Reefer madness

President Richard Nixon declared War on Drugs in June of 1971, forty years now of a failed policy which cost the federal government fifteen billion dollars last year alone. And federal spending is only part of it. Add in the total cost of law enforcement at the state and local levels and you’re talking enough real money that it’s amazing Republicans haven’t zeroed in on the War on Drugs as just another failed policy of the federal government.

Except Ron Paul.

Also add in the cost to our legal system of arresting, jailing, trying and imprisoning millions of Americans every year just on drug charges. Your kid can do hard time and have a lifetime criminal record for possession of an ounce of pot. In fact, most people in jail for every possible crime from check fraud to burglary to armed robbery are there because they were trying to make enough money to feed their need for price-inflated illegal drugs. If pot were legal, prison populations and neighborhood crime would both decline dramatically.

Still, to appreciate the enormous damage the war on drugs can do to an entire country, you have to look to Mexico, where acts of atrocity and corruption barely make the news north of the border unless they somehow surpass the norm. You have to go a long way to surpass the norm in Mexico these days, which is why the Zeta Cartel decided to attack a casino in Monterrey—a bingo parlor, really—with assault weapons and then empty five-gallon cans of gasoline on the carpets and drapes and flick a match on the way out. Fifty-three people died, good enough to warrant a mention on NBC news the next day.

It’s at least thirty years past time to acknowledge that we’ve lost the war and need to start looking at what a successful peace might look like. For marijuana, by far the biggest cash crop for the cartels, the answer is simple: decriminalization, if not outright legalization.

The concern with legalization is that it will make pot more available and
lower prices so substantially that many more young people will try it and take their first steps down the path to meth addiction or worse. (There’s nothing worse.) This argument simply doesn’t hold up. I can get an ounce of pot in less than a half hour from this very chair I’m sitting in right now, and most of that time would involve getting dressed and combing my hair.

And enough pot to stay high for a month would certainly cost less than a cell phone plan, and I don’t see too many kids who can’t afford a phone. (I actually know one kid in the neighborhood who has offered to do yard work to pay for his. I think he might be the last kid in the United States who still realizes that work and reward are somehow linked.)

All of the arguments for legalization are old and obvious: we would control and tax marijuana. We would regulate its use in the same way we regulate alcohol. Kids under eighteen would face some legal consequences for using it. Providing it to kids under eighteen would be worse. You couldn’t drive while stoned. Your employer would still have the right to test and fire you for use, even off duty. The military would have a zero-tolerance policy. Airline pilots would avoid all brownies on the off-chance that grandma had slipped a little faux-regano in as a joke.

Legalization would take hundreds of billions of dollars away from the drug cartels and substantially reduce the levels of corruption and violence in Mexico, as well as law-enforcement, court, and prison costs here in the United States. The cartels would survive, of course, especially as long as meth and cocaine remained a lucrative source of fast, easy cash. But they would be weakened to a degree that Mexico might actually move to reduce corruption and effectively fight them.

Cartel leaders should fear legalization more than they ever fear each other.

It would be foolish to believe that legalization of pot would solve all of our drug-related problems, especially addiction itself. But it would allow us to channel a small portion of the enforcement dollars into treatment. Legalization of marijuana would provide a laboratory for decriminalizing other drugs, and in the end we would find what programs work best for individual, community, and national health.

Legalization doesn’t seem likely anytime soon. Like gay marriage, it will probably arrive by a series of small steps rather than one big initiative.

Still, forty years of failed policy might one day lead to changes based on simple evidence and logic. May the War on Drugs not live to see fifty.