Pubdate: Fri,  8 Feb 2002
Source: Houston Chronicle (TX)
Copyright: 2002 Houston Chronicle Publishing Company Division, Hearst Newspaper
Contact:  http://www.chron.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/198
Author: Buford C. Terrell
Note: Terrell is a professor at South Texas College of Law who teaches 
controlled-substances law.

THE TRUE VILLAIN IN OUR DRUG WAR IS PROHIBITION

The Office for National Drug Control Policy spent $3.2 million for Super 
Bowl ads claiming that people who buy drugs are supporting terrorists. But 
that's not the real story. The real story is that the profits in the drug 
trade garnered by gangsters and terrorists is a product, not of the drugs, 
but of the laws prohibiting the drugs.

Almost nine out of 10 of us use the addicting, mind-altering drug caffeine, 
but coffee sales don't fund terrorists. A quarter of all adults are 
addicted to nicotine, but cigarette sales don't fund terrorists. Two-thirds 
of the country uses the psychoactive drug alcohol, but since 1933, alcohol 
sales haven't supported terrorists or criminals.

Why? Beer sells for a few dollars a six-pack and vodka can be bought for 
less than $10 a liter. Coffee and tea sell for pennies an ounce, and even 
cigarettes with their taxes are only about $3 an ounce. There's no excess 
profit for terrorists in those prices.

But marijuana goes for $100 an ounce and cocaine for $10,000 a kilogram. 
Heroin weighs in at well over $100,000 a kilogram. People will kill and 
risk prison for those profits, and there's plenty of money to support 
terrorists and gangsters and buy crooked cops to protect the deals.

The villain is prohibition. End the black market by selling legal marijuana 
for the price of cigarettes and heroin for the price of aspirin (the price 
at which it is sold when legal). Drug dealers and terrorists will go away 
because there will be no money for them.

The experience with alcohol prohibition showed that when prohibition ended, 
gangsters got out of the business. What is more, legal beer distributors do 
not settle their business disputes with machine guns; they use the courts. 
Ending the failed prohibition against marijuana, ecstasy, cocaine, heroin 
and select other drugs -- regulating their sale and use the way we do that 
of caffeine, alcohol and nicotine -- would remove the dangerous drug 
dealers, the vicious smugglers, the crooked cops and, yes, the al-Qaida 
terrorists from our society just like ending alcohol prohibition ended the 
reigns of Al Capone and Myer Lansky.

And the terrorists? They would continue to get their money from religious 
contributions, from the sale of honey (a major source of Osama bin Ladin's 
income) and from oil. They use drug money because prohibition makes it easy 
for them, but it is not a major source of their income.

Ending drug prohibition would not end the problems created by those few 
drug users who cannot control their use; but neither has drug prohibition 
ended them. We probably have more heroin addicts now than we did in 1914 
when we first prohibited it.

The problem is that now we have both drug problems and drug prohibition 
problems: large sums of money going to gangsters and terrorists, corrupt 
public officials, drive-by shooting and crack houses, HIV and hepatitis C 
infections from the inability to buy syringes and more than 700,000 arrests 
last year for the mere possession of marijuana. We have not been able to 
stop the problems caused by the misuse of drugs, but we do not have to 
compound those problems with the miseries caused by foolish and ineffective 
laws of prohibition.

Our country is again facing budgetary deficits, a large part of which are 
caused by the $1 billion a month that the war against terrorism is costing. 
At the same time, the federal government is spending $20 billion a year on 
the war on drugs, an amount that would more than make up for the cost of 
the war on terrorism.

About $25,000 a year would be saved for each drug user not sent to prison; 
700,000 young marijuana users would not be branded as criminals for the 
rest of their lives, and drug misuse could be attacked as the medical 
problem it is instead of being treated as a crime. Fight terrorism; stamp 
out prohibition.

Terrell is a professor at South Texas College of Law who teaches 
controlled-substances law.
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