Winning the drug war

In many martial arts, you learn to "go with the flow". You defeat your opponent by flowing with his attack, joining it, and re-directing it in tge direction you want to go. Your opponent throws himself against the floor.

Here, a conservative Christian proposes to end the drug war, and take a huge bite out of the drug crime problem by apparently giving in. He would have us not only legalize drugs, but sell government-certified pure drugs in the marketplace.

Let's look at the demand problem this week. That's the easy one because it can be solved by government decree: Just get Congress to pass a law legalizing drugs and setting up super-discount outlets for heroin, pot, and other flavors of dunce drugs, and – poof! – the game is 90 percent over.

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The Libertarian Party has advocated legalization for years. It's easy to accuse the Party of being made up of druggies and would-be druggies. Somehow, it seems harder to make that label stick to someone whose book is the darling of the Religious Right. Maybe his credentials will get people to listen to the reasoning behind legalization, which includes:

With legalization,

The magic of the forbidden fruit will evaporate, especially if President Bush decides to skip the government emporiums and sell exclusively through churches. (At least that would beat bingo and bake sales as a fund-raiser.) Envision this remark in a circle of teens slouched around your TV set on Saturday afternoon: "Hey, guys, let's go buy some crack from Father O'Toole and get high tonight." Approximately 12 seconds after the sale, your phone would ring with the news, and you and the other parents would come down on your kids like an avalanche down Everest.

Would increased availability mean increased use? Not necessarily.

Think back to the 1920s. Marijuana could often be found growing wild down by the river in most states, and all the kids knew what it would do if you smoked it, but no child with any social standing would have anything to do with a loser who was brainless and pathetic enough to try it more than once. That, I suggest, would soon become the prevailing attitude again if we demystified drugs by putting them where they'd be readily available – albeit, perhaps, attached to a sermonette.

How about kids going around the established stores to avoid stigma?

Would this social stigma push our young people back to buying on the street? Not often. The risk of doing time for selling a $5.95 baggie for $9.95 (tops) in an alley would be a strong motivation for going into used car sales or joining the French Foreign Legion. Besides, who would pay extra to get potentially fatal or sugared-up junk when the government-guaranteed pure stuff is so cheap? The whole drug mystique would dwindle into silliness and dissolve in ridicule. Who wants to be the butt of Leno two-liners?

Besides, how often do we have that problem with kids buying booze on the street? There's some, but how much? Here's a parallel case, and we should be able to derive some real numbers. What are they?

Another case the Libertarian Party makes is that the effect of the drug war (increasingly intrusive search-and-seizure laws, random drug testing, second-guessing of physicians who prescribe certain medicines, asset forfeiture laws, and so on) is worse than the problem it's trying to address.

Any good arguments otherwise?