Ezekiel Edwards

The Right Gets It Right?

It is not every day, or every month --- sometimes, not even every year --- that I am nodding my head in agreement with an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. But on February 26, 2006, an opinion piece titled "Musings About the Drug War" by the Journal's editorial page deputy editor, George Melloan, caused my head to bob up and down in uncharacteristic approval. Although Melloan's reasoning at times differs from mine, he arrives at a similar conclusion: the war on drugs has failed.

Melloan provides a lengthy (though far from exhaustive) list that highlights drawbacks to the drug war: he decries its financial waste (including the immense cost of incarcerating hundreds of thousands of drug offenders); he acknowledges that drugs' illegality enhances their pecuniary value and hence causes an upsurge of violence among those competing for the lucrative American drug market, from the Bronx to Mexico; he analogizes it to the fiasco of Prohibition --- which he refers to as "that effort to alter human behavior [which] left a legacy of corruption, criminality, and deaths and blindness from the drinking of bad booze"; he discusses the hypocrisy inherent in our society's tolerance of alcohol, which he identifies as the "most common contributor" to "crime, automobile accidents, work-force dropouts and family breakups", yet which we address reasonably by "punishing drunken misbehavior, offering rehabilitation programs and warning youths of the dangers"; he emphasizes marihuana's medical benefits for people undergoing chemotherapy, dealing with multiple-sclerosis pain, and suffering from AIDS; he recognizes that cocaine and marihuana might be an inner-city teenager's version of legally-obtained Prozac prescribed by doctors for the middle- and upper-class; and he advocates for education over incarceration, exemplified by society's strategy to curb other harmful addictions (such as cigarettes).

Lest we think the Wall Street Journal has completely gone mad, Melloan makes only a passing reference to the "occasional" abuse of civil liberties (in the Bronx, the infringement of constitutional rights encouraged by the drug war is daily), makes no mention of the drug war's disproportionately devastating effects on African-Americans, Latinos, and the poor, and bemoans America's inadvertent strengthening of leftist regimes in Latin America that he considers deplorable --- Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Evo Morales --- through our attempts to eliminate cocoa crops.

Still, Melloan's editorial is an unequivocal denunciation of America's war on drugs. If the Wall Street Journal does not support our decades-long destructive blunder, who does?

(Answer: New York State Senators Volker and Nozzolio --- whose districts' existences depend on the steady influx of drug offenders into their prisons --- and thousands of others whose employment is likewise created or sustained by the drug war, from police narcotics squads to many correction, probation, and parole officers to a number of judges, assistant district attorneys and even some defense lawyers. If we ceased waging the war on drugs, many of the aforementioned professionals would find themselves in a similar predicament as thousands of previously incarcerated poor people: they would all be looking for work)

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Posted at 7:00 AM, Mar 08, 2006 in Criminal Justice
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