Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about a case in which the judge refused to impose the notoriously high sentence required for crack cocaine, Kimbrough v. U.S. While the case doesn't challenge the sentencing disparity directly, it calls attention to the statute that punishes crack cocaine with sentences 100 times greater than for powder cocaine, despite the fact that there is no difference in the chemical makeup of the two forms of cocaine.

In addition, new sentencing guidelines will go into effect Nov. 1 for people convicted of federal crack cocaine offenses. The U.S. Sentencing Commission has finally corrected the inconsistency between the federal guidelines and mandatory minimum sentences that resulted in people sentenced to more time in prison than required by the law.

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The Life of Hunter S. Thompson

An Oral Biography

By Jann S. Wenner and Corey Seymour

Little, Brown. 467 pp. $28.99

Reading "Gonzo" takes us back to a counterculture moment in U.S. history that seemed very modern and cutting-edge at the time but was still taking its cues from the rhetoric of Hemingway. It was a time in America when many men were he-men and proud of it: The really masculine ones fought wars, scaled mountains, built bridges. The mid-list guys found bars where they could beat each other up, drove 100 miles an hour through hairpin turns, laboriously dragged their couches out onto the front lawn, where they could set them on fire. Those were men's adventures; adventurous women tested their mettle by hooking up with abusive men and finding out just how much abuse they could take.

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Should judges have the discretion to depart from severe sentencing guidelines if they lead to unjust results? The Supreme Court wrestled with this question Oct. 2 during oral arguments in a crack-relatedcase, Kimbrough v. United States . The case had percolated up through the lower courts because the trial judge refused to impose a required sentence he found deeply unfair.

At the peak of the panic over crack cocaine in the mid-1980s, Congress passed a rash of laws requiring longer prison sentences. One such law created a 100-to-1 disparity between crack and cocaine offenses. You have to get caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine -- but only five grams of crack cocaine -- to get a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.

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Experts Debate Whether Disease or Defect Is to Blame

Many people think they know what addiction is, but despite non-experts' willingness to opine on its treatment and whether Britney or Lindsay's rehab was tough enough, the term is still a battleground. Is addiction a disease? A moral weakness? A disorder caused by drug or alcohol use, or a compulsive behavior that can also occur in relation to sex, food and maybe even video games?

As a former cocaine and heroin addict, these questions have long fascinated me. I want to know why, in three years, I went from being an Ivy League student to a daily IV drug user who weighed 80 pounds. I want to know why I got hooked, when many of my fellow drug users did not.

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Thanks for publishing Arnold Trebach's outstanding column "Fatal alliance" (Op-Ed, Aug. 20). I'd like to add that alcohol prohibition was not terminated because it was decided that alcohol was not so bad after all, but rather because of the crime and corruption that its prohibition caused.

The time has come to terminate our counterproductive so-called war on drugs. Not because some of the drugs are not dangerous -- many drugs are very dangerous. But because of the crime and corruption drug prohibition is causing and because our drug prohibition policies are financing international terrorists.

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The forced resignation two weeks ago, under pressure from President Alvaro Uribe, of three prominent officers accused of drug trafficking is not likely to end the shakeup in Colombia's army and navy. More heads will roll in a long-overdue purge of corruption in the military. The credit has to go to the left-wing members of Congress who have taken over the Colombian account on Capitol Hill since the Democratic victory in the 2006 elections.

A conservative American with close, longtime ties to Colombia put it to me bluntly: "The firing of these officers is seen as President Uribe's way of clearing the decks to make the Democrats in Congress happy, in order to secure the free-trade agreement. There are plenty more generals and admirals to get the heave-ho."

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Quirky Collections Display Swag Confiscated From Drug Dealers And Macabre Medical Mementoes

WASHINGTON, D.C.- I am gazing at a slick, maroon Bombardier Sea-Doo on a pedestal labelled "evidence #48007" - part of a haul seized in a raid on a Baltimore crack dealer.

The candy apple red drag racing car behind me was once owned by notorious Mexican dealer Joe Fuentes. Nearby, there's a collection of pistols that belonged to the Medellin cocaine cartel.

In a city of museums, this one, operated by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), has to be one of the quirkiest, with a collection of 5,000 objects seized from drug dealers.

