Taxpayers are Victims of 'War on Drugs'

Illegal drugs are a huge moneymaker. The moralists are free to extrapolate various concerns about where our society will be headed if we keep our noses in the dust, but the truth remains: Illegal drugs make money for their growers, producers and distributors in an exponentially increasing manner up the distribution ladder.

Current law enforcement techniques are the equivalent of treating an addict by telling him to wear long sleeves to cover up an armful of track marks: ineffectual and stupid. While well-trained police officers are wasting resources sniffing out small-time abusers and shooting up our prisons full of addicts, the real problem – the aggregate market demand and supply of drugs – remains untouched.

It’s because gung-ho can-torture attitudes like those of Giuliani play well in front of the violent set and Clinton’s dedication to health care showcases her caring, domestic side but drug addiction does not poll well. Sure, it can sell millions of books a la James Frey and is sexy as long as it’s coursing through the veins of Dr. Gregory House or making Johnny Depp a billionaire in Blow.

But when it becomes real and we see it rotting our neighbors’ teeth and making a slave out of the young Wall Street types’ need for unbounded energy, it’s filthy and not fit for middle-class discussion.

So it’s no surprise that not a single candidate has a literate drug platform. Even more disheartening is that policy follows perspective, and our society desperately needs a 12-step program of drug attitude readjustment. The only sensible drug policy is of course, to educate the public about the dangers of drugs, make them legal, then tax the hell out of their sale and revel in the revenue.

Let’s begin by realizing that the line of losers in our government’s status quo treatment of drugs is staggering. To enumerate: the addicts in jail, the addicts in rehab, the government’s coffers and every sober citizen from here in these United States to every farmer being taken advantage of while trying to stake out a living in the countries we consider allies in the War on Drugs.

American drug consumers are, along with the drug pins, the only ones celebrating the War on Drugs’ success: Since 2003, the price of cocaine has dropped by 29 percent on U.S. streets while purity has risen from 60 percent to 70 percent.

Crackdowns on good ol’ methamphetamine made in America’s heartland, including Missouri and Utah, have instead opened the market for Mexican importers of crystal meth. International drug cartels tend to carry bigger guns than your average mom-and-pop basement meth lab.

Even the druggies are happy to point out when “Government reports indicate that the nation's marijuana laws cost taxpayers $41.8 billion annually” by diverting taxable economy into the illicit economy (they’ll even trade the bong for a calculator long enough to work out the math.

Suffering the most from the (understandable) stigmatization of addiction are those actually attempting to reform. As long as the choice for the homeless, penniless and insurance-free addict remains only between prison and a pain-numbing heroin-fueled existence, addicts will keep getting high and prosecutors will keep jailing small time abusers. Making rehab an affordable alternative will inevitably make more recovering addicts out of our prisons’ rolls of drug cases.

Drugs are a commodity and as long as the government artificially cuts short their supply by making the occasional bust the market will continue to self-adjust, with prices temporarily rising until more can be shipped into the United States. Farmers in South American countries are happy to oblige as long as coca yields a higher price than say, food crops (drug cartels, for all their faults, are good at moving product and coca doesn’t sit at market for long).

To the alarmists who insist that making all drugs legal would lead to a perpetually high society, decrease productivity and United States competitiveness, and a bunch of other morally attractive but reality-deficient invectives and warnings, I say this: you’re wrong.

The rational decision in such a drug-saturated society would still be to remain sober. And conceding that not all of society is rational, it is inconceivable that after being properly educated in the hazards of drug indulgence, that a majority of citizens would still toke up.

Is this country suffering from collective blackouts after our (figurative) sixth tequila? We made alcohol illegal once and we would do well to remember that it took an Amendment of our Constitution to fix that fiasco.