Last Updated: May 20, 1999
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Editorials with fangs
With 500 of the world’s prominent people serving as foot soldiers, there’s
now a war on against the war on drugs. As the U.N. General Assembly opened
a special anti-drugs session this week, an international group of eminences
urged the world to cede victory to the drugs’ allure and concentrate its
money and attention on making the addicts more comfortable.
"The global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself,"
said a letter appearing Monday in newspapers and bearing the signatures
of 500 people rounded up by an outfit bankrolled by financier George Soros,
the man who underwrote the successful California effort to legalize "medical
marijuana." "Punitive prohibitions" should be dropped in favor of approaches
based on "common sense, public health and human rights."
The letter is mostly the sort of high-minded pabulum needed to attract
such famous names as former U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar
or former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz. The word "legalize" never
appears. Nor do the words cocaine, heroin, marijuana, methamphetamine or
designer drugs. For the "We Believe" signers, it’s all just "drugs." We
hope all these sophisticated folks won’t feel their judgment is being too
terribly offended if we say quite bluntly: They have just been enlisted
in Mr. Soros' legalization crusade.
It’s a remarkable collection: former White House general counsel Lloyd
Cutler, Milton Friedman, Willie Brown, Richard Burt, Bob Strauss, Jocelyn
Elders, Ahmet Ertegun, Harvey Cox, Charles Murray, Bishop Paul Moore Jr.,
former FDA Commissioner and Stanford President Donald Kennedy, Ruth Messinger,
Walter Cronkite, anti-biowarfare crusader Matthew Meselson of Harvard,
Gunter Grass, Ivan Illich, Jesus Silva Herzog of Mexico. They’re all listed
at www.lindesmith.org/news/un.html.
"We have a few favorites. Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop,
who’s famous for worrying about testing cosmetic chemicals on animals.
And — this takes the cake — Naderite Sidney Wolfe, who’s dedicated his
life to allegations that various prescription drugs are "unsafe." No doubt
Dr. Wolfe would advocate package inserts listing such side effects as crack
babies and headlong dives out windows. The notion that drug use is both
a human right and an unstoppable urge is at root an immoral one, with its
suggestion that some human lives are not worth saving from the scourge
of addiction. Fortunately, this defeatist attitude is still in the minority.
The mainstream view remains the one articulated by French President Jacques
Chirac as the U.N. session opened: "The great crusade against drugs will
not end until we have done [away] with this cancer eating at our societies."
Critics of this approach include a diverse crew of leftists and self-described
realists and libertarian economists who believe in backward-sloping demand
curves. It occurs to us to suggest that the future of the debate would
profit if all of these people stated publicly whether they themselves use
any of these drugs recreationally.
They argue that years of effort have done little or nothing to stem
the flow and consumption of narcotics. Some add that de-criminalizing drug
use is the best way to bring down drug lords and to eradicate the pernicious
political and social effects of their illegal activities. All seem to believe
that drug use and abuse are part of the human condition, and that governments
should concentrate on making addicts less of a threat to themselves and
their societies by providing safer access to drugs and the adult addicts’
attendant diaper-changing services, which they call "public health."
It still strikes us as a hard sell to families who’ve bankrupted themselves
trying to bring a son or daughter out of heroin hell. Or parents battling
to make sure their children aren’t among those down at the local high school
or middle school using marijuana. Pedophilia and child prostitution may
also be part of the human condition, but you don’t hear anyone arguing
that they should be legalized or at least made safe and sanitary.
None of this can obscure the fact that the current war on drug trafficking
— and the political corruption, economic distortion, crime, AIDS and other
social ills that flow from it — is not going well. This week’s session
at the United Nations, however, at least begins to point in the right direction.
The proposals we are hearing are for a more cross-border problem. Up to
now most countries have focused their efforts internally, with a more global
approach mostly breeding recriminations. This time the heads of state are
on the right track, and perhaps something useful will slowly come from
this session.
If the war on drugs isn’t working, the answer is not to abandon the
fight. We suspect that unlike the 500 famous authors of this week’s petition,
ordinary people have much less tolerance for the drug culture or its denizens.
