Date: Sat, 10 Jun 1995 02:01:44 -0400
Message-Id: <Pine.3.89.9506100125.A9202-0100000@mojo>
From: Richard Evans <devans@calyx.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <drctalk@drcnet.org>
Subject: David Nyhan's Op-Ed (long)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 10 Jun 1995 00:52:59 -0400
From: Richard Evans <devans@mojo>
To: drtalk@drcnet.org   		OOPS
Subject: David Nyhan's Op-Ed

	Thanks to Adam Smith for pointing out the Nyhan piece in today's 
Boston Globe.

	It deserves to be read in its entirety, so here it is. Typos are mine.

	The Globe's address is:

			Letters to the Editor
			The Boston Globe
			Boston, Massachusetts 02107-2378
			letter@globe.com


                                           -- Dick Evans

--------------------------------------------------------------------------


			We Lost the war -- legalize drugs
				by David Nyhan
			 The Boston Globe   June 9, 1995

	The indictments in Miami of three former federal prosecutors for 
smoothing the legal path of Cali cartel drug lords is the most 
persuasive evidence yet that America is going to have to legalize, or at 
least decriminqalize, drugs in order to control the damage mood-altering 
chemicals do to our society.

	The drug war, as waged by every American president within living 
memory, is over.  We lost.  So many Americans sniff, inject, swallow, 
inhale and imbibe narcotics, and so many foreigners wax rich supplying 
them, that our government cannot cope.  It is too risky a step for any 
but the most courageous or foolhardy elected official to say so, but the 
drug war is lost, lost to human nature.

	There is so much money to be made in narcotics trafficking, so 
many ways to corrupt the legal system, police, judiciary, the military, 
the Coast Guard, customs officials, the probation system, that no device 
of government can stem the tide.

	Face facts.  The corruption that we've seen creeping north from 
Colombia, from Mexico, from the island nations that transship the dope in 
huge container-ship lots, is here.  It's not *coming.* It's here. The odd 
federal judge, the odd rogue cop, the gone-bad DEA agent, the obscure air 
traffic controller, the easily blackmailed prosecutor gone wrong--we've 
read about them all for years.

	Now it's a former senior Justice Department official, once this 
country's chief operator in extraditing bosses of Colombia's drug 
conglomerate, charged himself with abeting the criminal conspiracy that is 
the ruination of America's underclass.

	Two other former officials of our Justice Department were among 
the 62 people indicted in the biggest legal move in American history 
against an octopus whose head is in Colombia but whose tentacles span the 
planet.

	The case, if proved, will demonstrate that the temptation of huge 
sums of cash overwhelms even the people we trusted to perform the most 
important tasks of our drug war.  Human nature succumbs, as ever, to the 
tantalizing prospect of near-limitless riches.  There is simply too much 
money in drugs to allow the drug trade to flourish outside the formal 
economy.

	Yes, it will kill some of our fellow citizens if we legalize or 
decriminalize. Yes, some of our young, maybe even slightly more of our 
young, for a period of time, will misread our signal and overdose, or 
worse.  But the money in the illegal system overwhelms any attempt [to] 
stem the drug tide.  We tried.  We lost.  We have to go in another direction.

	In the 80's, we tried "Just Say No," and spent billions on planes 
and radar balloons to spy on drug planes.  The government seemed to think 
it could stop the deadly trade.

	It was a colossal and expensive failure.

	Where can you not buy cocaine in America?  Where can marijuana 
not grow by the roadside, in plastic attic pots, under cellar grow lights?
What chemistry major cannot manufacture hallucinogens by junior year in 
college?  What US port can lock itself tight against shiploads of 
contraband that give a chancer a year's wage for a night's work?

	How many thousands of out-of-work boatmen have turned to 
offloading drugs from mother ships, risking jail on right runs to obscure 
moorings and piers, tossing the bales into rental trucks or under fish 
baskets, moving the junk Americans crave?

	How can you stop it? You can't.  Just as Colombia can't stop it.
And the Mexicans can't stop it.  Now the USA can't stop it.  Drugs that 
made street crime in America what it is today.  Drugs drive the B&Es, the 
car thefts, the purse snatches, the subway necklace-snappers.  Drugs are 
a career for thousands of inner-city teen-agers.  Drugs bring guns, 
violence, the terrorizing of lower-end neighborhoods.

	Legalize drugs. Or decriminalize drugs.  Regulate the flow, like 
alcohol.  Let the potential addicts pay legally what they now pay 
illegally.  Tax the junk.  Parcel it out, in carefully measured doses, 
like alcohol.  Let the junkies fry their brains in public instead of in 
private.  Bring back shame.

	Use the tax revenue and profits off sales for more treatment, 
conselling, housing, child care.  Take the money out of the underground 
economy and put it into the above-ground economy.

	Do it now. Because we are heading for total corruption.  There 
are drug judges and drug cops and drug military men.  There will soon, 
inevitably, be drug congressmen, if there aren't now, drug senators, and 
maybe one day a president elected either wholly or in part with drug 
money.  It happened in Latin America; it can happen here. Drug money is 
unstoppable.

	When the prosecutors have to be prosecuted, it's time to give 
up.  The drug war is over.  We lost.

				###