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In "The Lost War," his Outlook article on the international drug trade, Misha Glenny writes that "the 'War on Drugs' is defeating the 'war on terror.'" What he fails to note, however, is that while we still have a lot to accomplish, the national effort against drugs is working on its own terms.

With a comprehensive anti-drug strategy in place, involving foreign policy, enforcement, education, treatment and prevention, overall drug use in the United States has declined by roughly half in the past 25 years -- from about 13 percent of the population in 1980 to just over 6 percent of the population in 2005. Cocaine use, including crack, is down 70 percent. Do we want to go back?

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GALKAYO, Somalia, On a dusty street that runs through this town of 80,000 in central Somalia, a cluster of men sit on low stools, lost in their daily ritual -- chewing the green leaves of a mild narcotic called khat. Lethargic and stupefied, they seem oblivious to everything. Only when their cellphones jangle -- a surreal sound in this otherwise primitive place -- do they snap to life. Soon they've arranged the money transfers they've been waiting for and lapse back into their somnolent masticating.

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A recent article in The Washington Times by Sara A. Carter show the frightening importance of the alliance between Arabic terrorists and Mexican drug cartels. It documents how well known this dangerous situation has been for several years, for which no effective action had been taken by the Department of Homeland Security or local officials.

As an old drug-policy hand, I thought I had heard everything about it. But parts of the story were news to me and terribly disturbing. One example was the report that "approximately 20 Arab persons a week were utilizing the Travis County Court in Austin to change their names and driver's licenses from Arabic to Hispanic surnames." I do not claim that this horrendous problem is easy to deal with; it is not.

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A hundred people gathered at Washington's Scripture Cathedral in May, many of them teenagers from the surrounding O Street NW neighborhood, where a murderous street feud had terrorized the community. Our anti-violence group, Peaceoholics, had convened a forum to ask "What's Snitching and What's Not?"

Snitching -- and its sibling, witness intimidation -- is much in the news these days, the result of a series of high-profile killings and shootings both here in the Washington area and elsewhere. But there are a lot of myths and misconceptions about it, not just among people in the community, but also among law enforcement officials and the media.

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Although it is encouraging that the FBI is reducing its discrimination against job applicants who have used marijuana ["FBI Bows to Modern Realities, Eases Rules on Past Drug Use," news story, Aug. 7], the change highlights the hypocrisy in the war on drugs.

While the federal government is allowing college-educated people with youthful indiscretions in their pasts to apply to the nation's top law enforcement agency, it is denying school loans, food stamps and public housing to hundreds of thousands of lower-income people with youthful indiscretions in their pasts. And there's the racial divide. Law enforcement routinely targets black communities for drug arrests, even though blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates.

While white drug users go on to work at the FBI, blacks go to jail.

Bill Piper

Director of National Affairs

Drug Policy Alliance

Washington

[end]

We've Spent 36 Years and Billions of Dollars Fighting It, but the Drug Trade Keeps Growing

Poppies were the first thing that British army Capt. Leo Docherty noticed when he arrived in Afghanistan's turbulent Helmand province in April 2006. "They were growing right outside the gate of our Forward Operating Base," he told me. Within two weeks of his deployment to the remote town of Sangin, he realized that "poppy is the economic mainstay and everyone is involved right up to the higher echelons of the local government."

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Since 2000, the Drug Enforcement Administration has embarked on a muscular campaign against prescription painkiller abuse. It has utilized undercover investigations, SWAT raids, asset forfeiture, and high profile trials against "kingpin" doctors. These tactics should be familiar to anyone who has studied the drug war, but the results are a shocker. Prescription opioids have actually grown scarce.

To put it bluntly, the DEA has finally found a drug war it can win.

"Opiophobia" is a term that describes doctors' increasing unwillingness to prescribe opioid painkillers - a class of drugs that includes Vicodin and OxyContin - and especially high-dose opioids, to those in pain. This fear is rooted in the DEA's practice of jailing those doctors it deems are prescribing outside "legitimate medical standards."

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How America and Mexico Can Defeat the Cartels

U.S. and Mexican authorities are nearing agreement on an aid package to support Mexico's courageous new offensive against the deadly drug syndicates that threaten both our nations. The stakes are high for the United States: We depend on Mexico as a cooperative neighbor and trade partner, and most of the marijuana and as much as 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in this country pours over our southern border. If Mexico cannot make significant headway against the bloodthirsty cartels, our security and our people will suffer the consequences.

