The so-called "war on drugs"

It's labeled "The Other War We Can't Win" by Neal Peirce. Here's how his article gets started:

Pick your week or month, the evidence keeps rolling in to show this country's vaunted "war on drugs" is as destructively misguided as our cataclysmic error in invading Iraq.

There are 2.2 million Americans behind bars, another 5 million on probation or parole, the Justice Department reported on Nov. 30. We exceed Russia and Cuba in incarcerations per 100,000 people; in fact, no other nation comes close. The biggest single reason for the expanding numbers? Our war on drugs — a quarter of all sentences are for drug offenses, mostly nonviolent.

So has the "war" worked? Has drug use or addiction declined? Clearly not. Hard street drugs are reportedly cheaper and purer, and as easy to get, as when President Richard Nixon declared substance abuse a "national emergency."

The article goes on to describe our efforts to erradicate drug use through prohibition and through unsavory relations with other countries who supply our drugs. Then this point is made:

We'd be incredibly better off if we had treated drugs as a public-health issue instead of a criminal issue — as the celebrated Nobel Prize-winning economist, Milton Friedman, in fact advised us. Friedman, who died last month at 94, witnessed America's misadventure into alcohol prohibition in his youth. "We had this spectacle of Al Capone, of the hijackings, the gang wars," wrote Friedman. He decried turning users into criminals: "Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse — for both the addict and the rest of us."

And in one of his last interviews, Friedman asked the relevant questions: "Should we allow the killing to go on in the ghettos? 10,000 additional murders a year? ... Should we continue to destroy Colombia and Afghanistan?"

The ironic truth is that humans have used drugs — psychoactive substances ranging from opium and coca to alcohol, hemp, tobacco and coffee — since the dawn of history. Problems get triggered when substances are associated with despised or feared subgroups, according to a careful study by the King County, Wash., Bar Association.

It's time to end prohibition. Prohibition doesn't help. It makes things worse.