Dean,

There really is more than one facet to this idea of letting people drink, inject, smoke, absorb or snort whatever the hell suits their fancy, regardless of its effects on abilities to think, make quick and accurate judgement calls, operate machinery, or maybe just walk a straight line.

I really don't give a hoot what the next guy or gal does with his or her brain, genital equipment, stomach or ass. Lucy in the sky with diamonds is just fine, in unreality as well as in music, for those who get high and get by with a little help from their friends, the substances.

But these folks interact with me every time we are both driving in opposite directions on two lane highways at a combined closing speed of 110 miles per hour, unless the other puts the pedal to the metal (which I haven't done ever since I sold my 1956 Austin-Healey 100-4 roadster 40 years ago). What worries me is that the vehicle coming at me may have a driver who thinks my approaching Ford Aerostar is just a firefly. They call that head-on city, here we come.

Also, as I write about frequently, I help organize and shoot in action/defensive firearms matches. You sure as hell wouldn't want folks like me simultaneously armed with live ammunition and either coke or meth. Neither would the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

So how can we work out this impasse without getting nasty about anybody's civil liberties?

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

The characterization of anti-postmodern research as "positivist" is a bit, well, interesting.

True positivism is, in fact, fairly well discredited. Positivism tended to imbue theories with truth value beyond their explanatory power. This led to crises of belief when falsification or qualification of scientific theories were necessary.

But I don't see this as necessarily leading to postmodernist "science as power dialectic" extremes. One only needs to acknowledge the irrational elements of the scientific process, while still acknowledging the power of the process over time.

Indeed, postmodernism seems in some ways to grow out of the certainty of positivism, which it seems unable to transcend.

The War On Drugs is no different in any way from Prohibition. Everyone has some reason why they think legalizing drugs is a Bad Thing. Any of those things that presents a danger to people other than the drug user is equally true of alcohol (and legally prescribed meds).

Prohibition ended. not because it was a bad idea, but because IT DID NOT WORK. The War On Drugs is no different.

The crime rate in the US, and especially the homicide rate, is driven in large part by the drug trade. As much of half the burglaries in the US are motivated by a need to get cash for drugs. Most street robberies, small business robberies, and even one man bank robberies are motivated by the need to get drug money.

The largest items in police budgets (after payroll) at all levels are those that support the War On Drugs. (And in fact, a significant part of payroll expense comes from that too.)

A goodly chunk of our budget deficits are driven by the costs of prosecuting the War On Drugs (including keeping offenders in prison).

The ACTUAL damages to our country caused by the War On Drugs far outweigh the damage we are likely to incur from legalizing and regulating drug sales in a manner similar to alcohol and tobacco.

It's time to legalize drugs.

I agree with Gary 100%, but the question is, How?

Specifically, how do we deal with the differing dangers and risks of different substances in any legalization regime?

Here's my run down on how I see the various major chemical groups, and pluses and minuses:

-Marijuana: This is the easiest, the AMA found it not harmful in 1977, when it nearly got legalized, and the tobacco companies have been ready to manufacture since then. This would also toss a bone to shrinking tobacco profits, and make them less resistant to efforts to discourage tobacco smoking, since they'd have weed profits to offset it. And more and more Christians (see christiansforcannabis.com) are in favor of ending Prohibition on Biblical grounds. How can you punish someone for growing a plant that God made? I don't buy the Biblical line myself, but it's useful cultural ammunition.

-Magic Mushrooms, Peyote and other organic psychedelics: You really can't ban a plant. That goes for these as well as pot. If you're messed up enough on psychedlics to not be driving, it'll be fairly obvious. Officer training on recognizing drivers on different things has made much progress too (60-90% success rate. The school that teaches it is run by the Phoenix Sherrif's Dept.)

-LSD and other synthetic psychedelics: Not easily abusable, as you litterally get tired of the experience like with mushrooms after so many trips. Non-addictive and non-toxic. Either legalize, or leave banned, because you legalized the plants above.

-Heroin and opiates: Your pharmacist already has 50-100 different brands and strengths of these, so you could either make the prescription ones over the counter, and/or legalize heroin, to prop up the states that grow it and depend on it for export income hard currency. The OTC option allows you to set the level of strength you allow in your state/community.

-Meth and other amphetamines: These are at the pharmacist already, and are also available over the 'Net for 'weight loss'. Just make up to a certain level of them available OTC, and keep the dirty street stuff illegal.

-PCP and ketamine: These are really nasty, and some of the few things I'd keep illegal, as they really ARE harmful. Ketamine must be shot up, and is indistinguishable from PCP in blind trials (aside from length of activity). Users only have a different typical experience because of set and setting issues; they CAN snap and go into a PCP like violent rage. This is because you are in a physical sense deprived hallucination wholly different from the type induced by psychedelics, and pain doesn't really get through. Very nasty.

-Ecstasy and other designer drugs: These are one of the harder ones, and it's difficult to know how dangerous they really are, due to lots of fake and adulterated street drugs, and a lack of clinical studies.

And now, the really hard one,

COCAINE: This is the toughie, as there aren't really any weaker variants to sell at the good old pharmacy like most other drug classes. The raw plant gives nothing like the rush users want, and cocaine is the abberational variant of a class of weaker topical pain killers.

It's also where most of the 10-20% (depending on who's numbers you use) of US GDP sent overseas on the black market, which keeps a number of countries afloat.

