Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:


After you have finished reading this article you can click here to go back.

US: Regulating Drug Trade Makes Sense

Mike Gray

Watertown Daily Times (NY)

Saturday 13 Oct 2001

---
(Note: Gray is author of "Drug Crazy - How we got
into this mess and How we can get out")


With the laudable goal of knocking the props out
from under international terrorism, House Speaker
Dennis Hastert announced last month that he has
formed a task force to combat drug trafficking.

"The illegal drug trade," Hastert said, "its the
financial engine that fuels many terrorist
organizations around the world, including Osama Bin
Laden."

Unfortunately, the 48 member "Speaker's Task
Force for a Drug Free America" will be led by
drug war hawks whose instincts are almost certain
to make matters worse. Hastert and his co-
chairmen are staunch supporters of current drug
policy even though three out of four Americans
believe that policy has failed.

Ironically, most of these lawmakers are champions
of free-market capitalism and they'd be the first
to admit that you can't mess with the law of supply
and demand. But in this on arena, drugs, they
believe they can somehow repeal the most basic
law of economics.

History, logic, and recent experience suggest
otherwise. If, for example, we were somehow able
to actually dent the drug supply, something we
have not managed so far with a $50 billion annual
effort, the price will just go up and so will the
profits.

For 80 years we have been trying to wipe out
illegal drugs by eliminating the supply, and year
by year we have compounded the problem.

When we began this crusade in 1914 we set out to
rid the world of the scourge of addiction, and
after an incalculable expenditure of money and
lives we have managed to increase the rate of
addiction by 1,500 percent.

It turns out you cannot alter the fundamental
equation of economics, no matter how much money,
force, or firepower you throw at it.

Daredevil entrepreneurs, attracted by unimaginable
profits, will find ways to corrupt the system and
expand their markets.

It will be fairly easy, however, for Hastert and
his colleagues to make things worse.

Consider Colombia, one of our major partners in
the war on drugs, a country that is literally
going down the drain right in front of us as
revolutionaries, death squads, and corrupt army
officers fight for control of the drug trade.
Back in the 1980's Colombia went through a
horrifying bout with terrorism when the U.S. was
chasing the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar.

Like Osama bin Laden, Escobar considered human
life expendable and he liked to blow people up
to get our attention. In his time, he killed
hundreds of innocent people before the U.S. put
together a secret Colombian commando force to
track him down.

But men in charge were so terrified of Escobar
that they invited his underworld competitors to
join the hunt, another classic example of "the
enemy of my enemy is my friend."

Today, despite our best efforts, drug production
in that luckless country is raging out of control.

Colombian High Court Justice Gomez Hurtado has
some shrapnel in his leg from one of Escobar's
bombs and he has something to tell us about
terrorism. At a drug policy conference in
Baltimore nearly a decade ago, Gomez Hurtado gave
a chilling snapshot of the trouble we're in.

"The income of the drug barons is greater than the
American defense budget," he said. "With this
financial power they can suborn the institutions
of the State and, if the State resists, they can
purchase the firepower to outgun it. We are
threatened with a return to the Dark Ages."

As we stand transfixed at the specter of 21st
century vandals assaulting the governments of
one country after another, it's important to remember
that this particular plague could be terminated
with the stroke of a pen.

The vast illegal enterprises that the U.N. says
are raking in some $400 billion a year, the powerful,
murderous combines that threaten to overwhelm the rule
of law itself, all could be cut off instantly by
simply taking the drug trade out of the hands of the
gangsters and putting it in the hands of government
regulators, just as we finally were forced to do with
alcohol.

Those who argue that the cure would be worse than
the disease should take another look at the disease.

 

 

 

After you have finished reading this article you can click here to go back. 




This page was created by the Cannabis Campaigners' Guide.

Feel free to link to this page!