Editorial:
Sometimes
People
Learn,
Sometimes
They
Don't
12/7/01
David Borden, Executive Director, [email protected], 12/7/01 Sixty-eight years ago this week, on December 5, 1933, our nation corrected a historic mistake and repealed its disastrous experiment with Alcohol Prohibition. Sometimes people learn, sometimes they change course. Sometimes they don't. Earlier this week, the DEA held a conference on terrorism and drugs -- coincidentally the same day as our hemp food protests in front of DEA offices around the country -- somehow they were able to spare several security officers to monitor our taste-test table, even though they knew from the last time that we weren't dangerous. The conference was a minor news item, but if the news report gave an accurate characterization of what the DEA people were talking about -- which we don't know for sure, but it certainly sounds like them -- the thrust of what they discussed, and for which they will probably lobby, is for an effort to use the rearrangement of Afghanistan's governmental system as an opportunity to move against the nation's opium crop. They claim that doing so could raise the price of heroin in the US. DEA, at least, never learns. Eradicating Afghanistan's opium will only shift the production to other regions, such as Burma -- or Latin America, where most US heroin actually originates now. Crop eradication has never reduced the long-term supply of any drug. Why not? Because people are paying money for it, a lot of money. Someone will grow it, someone will process it, someone will sell it, people who want it will get it. Not all the time, perhaps, but most of the time. Ultimately, the price drops again, sometimes even more. To believe that reducing or even wiping out Afghanistan's opium crop will have any significant long-term effect on the heroin supply takes an extraordinarily degree of foolishness or ignorance of economics and history. And it is very clear that we need DEA's tens of billions for other things much more than a failed and futile drug war. Our nation is under attack by terrorists. Our economy is ailing. And all our other needs have not gone away in the meantime. It would have been perfectly reasonable, maybe even productive, for the DEA to spend a day talking about the targeted goal of disrupting drug trafficking organizations that have links to terrorist groups. After all, drugs aren't legal yet, therefore there is a black market which does supply some of terrorism's funding. But instead, they apparently focused on the unfocused, wasteful and impossible goal of taking on the opium industry as a whole. Maybe Strom Thurmond can help. The 99-year-old Senator is more than old enough to remember Alcohol Prohibition, its failure, and the reduction of violence and corruption that followed its repeal. In fact, Prohibition was repealed on Thurmond's 31st birthday. And Thurmond has shown an ability to learn: Back in 1964, when he switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party over the Democrats' support for civil rights, Thurmond was a segregationist. But now, he admits that he was wrong about that. He learned, he became a better person. Only someone who knew him well could say whether his initial opposition to desegregation was based on misguided conviction or on politics, or whether his conversion over the subsequent years reflected a personal enlightenment or was simply a shift to match the prevailing cultural and political winds. But whatever the reason was for Strom Thurmond deciding to join modern civilization, he did it. He did ultimately change his position. Which means he may be capable of changing his mind on other long-entrenched views. And he does remember Alcohol Prohibition. There probably is no one quite so old working at the DEA. And they have too much invested in their bureaucracies and the status quo, anyway, to do anything about this. But the same doesn't apply to a member of the Senate. Certainly not to a 99-year-old member of the Senate. Strom Thurmond would have nothing to lose by initiating a dialogue on drug prohibition. Of course, I'm not holding my breath; after all, he didn't change his mind about segregation until after most other people had already figured it out. But one can hope. After all, it's no more unlikely than it would be for some of the other responsible parties in the drug war.
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