Ending the War on Drugs.

[National Public Radio correspondent John Burnett] said that [when covering the Drug War] he tries always to include a mention that the U.S. is the biggest illegal drug consumer in the world, and noted an Associated Press investigation that found that 80 law enforcement officials, from local to federal, had been convicted of drug-related corruption on the U.S.-Mexico border since 2006.^[1]

The source of this quote is linked to in an article critical of drug prohibition. It’s not the last word on the issue of drug legalization but it makes several good points, q.v.^[2]

The issue of the corrupting influence of drug money is a cause for concern, to put it mildly. Nor is corruption something that plagues only the border areas. How could there not be corruption cutting through society at all levels and in all communities?

The War on Drugs is surely one of the more pointless “wars” to wage. “Occasional skirmish” might be a more accurate term and that’s not meant as a slur against the brave officers who risk their lives to carry out their drug interdiction mission. Compare (a) fighting World War II and (b) annually capturing 25 hedgerows in Normandy between 1939 and 1945.

We simply must acknowledge that the advantages are virtually all on the side of the traffickers -- phenomenal profit that rewards trafficking, unlimited cash to buy official cooperation (silver bullets), legions of assassins to silence witnesses, compact and easily transportable product (except marijuana), huge numbers of possible entry points, and limited law enforcement resources.

The huge financial gift that we hand over to drug traffickers and Hezbollah, S. American, and Taliban terrorists supports a swarm of murderous and subversive causes the deleterious effects of which far outweigh the supposed moral “surrender” that some see the ending of the War on Drugs as being. (Tortured syntax alert!)

There is no war with any prospect of victory and there’s no shame in recognizing that publicly. Drugs are freely available everywhere in the U.S. after decades of fruitless attempts to prevent this.

Is this a controversial statement? A debatable one?

If we called off the "war," we’d only go from a situation where

• drugs are freely available at high economic, political, social, and military cost

to a situation where

• drugs are freely available at minimal economic, political, social, and military cost.

Too, there are other more pressing problems like keeping the dollar from tanking, reviving the economy, reducing the deficit, reducing the national debt (and its ruinous interest payments), reversing the hollowing out of our manufacturing sector, stopping foreigners from buying up our most valuable assets, dealing with unfunded entitlements, and preventing the unholy spawn of Beelzebub from screwing up a health care system that’s anything but broke, inter bleeping alia.

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t get the value of going after crabgrass in the front lawn when the house is on fire. Oh, but we’re not sending the wrong message to our kids. No matter the devastation in every other sphere, at least we’re not doing that. And what better use of the time of our government school teachers than to have them listening to students in after school programs pee in a cup in a stall in the rest room. Now that’s elegant!

There must be something in all that bottled water that paralyzes the cerebral cortex . . . .

Notes
^[1] "Reporting the Drug War." By Sito Negron, Newspaper Tree, 9/21/09. The article is especially interesting for the light it sheds on journalistic self censorship as the result of realistic apprehensions of violence against them.
^[2] "Is Drug Prohibition Worth the Effort?" By James Wilson, Assistant Communications Director, DownsizeDC.org, 9/24/09.

UPDATE (10/15/09):

A reader of this post over at Eternity Road, RandyB, has kindly supplied me with a link to Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), whose name is self explanatory.