Waging war against war on drugs

2011-01-04T19:43:00.000-08:00

Profound thanks are due televangelist Pat Robertson for stating so clearly what many of us have been screaming in the wilderness for years — that the criminalization of marijuana is a plague on young people. May he lend courage to politicians who know better but won't do the right thing for fear of seeming soft on drugs.

"We're locking up people who take a couple of puffs of marijuana, and the next thing they know, they've got 10 years," Robertson said on his Christian Broadcasting Network show, The 700 Club. These are mandatory sentences, he adds, that absurd laws force on judges.

Robertson does not call for legalization of all drugs, as do many disillusioned law enforcers, judges and prominent economists of all political stripes. He does say that criminalizing the possession of small amounts of pot is "costing us a fortune, and it's ruining young people."

Where are the foes of big government in this? They should note that the federal Drug Enforcement Administration's budget has more than quadrupled over the decade to $2.6 billion — without making a dent in the quantity of illegal drugs sold in this country. (The narcotics, meanwhile, are more potent than ever.)

But the DEA bureaucrats know how to expand a mandate. The agency now operates 86 offices in 63 countries and runs a shadow State Department that at times mucks up American diplomacy. It employs nearly 11,000 people.

And the DEA is but one expense in the drug war. Add in the costs of local law enforcement to round up suspects, courts to prosecute them and jails to hold them, and the war on drugs weighs in at about $50 billion a year. States and municipalities bear most of the costs.

Of course, these numbers don't take into account the lost tax revenue that legalizing these drugs could generate. Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimates that taxing marijuana like tobacco and alcohol could add $6.4 billion a year to state and local treasuries.

If drugs were legalized, narco-terrorists (including the Taliban) would lose their chief source of funds, drug gangs would go out of business, and the drug-fueled bloodbath now tormenting Mexico would end. Border security would vastly tighten as drug traffic dried up.

Ending the war on drugs has support across the political spectrum. Many on the left regard America's drug laws as an assault on personal freedom and racist in their application. Prominent voices on the right — for example, William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman — long ago declared the war on drugs simply a dismal failure.

This month, Britain's former drug czar and defense secretary, Bob Ainsworth, declared that the war on drugs is "nothing short of a disaster" and called for government regulation of drug manufacturing and sales. "We must take the trade away from organized criminals and hand it to the control of doctors and pharmacists," he said.

No one here is advocating drug use. I have never touched hard drugs, but the "war" against them lost its romance the day that a drug addict pointed a knife at my gut, demanding money for a fix that should have cost him no more than a head of celery.

Then there's the rank hypocrisy. President Obama admits to having "tried" cocaine, and President George W. Bush all but did, refusing to answer questions about his previous drug use. Yet we still ruin the lives of teenagers caught using or dealing in far less dangerous marijuana.

The injustice of this is what aroused Pat Robertson. A social conservative has now filled a gap in the anti-drug-war lineup of liberals, economic conservatives and libertarians. And we welcome him.

A Century of Protest, by Lyn Smith

2011-01-04T19:35:00.001-08:00

My father had a bad war, but then most pacifists did. He didn't have a very good peace either, as soldiers returned from a victory in which he was only too aware he had played no part.

Some of his wartime correspondence with the sculptor and fellow anti-militarist Henry Moore ended up in the Imperial War Museum. Their testimonies are not in Voices Against War, but Lyn Smith has drawn on the same source. They include the usual suspects like Tony Benn, who wrote an essay on disarmament at the age of 11. Fenner (later Lord) Brockway suffered imprisonment, one night spent in the Tower of London, for being a conscientious objector in the First World War and was still active in the early Sixties when I rattled a collecting tin at a CND meeting, the organisation he helped to found.

More unexpected are the observations of the wife of the RAF commander at Greenham Common. Confronted by angry American women demanding to know why the protesters should be allowed near the base, Ann Marsh replied that the whole point was that this was a free country where people did what they thought right.

Such fair-mindedness was not common in the First World War, which saw COs receiving death sentences, although they were not usually carried out. On the home front, women gave the white feather of cowardice to men not in uniform. One recipient pointed to his damaged leg and invited the accusing woman to look for the missing bit – on a battlefield of the Somme.

The quotations speak for themselves, apart from Smith's introductions at the beginning of each section. Moving and powerful contributions come from all classes. William Douglas-Home, brother of the Tory prime minister, Alec, was court-martialled for refusing to obey an order he believed would cause the deaths of French civilians. A A Milne moved in the other direction, from defence of pacifism to defence of the realm: the howitzer at Pooh Corner, as it were.