It is also perhaps the most damaging of this whole list, as it causes permanent, irreversable damage to the brain's pleasure center after extended use (which is why recovered long-term cokeheads always seem so sad and nasty tempered.)

It's also what most of those violent crimes are commited to buy (heroin and pot are a much smaller percentage of dollars spent).

At legal, non-inflated prices, most of the drug crime due to cocaine would go away, but you'd have a few more South American revolutions too.

But as it's not easily synthesised, the farmers would still be in business, it's just not at the level of profits they have now.

But unless you legalize coke, you're not really going to address the bulk of the drug violence, corruption, law enforement, prison and legal system expenses.

That's the rub. The rest are relatively easy, cocaine IS the bugaboo.

I would encourage people to read the Policy Review article, because it's not about "why we should legalize." It's about "why we can't seem to talk about these issues without people going nuts."

I am more or less in the same camp as Arnold. I really don't think it's anyone's business what people to with drugs, except to the extent that they endanger others. I've used just about every well-known illegal drug except for heroin--and I've used morphine, which is a less intense version of the same thing. I have no shame about my drug use whatsoever, and little in the way of regrets, except for that lousy LSD I bought that one time at a Grateful Dead concert.

Nevertheless, having said that, I'm not--quite--ready for a Holland-style legalization/decriminalization regime. That, to me, isn't even the issue at hand. The issue is: why can't we at least start at square one by talking about this rationally? First and foremost, with an open committment to looking dispassionately at research data on what works and what doesn't? That's what really bugs me. Emotions run so high on this issue, it seems almost impossible to discuss it rationally.

"I've used just about every well-known illegal drug... ...The issue is: why can't we at least start at square one by talking about this rationally? First and foremost, with an open committment to looking dispassionately at research data on what works and what doesn't?"

I am in the antiprohibitionist camp, and I think your statements above are a sincere attempt to be "reasonable". But they disclose much that prohibitionists have traditionally used to make rational discourse difficult.

You admit you have used illegal drugs. Therefore, by prohibitionist lights, if you advocate against prohibition you are at best merely trying to justify your past crimes.

You ask for "an open committment to looking dispassionately at research data on what works and what doesn't?" Prohibitionists, through government agencies funded for the purpose, have created reams of "research", much of which is purely bogus, as the infamous Heath monkey studies of marijuana. Professional prohibitionists in government don't hesitate to promulgate outright lies, as Barry McCaffrey's trumpeted assertion in 1996-7 that The Netherlands' murder rate was several times America's. This, he reasoned, was due to Netherlands' lax marijuana laws. Never mind that Netherlands' murder rate is actually a mere fraction of America's.

Faced with prohibitionists who are willing to lie outright with a government imprimatur, and who are willing to use the full force of government power to punish dissent and interfere with local elections, as the DEA and ONDCP are recently doing to Californians and Nevadans, it is a small wonder that antiprohibitionists aren't even more testy.

I have never heard a honest and factual argument for prohibition in my lifetime, and I am old enough to be your father. I have heard countless sincerely believed but bogus arguments for prohibition, even voiced by those sympathetic to legalization.

For example: the notion expressed above that removing legal prohibition against adults using a drug privately will give license to those who would give intoxicants to children, or license to those who would drive while intoxicated. Nothing in law or reason makes this so. But many people sincerely believe it, because it is the standard issue government line, across all government entities.

I do think that sometime in this century, a generation will look back at prohibition in somewhat the same way we now see slavery or denying women the right to vote -- as institutions based upon bogus "science" and invidious false belief; adapted and designed to serve the most corrupt and abusive factions in government.

A major question is whether prohibition will fall precipitously like the Berlin Wall or slavery; or whether it will fall to gradual reforms like those that gave women suffrage. The current odds are for the latter.

The historical irony is that the prohibitionist movement which brought us to this present sorry state has roots in the abolitionist and suffrage movements, and has subtly twisted those precursor ideals to suit its own corrosive agenda. Prohibitionists, in their most idealistic statements of purpose, seek to protect from the "slavery of drugs" those who are neither "enslaved" nor wish to be so protected.

One hears surprisingly little public rhetoric along the lines of "mankind will not be free until the last prohibition enforcer is strangled with the guts of the last prohibition advocate." Yet rhetoric like Darryl Gates' "casual drug users should be shot", is the norm in public discourse. With such pervasive irrational zealotry rational discourse is difficult at best.

Dean, I have to agree with fub that rational discourse with the prohibitionists isn't possible. That's why I posted what I consider to be my rational thoughts on a post-prohibition regime, we have to start seriously talking about 'what comes next', and not engage with the prohibitionists in there terms in their fora. They will NOT listen to reason or science. Too much money and prestige rides on the status quo for them to do so.

And I'm still waiting for ANYONE to explain under what authority the Feds can outright ban anything. The Commerce clause of course would cover the original tax stamps used to regulate pot, but it took a Constitutional Amendment to ban alcohol outright, why less for a mere plant?

I skimmed the paper you linked to, it's what I consider to be a great example of trying to debate on the prohibitionists terms. In my opinion they won't listen to science about how to go about prevention, because this isn't a winnable 'war', for them winning is continuing it to maintain their power. Kinda like the Palestinians.

The savage penal drug laws have taken mothers
from children. Retroactive legislation is required to punish those who inflict such penalties,in much the same way as Nazi officials
are punished.

P.S. I do not take drugs,but sometimes I press
the spacebar too many times.