Pubdate: Thursday, 11 March 1999 Source: Arizona Daily Star (AZ) Contact: http://www.azstarnet.com/ Author: Rodney S. Quinn THE DRUG WAR: SUPPRESSION TACTICS WILL NEVER WORK (Rod Quinn, who lives in Green Valley, was the Secretary of State of Maine for five terms and is a retired Air Force officer.) Drug Enforcement Administration chief Thomas Constantine blames the failure of our drug war on the public; he said the public is unwilling and unable to fight the war. Maybe. It seems more likely the public is willing to fight a war, but dissatisfied with the present tactics. The drug war as presently conducted, it turns out, may be a grand mistake. From the very beginning, official exaggerations hold an honored place in the government mendacity hall-of-fame. During the Nixon administration when the program first needed a worthwhile enemy, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs decided that for every known addict there were four unknown and, a year later, seven unknown, causing the ``official'' number of addicts to rise from 68,088 to 559,000 in only two years. Along with the manipulation of statistics, the drug war has waged a vigorous campaign to elevate drugs in the public consciousness from a behavioral and psychological concern to a major national depravity. These essentially natural products that have been with us for history have suddenly become evil incarnate - the 20th century snake in the American Garden of Eden. There is reason to believe much of the purple prose about the horrors of drugs may be as suspect as the bureaucratic guesstimates of addict numbers. Alcohol, too, is a drug. But we've managed to live with it. Marijuana (Asian hemp, kief) has been in worldwide recreational and agricultural use for thousands of years. Poppy derivatives have been used to ease human suffering for the same millennia. As recently as this century, morphine (or its siblings) was a key ingredient of many patent medicines that provided a few relaxed moments in the day of overloaded farm wives and lonely widows. Laudanum (morphine) was the only commonly available anesthetic for Civil War medicine. By the end of 19th century, it was in broad use but declined as the old soldiers died off. Cocaine, the addiction of Sherlock Holmes and many early soda pop drinkers in Georgia, has been in recreation use for centuries. The cocoa leaf, from which cocaine is processed, is legal in many South American countries, especially at high altitudes, where it makes life more bearable and workers more efficient. Here in the United States, the overwhelming majority of cocaine use is by well-educated, financially secure professionals. Many drugs have valuable medicinal qualities. Heroin possesses unique pain-killing properties with few side effects and is prescribed for the terminally ill in most civilized countries. Known in England as a Brompton cocktail, it is widely used to ease the final hours of terminal cancer patients. Marijuana is believed by a growing number of responsible scientists to reduce or ameliorate side effects from cancer chemotherapy, as well as from some glaucoma symptoms. All that aside, however, the basic failure of the war on drugs is, it is simply not winnable as long as we insist on using the tactics of suppression. According to the director of the Office of Drug Abuse and Law Enforcement, the entire U.S. market for heroin could be provided from crops grown in 10 square miles of poppy farming and two 10-ton trucks can carry enough of the product to supply the U.S. market for one year. So much for programs that pay foreign countries not to produce. The physical parameters of drug entry into this country mean even the fabulously rich United States cannot eliminate drugs by force and interception any more than British muskets arranged in close-order drill were able to defeat frontiersmen shooting from undercover with squirrel rifles. Entering the United States each year are more than 100 million cars, 300 million people, 500,000 airplanes and 200,000 ships (each of which, Customs officials estimate, has more than 30,000 potential hiding places). The Associated Press quoted Francis X. Kinney, Director of Strategic Planning for the Office of National Drug Control Policy; ``Our current interdiction efforts almost completely fail to achieve our purpose of reducing the flow of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines across the border.'' But we hardly need to consult Kinney. The true measure of drug availability is cost. For the past 20 years, the street price of drugs, in constant dollars, has hardly kept up with inflation. Beyond the obvious inadequacies of the drug war strategy is the damage being done our society. In one year, from 1997 to 1998, prosecution for drug offenses in federal courts increased 19.2 percent, one quarter of all criminal cases. The drug war is a lawyer's dream of a growth industry. We are not, nor are we likely to be, even close to winning the war, and the costs in human misery and taxes are escalating at a rate that is fast becoming unsustainable. In the 1920s, we thought the problems associated with alcohol could be solved by police and jails. Prohibition taught us we were wrong. The strategy of the present drug war is Prohibition redux. - --- MAP posted-by: Rich O'Grady