Pubdate: Mon, 9 Apr 2001
Source: USA Today (US)
Copyright: 2001 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc
Contact:  http://www.usatoday.com/news/nfront.htm
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/466
Author: Paul M. Bischke

TRY A LITTLE EDUCATION ON DRUG MARKETS

USA TODAY commentary writer Amy Holmes apparently didn't understand either 
the movie "Traffic" or her experiences on Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) 
raids.  What she saw and disliked in both cases was the black-market system 
for distributing pleasure drugs.  It's a bad system. What she missed was 
the fact that prohibition policies cement the black-market system firmly in 
place by guaranteeing profits to traffickers ("Pessimism shouldn't thwart 
war on drugs," The Forum, March 30).

Despite their paramilitary heroics, drug enforcers' raids perpetuate the 
very black-market system they're attacking. Furious efforts to eliminate 
all production, distribution, and use of certain pleasure drugs simply 
drives it all underground and minimizes society's control over it. 85 years 
of drug-prohibition history shows that the government can never enforce 
total drug abstinence on all citizens, no matter what mix of 
supply-reduction, demand-reduction, treatment, or prevention it uses -- and 
no matter how badly it erodes the Constitution or fills up prisons.

Some citizens will still use disapproved pleasure drugs, the vast majority 
without addiction. And someone will always distribute those pleasure drugs. 
That will never change, regardless of the stern pronouncements of 
politicians and enforcers.

All our society can do is choose how pleasure drugs will be distributed. 
Holmes, the DEA, and thousands of drug-warring officials effectively insist 
that the only distribution method must be the black-market system.  That's 
bizarre. America should stop insisting on absolute control over drugs. That 
strategy gives us the least possible control, while increasing the harms 
done by drugs and adding harms caused by drug-prohibition itself.

Officials in Mexico, Uruguay, Switzerland, and Belgium have begun realizing 
that pleasure drugs can be handled far better by regulating them rather 
than trying in vain to banish them.  Puritanical America, despite its 
bitter experience with alcohol prohibition, seems mentally incapable of 
learning this lesson.

Paul M. Bischke, Board Member Drug Policy Reform Group of Minnesota St. 
Paul, Minn.
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