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Academy of Sciences report last year, have concluded that methadone is
more effective than any other treatment in reducing heroin-related
crime, disease, and death.  In Australia and much of Europe, addicts
who want to reduce or quit their heroin use can obtain a prescription
for methadone from a GP and fill the prescription at a local pharmacy.
In the United States, by contrast, methadone is available only at
highly regulated and expensive clinics.
A warning of the prohibitionists is that there's no going back once we
reverse course and legalize drugs.  But what the reforms in Europe and
Australia demonstrate is that our choices are not all or nothing.
Virtually all the steps described above represent modest and relatively
low-risk initiatives to reduce drug and prohibition-related harms
within our current prohibition regime.  At the same time, these steps
are helpful in thinking through the consequences of more far-reaching
drug policy reform.  You don't need to go for formal legalization to
embark on numerous reforms that would yield great dividends.  But these
run into opiaphobia.
The blame is widespread.  Cowardly Presidents, unwilling to assume
leadership for reform.  A Congress so concerned with appearing tough on
crime that it is unwilling to analyze alternative approaches.  A drug
czar who debases public debate by equating legalization with genocide.
A drug enforcement/treatment complex so hooked on government dollars
that the anti-drug crusade has become a vested interest.
But perhaps the worst offender is the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration - not so much the agents who risk their lives trying to
apprehend major drug traffickers as the ideologically driven
bureaucrats who intimidate and persecute doctors for prescribing pain
medication in medically appropriate (but legally suspicious) doses, who
hobble methadone programs with their overregulation, who acknowledge
that law enforcement alone cannot solve the drug problem but then
proceed to undermine innovative public-health initiatives.
I am often baffled by the resistance of conservatives to drug-policy,
reform, but encouraged by the willingness of many to reassess their
views once they have heard the evidence.  Conservatives who oppose the
expansion of federal power cannot look approvingly on the growth of
the federal drug-enforcement bureaucracy and federal efforts to coerce
states into adopting federally formulated drug policies.  Those who
focus on the victimization of Americans by predatory criminals can
hardly support our massive diversion of law-enforcement resources to
apprehending and imprisoning nonviolent vice merchants and consumers.
Those concerned with overregulation can hardly countenance our current
handling of methadone, our refusal to allow over-the-counter sale of
sterile syringes, our prohibition of medical marijuana.  And
conservatives who turn to the Bible for guidance on current affairs can
find little justification there for our "war on drugs" and the people
who use and sell them.
Kurt Schmoke
Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore may be the only sitting politician who
advocates, if not outright legalization, reforms in that direction.
But even if he is lonely, he is not hopeless on the question of
democratic political enlightenment.  Mr. Schmoke was first elected
mayor in 1987.  He is a graduate of Yale University and a Rhodes
Scholar.
Serious problems require serious minds.  That may help explain why
William F. Buckley Jr. was one of the first public figures to
acknowledge that the war on drugs is a failure.  I don't know how Mr.
Buckley's early apostasy about the war on drugs was greeted by his
conservative colleagues - although it's not hard to guess - but I
remember the reaction in 1988 to my own call for a national debate on
that war.  A leading congressional liberal called me the most dangerous
man in America.  A national magazine referred to me as "a nice young
man who had a bright future." Many of my political supporters
encouraged me to drop the subject and stick to potholes.
Potholes are important, but, as Mr. Buckley argued to the New York Bar
Association, dropping the subject of the war on drugs means dropping
any hope of solving some of America's most difficult social problems.
The war on drugs isn't a solution in search of a problem.  It's a
problem in search of a solution.
How big a problem?  Very big.  As Mr. Buckley points out, "More people
die every year as a result of the war on drugs than die from what we
call, generically, overdosing." He is similarly correct in noting that
blanket prohibition is a major source of crime: it inflates the price
of drugs, inviting new criminals to enter the trade; reduces the number
of police officers available to investigate violent crime; fosters
adulterated, even poisonous, drugs; and contributes significantly to
the transmission of HIV.  These are not problems that are merely
tangential to the war on drugs.  These are problems caused, or made
substantially worse, by the war on drugs.
That is why I have long advocated that the war on drugs be fought as a
public-health war.  This is sometimes called medicalization, or
regulated distribution.  Under this alternative to the war on drugs,
the government would set up a regulatory regime to pull addicts into
the public-health system.  The government, not criminal traffickers,
would control the price, distribution, and purity of addictive
substances - which it already does with prescription drugs.  This would
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