Pubdate: Sun, 19 Jun 2005
Source: Sun Herald (MS)
Copyright: 2005, The Sun Herald
Contact:  http://www.sunherald.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/432
Author:  George Will

THIS IS NOT THE TIME FOR AN ARMISTICE IN THE 'WAR ON DRUGS'

Exasperated by pessimism about the "war on drugs," John Walters,
director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy,
says: Washington is awash with lobbyists hired by businesses worried
that government may, intentionally or inadvertently, make them
unprofitable. So why assume that the illicit drug trade is the one
business that government, try as it might, cannot seriously injure?

Here is why: When Pat Moynihan was an adviser to President Nixon, he
persuaded the French government to break the "French connection" by
which heroin came to America. Moynihan explained his achievement to
Labor Secretary George Shultz, who said laconically: "Good."

Moynihan: "No, really, this is a big event."

Shultz, unfazed: "Good."

Moynihan: "I suppose you think that so long as there is a demand for
drugs, there will continue to be a supply."

Shultz: "There's hope for you yet."

Walters understands that when there is a $65 billion annual American
demand for an easily smuggled commodity produced in poor countries,
and when the price of cocaine and heroin on American streets is 100
times the production costs, much will evade even sophisticated
interdiction methods. And, Walters says, huge quantities of marijuana
are grown domestically, including particularly potent strains of the
drug that are grown indoors. Marijuana possession, not trafficking,
accounts for most of the surge in drug arrests since 1990. Critics
suggest an armistice on this front in the $35 billion-a-year drug war.

Marijuana's price has fallen and its potency has doubled in the last
eight years. So say David Boyum and Peter Reuter in their new book,
"An Analytic Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy," from the American
Enterprise Institute. They say that, although the number of persons
incarcerated for drug offenses on any given day has increased from
50,000 in 1980 to 450,000 in 2003, the inflation-adjusted prices for
cocaine and heroin are half what they were 25 years ago.

So, should there be an armistice on this front, too? Walters responds
that the bulk of the demand for illegal drugs is from addictive users.
Of the 19 million users, 7 million are drug-dependent. Marijuana use
is a "pediatric onset" problem: If people get past their teens without
starting, the probability of use is very small and of dependence much
less.

Use of marijuana by youths peaked in 1979, hit a low in 1992, then
doubled by the mid-1990s. The age of first use of marijuana is now the
early teens and lower.

Because marijuana is, unlike heroin and cocaine, not toxic - because
marijuana users do not die of overdoses - its reputation is too
benign. The 5 million users in the 12-to-17 age cohort are, Walters
believes, storing up future family, school and work problems, and
putting their brain functions at risk with increasingly potent strains
of marijuana.

Last year 400 metric tons of cocaine were seized worldwide, but 200
entered the United States. However, some seizures, by causing abrupt
shortages in some metropolitan areas, cause addicts to seek
detoxification. Walters says that breaking the "French connection" did
that in New York in 1972. Even Prohibition, he says, for all its bad
effects, changed behavior: after repeal, per-capita alcohol use did
not return to pre-Prohibition levels until the 1960s.

Walters says the data do not support the theory that society has a
"latent level of substance abuse" - that if one problem declines,
another rises commensurately. And he thinks indifference to drug
abuse, which debilitates the individual's capacity to flourish in
freedom, mocks the nation's premises.

Having studied political philosophy at the University of Toronto with
the late Allan Bloom, Walters describes the drug war in Lincolnian
language: "There are certain requirements of civilization - to keep
the better angels of our nature in preponderance over the lesser angels."

Fighting terrorists, he says, is necessary even though it is like
seeking a needle in a haystack. Illicit drugs - millions of tons
marketed to millions of Americans - are at least not a
needle-in-a-haystack problem.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin