few plastic bags of white powder is like watching someone baling the ocean with a bucket. A bucket with a hole in it. In any case, were every effort to bring in illegal drugs to be thwarted, were everyone convicted of any role in smuggling, selling or using to be dragged off to a local death row (and hence to a place of execution where they'd have, at taxpayers' expense, a final fix with a nice clean needle), do you imagine that would put an end to humans taking drugs? Human ingenuity would find another way to supply the market. Prescription drugs are always promising. And new drugs are always being invented. You can cook 'em in the kitchen, brew them in the basement. Ask your local biker gang. It's time to give the death penalty the death penalty. The fact we gave it up after Henry Bolte's hanging of Ronald Ryan in 1967 gives us some authority here. Unfortunately, we signed up to the US war against drugs long before we joined its war on terror and the US Commander-in-Chief has the world's worst record on capital punishment. So George W. Bush can't help us in Bali even if he wanted to. It's also time to get out of that drug war. Even if you support the war in Iraq, surely you can see that we must extricate ourselves and our children from this unwinnable war against drugs. Certain drugs, that is. The few drugs our moral panic merchants choose to demonise. America's great conservative - many would argue its greatest - has been urging Washington to admit the war is lost. In this stand William F. Buckley is joined by anyone with half a brain. Sadly, it won't happen in the US. But it should happen here. And it could if our political leadership contained any leaders. - --- MAP posted-by: Elizabeth Wehrman