Pubdate: Tue, 3 Mar 2009
Source: Daily Sound (Santa Barbara, CA)
Contact: http://www.thedailysound.com/contact/Letters-to-the-editor
Copyright: 2009 Daily Sound
Website: http://www.thedailysound.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4995
Author: Loretta Redd
Referenced: The LA Times editorial 
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v09/n238/a01.html

THE WAR ON WHAT?

Why do Republican Presidents tend to declare war on behaviors rather 
than on actual adversaries? Armies should be sent into battle to 
overpower and defeat other armies not to fight slogans, ideologies or 
political promises.

Thirty years before George W. Bush initiated his "war on terror," 
President Richard Nixon conceptualized his "war on drugs." Both are 
proving to be utter and complete failures, as terrorist cells and 
anti-US sentiment proliferate around the globe, and drug use leaves a 
tsunami of horrors behind.

Both are unimaginably expensive in both human suffering and lost 
revenues, neither can be defeated through our current efforts, as 
they are now tightly intertwined.  As a recent LA Times editorial 
noted, "Drug use can and does cause profound social harm-but now we 
know the methods chosen to address the problem were flawed."

Flawed indeed, in a country where we lock up over 800,000 people a 
year while spending $700 a second unsuccessfully trying to stem the 
tide of illegal drugs. While law enforcement agencies cry for more 
funds to curb narcotic crimes, they've managed to arrest only one 
million of the 28 million drug using occupants of our not-so-bright nation.

Supporters of drug prohibition, however, claim that its benefits are 
undeniable and self-evident.

James Ostrowski, of the Policy Analysis division of the CATO 
Institute writes, "Their main assumption is that without prohibition 
drug use would skyrocket with disastrous results. But there is little 
evidence for this commonly held belief From 1988 to 2008, there was 
not a single Washington official who could cite any study which 
demonstrated the beneficial effects of drug prohibition when weighed 
against the costs.

Jeffrey Miron, Harvard professor and author of Drug War Crime: The 
Consequences of Prohibition, notes that the homicide rate in the US 
would be reduced up to seventy-five percent if drug use were 
decriminalized and regulated like alcohol, while saving an incredible 
$30 billion in our national flop of a fight.

Today, the old War on Drugs has fused with the War on Terror as the 
Afghan Taliban brings in its largest crop of heroin producing poppies 
in history. And while heroin use is on a meteoric rise in our 
country, the President of Afghanistan's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, 
has been up to his turban in drug trafficking. A New York Times 
article in October, 2008, cited the complaints of senior DEA 
officials and the office of the Director of National Intelligence, 
explaining"the (Bush) White House favored a hands-off approach toward 
Ahmed Karzi because of the political delicacy of the matter."

Afghanistan may be half a world away, but in our own backyard, a 
different Godzilla combo of drugs and terror is growing by the hour. 
Mexican police agents and federal armies stood helpless or become 
victims themselves, as the Sinaloa, Tijuana and Gulf cartels 
blatantly slaughtered over 6,000 people last year. A recent two year 
combined trafficking operation between the United States and Mexico 
has led to the arrest of over 700 people, seized $60 million in cash, 
confiscated over 25,000 pounds of narcotics and sufficient weapons to 
be the envy of our US military.

To bring this insanity even closer to home, anyone who has followed 
the 'police blotter' over the past few years has to be aware of the 
increasing number of crimes in our area involving some form of 
"controlled substance." While many arrests appear to involve Latinos 
living in the lower East and West sides of town, let us not overlook 
our Montecito marijuana mavens, country-club cocaine users, UCSB 
speedball all-nighters, our 'high' society DUI-dodgers, or the 
increasing high-school heroin users.

Santa Barbara is no different from Los Angeles or Los Gatos when it 
comes to the demand side economics that drives the drug economy. That 
is why it may be time to examine how best to regulate and tax all 
drugs and narcotics.

Without the user, the growers have no customers, the traffickers have 
no market, and the 'war on drugs,' with its collateral 'war on 
terror' costs, is over. History has proven this to be a difficult 
task, as we reflect on the long-ago days (1920-1933) of the failed 
Eighteenth Amendment, its speakeasys, bathtub gin, and Al Capone.

A poem by Franklin P. Adams, written two years before Prohibition 
ended, gives some insight in the Constitutional attempt to apply 
morality to behavior:

Prohibition is an awful flop.

We like it.

It can't stop what it's meant to stop.

We like it.

It's left a trail of graft and slime,

It don't prohibit worth a dime,

It's filled our land with vice and crime.

Nevertheless, we're for it.

Before we panic at the thought of decriminalizing drugs, or ending 
this untenable modern day 'prohibition,' maybe we could ask 
Congresswoman Capps to convene an objective, multi-facet study group 
to determine the astronomical price of our current 'war on drugs' and 
its collateral costs in Afghanistan, Central America and Mexico.

Have the panel factor in the budgetary savings of our proliferating 
penal system, currently building twenty jails to every one school in 
this country. And with the most important purpose and ultimate goal 
being that of prevention, ask the panel to consider the real morality 
of shifting funds from punitive criminal prosecution to that of 
treatment and rehabilitation. Then, as an added benefit, consider the 
elimination of much of the illegal arms dealing around the globe, 
typically purchased for the protection and defense of gangs and drug 
traffickers.

While the US economy dives further into bankruptcy, our drug craving 
goes utterly unimpeded by either our 'war on terror' or our 'war on 
drugs.'This is not a time for blame; nor is it a time for political moralizing.

The truth is, regulating and controlling currently illegal drugs, 
just as we have with alcohol and tobacco, won't keep people from 
making stupid choices, but it will shift the revenues currently 
flowing out of this country.

In the meanwhile, every time you or someone you know 'innocently' 
lights up a doobie, sniffs some coke, injects or smokes a little 
heroin, or takes a hit at anything other than a golf ball, you've 
added to the deficit (ours, not just yours) and paid the Afghans, 
Mexicans, or Columbians big bucks to supply you. Meanwhile, this 
nation just blew $700 for every second of your drug-fogged state. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake