>>> Part 8 of 15...
ideas that are sound.  The current war on drugs is an idea that sounds
good, but it is not a good idea that is sound.  After hundreds of
billions of dollars spent trying to stop the supply and demand of
drugs, after the break-up of thousands of families because of the 
arrest of a nonviolent drug offender, after eight decades of failure,
how much longer will the war on drugs continue?
I once told a television reporter that the war on drugs was our
domestic Vietnam.  Conservatives and liberals disagree about the
justice of that war.  But we generally agree that the strategy for
fighting it didn't work, and as a result the war lasted too long and
cost too many lives.  The same is true of the war on drugs.  It's time
to bring this enervating war to an end.  It's time for peace.
Joseph D. McNamara
We turned next to a former police chief - Mr. McNamara was chief of
police in Kansas City, Mo., and San Jose, Calif. - to inquire into the
special problems of the war on drugs on the street.  Mr. McNamara, who
has a doctorate in public administration from Harvard, is the author of
four books on policing and is currently a research fellow at the Hoover
Institution.
"It's the money, stupid." After 35 years as a police officer in three
of the country's largest cities, that is my message to the righteous
politicians who obstinately proclaim that a war on drugs will lead to a
drug-free America.  About $500 worth of heroin or cocaine in a source
country will bring in as much as $100,000 on the streets of an American
city.  All the cops, armies, prisons, and executions in the world
cannot impede a market with that kind of tax-free profit margin.  It is
the illegality that permits the obscene markup, enriching drug
traffickers, distributors, dealers, crooked cops, lawyers, judges,
politicians, bankers, businessmen.
Naturally, these people are against reform of the drug laws.  Drug
crooks align themselves with their avowed enemies, such as the Drug
Enforcement Administration, in opposing drug reform.  They are joined
by many others with vested economic interests.  President Eisenhower
warned of a military-industrial complex that would elevate the defense
budget unnecessarily.  That military-industrial complex pales in
comparison to the host of industries catering to our national
puritanical hypocrisy - researchers willing to tell the government what
it wants to hear, prison builders, correction and parole officers'
associations, drug-testing companies, and dubious purveyors of anti-
drug education.  Mayor Schmoke is correct about the vested interests in
the drug war.
Sadly, the police have been pushed into a war they did not start and
cannot win.  It was not the police who lobbied in 1914 for passage of
the Harrison Act, which first criminalized drugs.  It was the
Protestant missionary societies in China, the Woman's Christian
Temperance Union, and other such organizations that viewed the taking
of psychoactive substances as sinful.  These groups gradually got their
religious tenets enacted into penal statutes under which the "sinners'
go to jail.  The religious origin is significant for two reasons.  If
drugs had been outlawed because the police had complained that drug use
caused crime and disorder, the policy would have been more acceptable
to the public and won more compliance.  And the conviction that the use
of certain drugs is immoral chills the ability to scrutinize rationally
and to debate the effects of the drug war.  When Ethan Nadelmann
pointed out once that it was illogical for the most hazardous drugs,
alcohol and nicotine, to be legal while less dangerous drugs were
illegal, he was roundly denounced.  A leading conservative supporter of
the drug war contended that while alcohol and nicotine addiction was
unhealthy and could even cost lives, addiction to illegal drugs could
result in the loss of one's soul.  No empirical proof was given.
The demonizing of these drugs and their users encourages demagoguery.
William Bennett, the nation's first drug czar, would cut off the heads
of drug sellers.  Bennett's anti-drug rhetoric is echoed by Joseph
Califano, the liberal former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare,
now chairman of the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia
University.  Last June, the center hysterically suggested (with great
media coverage) that binge drinking and other substance abuse were
taking over the nation's colleges, leading to an increase in rapes,
assaults, and murders and to the spread of AIDS and other sexually
transmitted diseases.  The validity of the research in Califano's
report was persuasively debunked by Kathy McNamara-Meis, writing in
Forbes Media Critic.  She was equally critical of the media for
accepting the Center's sensational statements.
Conservatives like Bennett normally advocate minimal government.
Liberals like Califano would ordinarily recoil from the draconian
prison sentences and property seizures used in the drug war.  This
illustrates why it is so difficult to get politicians to concede that
alternative approaches to drug control need to be studied.  We are
familiar with the perception that the first casualty in any war is
truth.  Eighty years of drug-war propaganda has so influenced public
opinion that most politicians believe they will lose their jobs if
their opponents can claim they arc soft on drugs and crime.  Yet,
public doubt is growing.  Gallup reports that in 1990 only 4 per cent
of Americans believed that "arresting the people who use drugs" is the
best way for the government to allocate resources.
It was my own experience as a policeman trying to enforce the laws
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