According Andrew Somers, president of Drug Action Network site perceives the drug war is going nowhere and analogous to pre-prohibition and that certain drugs should be definitely legalized:


“For instance, comparative analysis of even the most pessimistic studies of marijuana show it to be safer and more benign than alcohol. Therefore it's easy to see marijuana regulations mirroring those for beer and wine.”


He acknowledges there are differences in narcotics and suggests:


“Hard alcohol is regulated more strictly than beer and wine, and certainly there are substances that should receive stricter regulation than marijuana. Soft drugs such as MDMA (Ecstasy), Psilocybin (Mushrooms), and Peyote, would need stricter regulation along the lines of hard alcohol, which has significant restrictions on public use and distribution.”


He doesn’t stop there and further advocates:


The very hardest of recreational substances, (i.e. the drugs with the highest physiological addiction rates, such as cocaine and heroin), would be regulated and distributed only by the government and directly to users. This distribution would seriously undercut, and virtually end, the black market for these drugs. This would greatly discourage the creation of new drug addicts.


The reason he goes to this extreme is to undercut the argument that these hard drugs are the reason for prohibition in order to fend off the user’s tendency to move up to more dangerous stuff:


“In reality, that demonization is no more warranted than that attributed to those that abuse alcohol. About 10% of the people that use alcohol use it abusively. This minority of abusive users is echoed by other substances as well. Depending on the substance, only 5% to 15% of the users develop abusive use habits. This means that 85% to 95% of users use recreationally, responsibly, and without developing abuse problems. (as a side note, marijuana and soft drugs see the lower, 5% abuse issues, while substances like heroin and cocaine tend toward the 15% abuse rates).”


Here is where we part company; for Somers seems to be on a binge of drug cleansing by simplistically assuming that the overwhelming majority of users are “recreational”; shucks, most, like alcoholics just have a drink or two as though they’re immune from abusive consumption — let alone that most of these same recreational users are also into alcohol.


“Ultimately, demonizing persons with abuse problems is faulty logic. These negative stereotypes do not assist the problem user, regardless of if the drug is alcohol, cocaine, or heroin. The fact that the vast majority of users are responsible, recreational users is a clear indication that the problems of drug abuse are not due to the drugs themselves, but due to individual problems with a small minority of people.”


This is indeed news to me that most users are responsible; I always thought they had a problem in dealing in reality or separating themselves from teenage mentality. Still, I agree that there appears to be an overreaction concerning a small minority but for the issue of depraved, pervasive crime for which these “recreational” profligates are responsible as much so as the lost generation of the 20s.


Were it not for the puritanic view of the U.S. in the early post WWII years and had absorbed the use of drugs as was alcohol after prohibition, the country would not be as crime-ridden and the world would not be influenced by the flow of capital from drugs.


In this sense, Andrews brings into play The Rand corporation’s studies:


“What is most telling though is that the RAND corporation's studies have show that education and treatment is 7 times more effective than criminal interdiction (and demonizing) at reducing the problems associated with drug use and abuse.


“That's a savings of 700% over our current expenditures, and for a more effective program. Yet we do not spend our drug war money on education and treatment - we spend it on law enforcement and prisons - to the tune of 100 billion a year.


“It's illustrative to show the results of policies in Amsterdam and Switzerland, where heroin addicts are given heroin virtually free. The result is that the heroin black market has ceased. A further result is that the addict population has stopped growing - in fact they have a 3rd the percentage of addicts as we do in the U.S. And perhaps most important, the other social ills - related crime, spread of AIDS, and health issues from tainted supply - have vanished, making their society safer and healthier overall.”


Andrew Somers offers the following points and summation:


“Provide addicts with clean supplies to demolish the black market, and greatly increase the availability of treatment options for them in a non-criminal setting.


“This is the common sense, humanistic, and moral approach to dealing with our nation's drug problems. And until we accept this approach, our entire society will continue to suffer the failures of this war against our own people.”


There is no question that the policy of drug wars pursued since Nixon has failed because they concentrated resources on citizen user, in lieu of aggressively going after criminal drug suppliers and the cartels.


Quick Facts:


The U.S. federal government spent $19.179 billion dollars in 2003 on the War on Drugs, at a rate of about $600 per second.


Arrests for drug law violations in 2004 are expected to exceed the 1,579,566 arrests of 2000.


Someone is arrested every 20 seconds.


In 2000, 46.5 percent of the 1,579,566 total arrests for drug law violations were for cannabis -- a total of 734,497. Of those, 646,042 people were arrested for possession alone. This is an increase over 1999, when a total of 704,812 Americans were arrested for cannabis offenses, of which 620,541 were for possession alone.


[Source: Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation]


Approximately 236,800 people are expected to be incarcerated for drug law violations in 2004.


About 648 are locked up every day.


[Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics]