Drugs and Nukes

Okay, an op-ed calling for a rational analysis of the costs and benefits of drug prohibition! Mary Anastasia O'Grady, in Friday's Wall Street Journal, notes that "Drugs Beget Thugs in the Americas." For those with a subscription, you can click here.

And it seems that Mexico is coming to its senses on the issue, too: today's New York Times reports that "Mexico Passes Law Making Possession of Some Drugs Legal."

An unnamed US embassy official, apparently toeing the reflexive US prohibition line, reacted to the news by noting that "any law that would decriminalize dangerous drugs would not be helpful."

But that's exactly the question, isn't it? How should we handle the problem? In all other fields of policy (except for oil and automobiles, but let's hold off on that for now), we instinctively know to ask, first, what is our objective; second, what is the most efficient way of achieving it. Only when it comes to drugs do we conflate ends and means; only with drugs does a policy -- in this case, prohibition -- become the objective itself.

I would think our objective with regard to drugs is to regulate them in such a way as to prevent too-high rates of addiction and other societal costs resulting from individual abuse. Prohibition is certainly one way of achieving that end. But prohibition involves costs: diversion of security, intelligence, military, judicial, border, customs, and prison resources; profits to the enemies of democracy in Latin America and Afghanistan; hostility to the US when our military assists in trying to eradicate crops abroad.

Does anyone know of a study that objectively analyzes the costs and benefits of prohibition and compares those costs and benefits to those of other possible policies? I've never heard of one, which leads me to believe that for some reason our country is in denial or otherwise irrational on the subject. Given the undeniable costs of prohibition and its dubious successes, shouldn't we at least be asking whether there's a better way?

My own unprofessional, anecdotal take on what such a study would show: if we ended prohibition today in favor of regulation, taxation, and treatment for addiction, there would be a mild uptick in drug use. Meanwhile the price of drugs, which is kept artificially high by prohibition, would fall, denying profits to the Afghan warlords who are committed to defeating our efforts there and to the narcotrafficantes who are committed to undermining democracy in Latin America. We would also be able to redeploy all the resources noted above to the war that really matters -- the one against Islamofascism.

You know how we'll know when we're really serious about the war against Islamofascism? When the government announces that we're ending the war on drugs. Because one of these wars is a war of necessity -- by definition, an existential war, a war we cannot lose -- and the other is a war of choice. And a society that fights a war of choice while simultaneously fighting a war of necessity is a society that's betting everything it holds dear on a policy that in the end is... nothing more than a policy.

Some congressional wag once quipped that of course it would be easy to smuggle a nuke into the US... all you'd need to do would be to hide it in a bale of marijuana. He meant this mostly literally, true, but there are figurative implications, too. Because if diverting so many resources from the war against Islamofascism increases the risk that we could lose an American city to a suitcase nuke, then one day we may have to add that lost city to the tally of the costs of our war of choice on drugs.