Pubdate: Thu, 26 Jul 2001
Source: Register-Guard, The (OR)
Copyright: 2001 The Register-Guard
Contact:  http://www.registerguard.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/362
Author: Jack Lange

DRUG WAR IS CHANGING

Can the recent sentencing of actor Robert Downey Jr. to rehabilitation 
instead of jail - thanks to California's new law promoting cure over 
punishment - signal a change in the drug war.

In Britain, debate over marijuana legalization is now taking place, with 
such stalwart warriors as Sir Keith Morris, former ambassador to Colombia, 
now totally disenchanted with enforcement and advocating outright 
legalization of all drugs. Canada's Joe Clark, former Conservative prime 
minister, is now calling for decriminalization of marijuana. Mexico's new 
president, Vicente Fox, drops similar hints. The Netherlands, with shops 
licensed to sell pot and hashish in small amounts for a generation already, 
is opening two border drive-through stores to accommodate German 
purchasers. In many European countries, soft drugs such as marijuana are 
already decriminalized, i.e., they don't make arrests for personal use. 
Only the United States is still stuffing its prisons with nonviolent users.

I suppose it's to be expected that we'll be the last to change. We started 
the drug war and cajoled and bribed and bullied the rest of the world into 
accepting our definitions of hard drugs and how to suppress their use by 
eliminating their production and distribution. Instead, as we did earlier 
with alcohol prohibition, we handed the criminal underworld control of a 
contraband market spawning the most lucrative profits in history and the 
goriest trail of addiction, death, corruption and destruction ever seen in 
peacetime. The answer is as obvious as the naked emperor, but still civic 
leaders and the people in this country - if we're to believe the polls - 
are still cheering him on.

One despairs that Hegel was right in his lament that "all we know about 
history is that it teaches us nothing!"

Jack Lange

Florence
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens