A CRIMINALLY STUPID WAR ON DRUGS IN THE US

How much misery can a policy cause before it is acknowledged as a
failure and reversed? The US "war on drugs" suggests there is no
upper limit. The country's implacable blend of prohibition and
punitive criminal justice is wrong-headed in every way: immoral in
principle, since it prosecutes victimless crimes, and in practice a
disaster of remarkable proportions. Yet for a US politician to
suggest wholesale reform of this brainless regime is still seen as an
act of reckless self-harm.

Even a casual observer can see that much of the damage done in the US
by illegal drugs is a result of the fact that they are illegal, not
the fact that they are drugs. Vastly more lives are blighted by the
brutality of prohibition, and by the enormous criminal networks it
has created, than by the substances themselves. This is true of
cocaine and heroin as well as of soft drugs such as marijuana. But
the assault on consumption of marijuana sets the standard for the
policy's stupidity.

Nearly half of all Americans say they have tried marijuana. That
makes them criminals in the eyes of the law. Luckily, not all of them
have been found out - but when one is grateful that most law-breakers
go undetected, there is something wrong with the law.

Harvard's Jeffrey Miron published a study denouncing drug prohibition
in 2004*. He noted that more than 300,000 people were then in US
prisons for violations of the law on drugs - more than the number
incarcerated for all crimes in Britain, France, Germany, Italy and
Spain combined. Today the number is higher - according to some
estimates, nearly 500,000. The far larger number of people who have
been convicted, at any point, of a drugs offence face permanently
impaired employment prospects and all manner of other setbacks: in
the US, once a criminal always a criminal.

Strict enforcement, Mr Miron explained, has reduced drug use only
modestly - supposing for the moment that this is even a legitimate
objective. The collateral damage is of a different order altogether.
Violence related to drug crimes has surged in Mexico and in US cities
close to the border, giving rise to renewed interest in the topic.
Thousands are thought to have been killed by criminal gangs competing
for the trade

Many users also die because of tainted drugs, or because they share
needles - consequences again of prohibition. There is an obvious
national security dimension as well: in countries such as Colombia
and Afghanistan, the huge surplus derived from prohibition supports terrorists.

The consequences of prohibition corrupt governments everywhere, and
the US is no exception. Since a drug transaction has no victims in
the ordinary sense, witnesses to assist a prosecution are in short
supply. US drug-law enforcement tends to infringe civil liberties,
relying on warrantless searches, entrapment, extorted testimony in
the form of plea bargains, and so forth. Predictably, in the US the
hammer of the law on drugs falls with far greater force on black
people: whites do most of the using, blacks do most of the time.

Few policies manage to fail so comprehensively, and what makes it all
the odder is that the US has seen it all before. Everybody
understands that alcohol prohibition in the 1920s suffered from many
of the same pathologies - albeit on a smaller scale - and was
eventually abandoned.

The present treatment of alcohol, which is to regulate and tax the
product, is the right approach for today's illegal drugs. One could
expect some increase in the use of the drugs in question, but also an
enormous net reduction in the harms that they and the attempt to
prohibit them cause. Adding the direct costs of prohibition (police
and prisons) to the taxes forgone by the present system, the US could
also expect a fiscal benefit of about $100bn (UKP75.7bn, UKP 68.2bn) a year.

Is an outbreak of common sense on this subject likely? Unfortunately,
no. Only the most daring politicians seem willing to think about it
seriously. One such is James Webb, a refreshingly unpredictable
Democratic senator for Virginia, who has called for a commission to
examine the criminal justice system and the law on drugs. Politicians
such as Mr Webb are very much the exception.

Elsewhere, signs of movement are minimal. Barack Obama has admitted
that as a young man he used not only marijuana - and, unlike Bill
Clinton, he inhaled; the whole point was to inhale, he joked - but
also cocaine. This might suggest the president has an open mind on
the subject. And in a departure from the previous administration, his
attorney-general has said he will not bring federal prosecutions
against the medical use of marijuana in states that allow it. But
then at a recent event Mr Obama ran away from a question about the
broader decriminalisation of marijuana under cover of a wisecrack.

For now, outright legalisation of marijuana, let alone harder drugs,
is difficult to imagine. Even gradual decriminalisation - a policy
that maintains prohibition but removes it from the scope of the
criminal law - seems unlikely, though perhaps not unthinkable. A new
study by Glenn Greenwald, a writer and civil rights lawyer, looks at
Portugal's policy of decriminalisation. He judges it a success:
"While drug addiction, usage, and associated pathologies continue to
skyrocket in many European Union states, those problems - in
virtually every relevant category - have been either contained or
measurably improved within Portugal since 2001."

Somebody in the White House should take a look. This national
calamity is no laughing matter.