Virginia Talks: Your voice, your opinion, loud and clear.

A Way Yet to Win War on Drugs

Hamilton is a retired corporate executive who lives in Rockbridge County.

America is fighting a war that cannot be won, and I am not referring to Afghanistan. The so-called war on drugs is being lost and is probably unwinnable. According to a May 2010 Associated Press article, in the 40 years since this war was initiated, it has cost American taxpayers $1 trillion and, more importantly and more tragically, hundreds of thousands of lives. The 2010 federal budget allocated $15.5 billion to this effort, two-thirds of which was directed to interdiction and law enforcement.

And what results do we have to show for these expenditures in human lives and dollars? The number of Americans hooked on drugs has increased from 15 million to 25 million during those 40 years. In 2009, 20,000 cases of drug overdose were reported, $121 million was spent to arrest 37 million non-violent drug offenders (10 million of whom were marijuana users), and $450 million was spent to incarcerate drug offenders in federal prisons. This latter figure represented approximately 50 percent of the total federal prison budget.

We are fighting a war that is obviously not being won and, in all likelihood, cannot be won — at least, not in the manner in which it is being waged. It is time to completely rethink our overall approach to this insidious problem. Old approaches that have been tried and found inadequate must be discarded. Bold new ideas are needed.

My suggestion is that all regulations that make the personal use of narcotics illegal be repealed, while strengthening laws against the private distribution and selling of such items. In addition, government should take two steps: Stores should be set up — something similar to ABC stores for the sale of alcoholic beverages — to sell all narcotics at extremely low prices to any adult buyer, with no questions asked. Second, rehab clinics should be established to help all addicts who wish to kick the habit.

The underlying premise of these suggestions is that the profit motive is the driving force behind the criminal elements responsible for the drug culture, and the removal of profit from the trade is the only means to defeat it. From the bosses of the drug cartels to the pusher on the street corner, it is the enormous profits that can be made from the selling of drugs to addicts that motivate their actions.

Consider the cumulative impact of removing the profit from the drug trade. If that addict can go to a local government store and get his fix at a fraction of what he would otherwise be forced to pay his pusher, the drug trade will quickly crumble. The addict will no longer be forced into petty crime to support his habit. The local pusher will stop giving free samples to naive and vulnerable teenagers to get them hooked as future customers. The drug czars will find their source of power disappearing and will become weak and vulnerable.

Nations such as Mexico and Afghanistan, long plagued by the drug trade, will be freed of the criminal elements working within their borders. Terrorist groups such as al-Qaida and the Taliban will find a key source of their income — the poppy trade — will have dried up. The Mexican drug cartels will find their power base demolished beneath their feet.

I recognize that my proposal is counterintuitive. A good analogy, it seems to me, is the repeal of Prohibition in the 1930s. The main opponents were the preachers and the bootleggers; one on moral grounds and the other for business reasons. Many will oppose the legalization of hard drugs for moral reasons, and I fully understand their concerns, but the objective of doing so is not to encourage their use but precisely the opposite.

The question is how to accomplish a mutually shared objective. Our present approach is obviously not working. It is time for bold new action.