COLUMN: The Foolish War

From Marc Teillon's "The Public Pillory," Fall '94 The futility of our operations abroad have led us to rethink our mission and duties in the rest of the world. Yet, the loss of our personal liberties in the names of morality and justice have caused us to demand more funding, more agencies and less individual responsibility to win the nebulous narcotics war. In this titanic effort, our elected leaders have spent billions of tax dollars and legalized unconstitutional search and seizure. Now any cop can strip-search you at any time on the mere suspicion of drug possession. The government has also gained free access to transactions involving our bank accounts, set up toll free informer numbers reminiscent of the Soviet Union, and created files on every potential threat in America. Some people are even demanding immediate execution of crack-dealers and any other drug peddlers. Despite this massive arsenal, our society is still drug-ridden. What this proves is the age-old Russian aphorism: "the only lesson of history is that it does not teach us anything." In the early part of this century, the Progressive Era leaders sounded the tocsin to warn the people of the dangers of drunkenness and convinced Congress to defend our land from the gluttonous imbibing that was wrecking society. Once wine and spirits were effaced from America, crime would disappear, men would work hard, women would be chaste, and children would be happy. In 1919, the Prohibition Amendment was passed and the Garden of Eden was resurrected. But something funny happened on the way to Utopia --economics. Whenever there is overwhelming demand for a good or service, entrepreneurial individuals will find ways to satisfy those needs and wants. If the government attempts to limit or ban the supply of the desired good, the demand for the good will not be eliminated, but the price of the good will rise, a two--tier economic system will be created -- one being the free market, the other being the black one -- and the attractiveness of consuming the good may increase. Did Prohibition stop people from drinking and getting drunk? Of course not. What the Golden Age of Moderation did do was create a system of speakeasies and hand the production of alcohol over to the bootleggers and gangsters, who promptly increased the amounts of alcohol and poison in the spirits. To top it off, the amount of alcohol consumption actually increased. Economist Clark Warburton, in The Economic Results of Prohibition, showed that per-capita consumption increased greatly during the 14 years of Prohibition: liquor, from .3 gallons per to 1.86; wine, from .44 to .87; and beer, from 1.26 to 6.9. Also, 90 per cent of the alcohol confiscated by the authorities contained poisons, thus contributing to the increases in alcohol-related deaths. If our lawmakers were students of history instead of sound-bites, the logical application of such empirical results would be to legalize drugs and allow them to be regulated by the market, where people can consume them cheaply, abstemiously, and safely. Making something legal to consume does not mean that it is moral to use the good, or that the government explicitly supports its consumption. Legalization means our government officials, realizing their inability to sanction consumption on moral grounds, are publicly giving that usurped responsibility back to the churches, families, and schools. These cultural institutions determine our morality and are the only ones with the mandate for such a task. Once drug use is decriminalized, the nation can use the tax revenue to punish the real criminals -- the murderers, robbers, rapists and perverts. Police then won't have to worry about busting a bong-toting freshman emerging from a fraternity party -- they'll be able to concentrate on catching the guys who shot Al-Moez Alimohammed. As a matter of fact, some of the less anal members of the University's Police force already take that liberty; one officer told me -- under the cover of anonymity -- that whether or not a person gets busted for a dime bag of pot depends almost entirely on whether the cop is having a good day. Prisons, too, can be used to house the true public enemies and stop the revolving door policy that allows the most hardened criminals to be released after serving only a fraction of their sentence. The time has come to stop the ludicrous War on Drugs and force the federal government to concentrate on its real duties: to protect private property, police the borders, and deliberate in our intercourse with foreign nations. Only then will the communities and individuals be free to take responsibility for their actions and restore the moral order that once governed the land. Marc Teillon is a junior Finance major from Liverpool, New York. The Public Pillory will appear alternate Thursdays.