Pubdate: Sun, 03 Dec 2000
Source: Washington Times (DC)
Copyright: 2000 News World Communications, Inc.
Contact:  http://www.washtimes.com/
Author: Michelle Malkin
Note: Michelle Malkin is a nationally syndicated columnist.

DOWNEY AND 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, Mr. 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.

Mr. 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. Mr. 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. However, Mr. Downey's case 
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, Mr. 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."

Mr. 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 Mr. 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." Mr. 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.

Michelle Malkin is a nationally syndicated columnist.
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