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If a narco-state can be defined as a nation where the production and export of illegal drugs comprises the equivalent of about 50 percent of that country's legitimate gross domestic product, then Afghanistan is a narco-state.

The numbers are staggering. According to the U.N. World Drug Report for 2007, which was issued in July, Afghanistan is home to 82 percent of the area throughout the world that is devoted to the cultivation of opium. Because Afghan poppies generate better yields than can be found elsewhere, the country was responsible for 92 percent of the opium produced in the world last year. The U.N. estimates that "around 92 percent of the world's heroin comes from poppies grown in Afghanistan." The 2007 World Drug Report revealed that "[t]here are indications that a small but increasing proportion of opiates from Afghanistan are being trafficked to North America." That means that Taliban-controlled areas in southern Afghanistan, where much of the recent increases in opium output have occurred, are effectively selling heroin to American addicts to finance their military operations against U.S. and allied forces.

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Paul Kengor rails against legalizing drugs ("A conservative take on drugs," Forum, Sunday) as if all drugs were alike and all drugs were illegal. Of course, neither is true.

Let us consider marijuana, an illegal drug, in comparison to alcohol, which is legal and regulated. Alcohol is more addictive (15 percent of users become dependent versus 9 percent for marijuana) much more toxic and more likely to induce violent and aggressive behavior.

So why exactly is alcohol a huge and legal industry, while we arrest nearly 800,000 Americans each year on marijuana charges, 89 percent of them for simple possession? Why have we taken a popular product -- used by at least 100 million Americans, according to federal surveys that even the government admits probably are gross underestimates -- and given a monopoly on sales and distribution to criminal gangs rather than legitimate, regulated businesses?

The late Milton Friedman understood, as do other real conservatives, that the only marijuana policy that makes sense is treating it like alcohol, with common-sense regulations, taxes and controls.

Bruce Mirken

Director of communications

Marijuana Policy Project

Washington

[end]

Paul Kengor makes the common mistake of assuming that punitive drug laws deter use. The drug war is in large part a war on marijuana, by far the most popular illicit drug. The University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future Study reports that lifetime use of marijuana is higher in the United States than in any European country, yet America is one of the few Western countries that still punishes citizens who prefer marijuana to martinis. Unlike alcohol, marijuana has never been shown to cause an overdose death, nor does it share the addictive properties of tobacco. The short-term health effects of marijuana are inconsequential compared to the long-term effects of criminal records.

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Paul Kengor's commentary "A conservative take on drugs" (Forum, Sunday) is atypically bad. His take on those of us who oppose the war on drugs, also known as Prohibition II, is wrong in many ways. Primarily, his notion that legalization advocacy is solely a libertarian view is absurd.

I would point to former Secretary of State George Shultz, the late economist Milton Friedman and a man Mr. Kengor quotes, William F. Buckley, as non-libertarians against the drug war. The good professor should know that Mr. Buckley was friends with Peter McWilliams, a man whose death still lays at the feet of Prohibitionists. Mr. McWilliams' death is one of the saddest examples of our present-day Prohibition's errant ways, and Mr. Buckley is no friend of the drug war.

Even former Rep. Bob Barr, who almost a decade ago held Washington voters' ballots hostage for nearly a year because of the medical cannabis (Measure 59) issue, is supporting the Marijuana Policy Project.

Drug Policy Forum of Oregon

Eugene, Ore.

[end]

Surgeon General's Warning: Attention Pregnant Mothers, Smoking Crack Can Be Hazardous to Your Baby's Health.

I once saw the mock warning label above in a political cartoon attacking the idea of legalizing drugs. It was a wonderfully cutting illustration of what drug legalization would actually look like -- flesh on a noxious concept cooked up amid gatherings of libertarians.

Practically speaking, the argument for legalizing drugs is flawed on so many levels that a full accounting here is impossible. My experience is that drug legalization is generally favored either by people who do an excessive amount of drugs or those who have never touched the stuff. The latter are clueless as to why a syringe of heroin is totally different from a glass of Merlot.

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