Our Lost War On Drugs

In the late 1960s, President Nixon declared war on drugs. In the early 1980s President Reagan declared war on marijuana. Today, it appears that neither effort and the less famous efforts of other administrations have had much of an effect on drug usage. Drug usage has gone through cycles but has not diminished much at all. We have a narco nation developing along our southern border and narco ghettos in many of our cities. The political class never got a handle on this problem.

Thus, it was so refreshing to come across a country, Portugal, that has taken a mature and logical approach to curb its drug problem. In the July, 2009 issue of Reason magazine (www.reason.com), an interview with Glenn Greenwald of the Cato Institute (www.cato.org) laid out how Portugal did what the American political class could not. They established a nonpartisan group of experts who took a zero-based approach to answer the basic question: "How can we best limit drug usage and drug addiction?" They studied a range of options and recommended what they believed what was optimal policy. In a nutshell, the decriminalized drug possession (not the same as drug legalization) which enabled the authorities shift more resources from law enforcement activities to treatment activities. The net result was a significant drop in drug usage in the country.

This exact same approach is laid out in Step 26 of "Love My Country, Loathe My Government." Given that the political class is no closer to solving this country's drug problem today than when Nixon declared war, why not follow Portugal's lead from a process perspective? Let some very smart Americans from a variety of fields (law enforcement, medicine, economics, sociology, etc.) get together and come up with a plan. They obviously could not do any worse than what we have gotten out of Washington since the late 1960s.