From The Albuquerque Journal
opinion@abqjournal.com
http://www.abqjournal.com
By Larry Calloway

JOHNSON'S DRUG STAND GOES NATIONAL

Cato, dedicated to the Jeffersonian principles of individual liberty, limited government and free markets (plus peace), has the intellectual horsepower to legitimize the business-formed governor's instinctive libertarian beliefs.

School vouchering, which would force the public schools into free market

competition, is one Johnson cause that Cato has argued for eloquently in its publications. Some of the think-tankers reason from the premise that education is too important in a free society to be under the control of government.

Johnson, expressing faith that private entrepreneurs can do what unionized educators have failed to do, received international acclaim from conservative business publications for his hard-headed just-do-it stand on school vouchers. The Legislature did nothing -- he was trying to govern by ultimatum.

Now he's receiving even greater publicity for his drug decriminalization rap. The governor has been interviewed by big city newspapers and cable TV news shows. He has accepted an invitation to be the keynoter for the Oct. 5 Cato forum, "An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century."

And his institute has done the research to back up that statement. The federal government is spending $17 billion a year on drug interdiction. Drug convictions account for 80 percent of the increase in the federal prison population. But there has been no resulting decrease in drug use or drug availability, says Boaz. "As long as Americans want to use drugs and are willing to defy the law and pay high prices to do so, drug busts are futile," he has said. (A column by Boaz praising Johnson's drug stand will appear on Monday's OpEd page.) (Marijuananews note: See below.)

Johnson says, more simply, that the war on drugs has failed, so let's put the money on "the problem side." When he first called for a national discussion on drug decriminalization, speaking both as a politician and as a youthful user, the Journal was deluged with letters of support from all over the nation. The fine distinction between advocating decriminalization and just discussing it was lost on this group.

Suddenly, in the fast-moving national eye, the voucher governor had become the pot governor.

And the publicity affects the reputation of the state, all of us. It's a matter of image association, to use the Madison Avenue concept. Yes, New Mexico is associated with a novel, athletic, governor who does not play politics as usual. Think: youth, creativity, personal freedom.

The downside -- at least for people under 50 looking for bright new tekkie frontiers in the 21st Century -- is the reassociation of New Mexico with the '60s. Think: grass, communes, bad trips, bad movies like "Easy Rider," student riots, brutal repression. Last weekend was the 30th anniversary of Woodstock, and the long National Public Radio reminiscence reminded the nation that the Hog Farm commune that did so much to feed the hungry and save the overdosed at the mother of all rock concerts was from New Mexico.

Perhaps it's a liberal reputation many people in the state enjoy and deserve. We are one of the first to exempt peyote used in religious ceremonies from the controlled substance laws, one of the first to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana, which is a native plant that has been a remedio for centuries. We were the first, in 1978, to enact a medical marijuana law, a precursor to the California initiative.

And we elected and re-elected Gary Johnson. He acknowledged early in his first campaign that he tried cocaine in college. That was the end of the issue. Nobody brought it up again. Johnson, however, does not come from the Sixties counterculture, the psychedelic marijuanos of the North. He comes from the straight, risk-taking, entrepreneurial culture of skiers and ski patrollers.

This bizarre exercise proved two things: First, New Mexico is not a drug haven where the laws are not enforced, at least for outsiders, and, second, the war on drugs is an expensive failure, just as Gary Johnson and the Cato Institute are telling us.

Copyright: 1999 Albuquerque Journal

August 23, 1999
FromThe Albuquerque Journal
opinion@abqjournal.com
http://www.abqjournal.com

By David Boaz
(Marijuananews note: David is one of the smartest people I know, and a member of the NORML Board of Directors.)

GARY JOHNSON IS RIGHT

In a political world where more and more politicians let their pollsters tell them what to think, it's refreshing to discover that the Great American West has produced another leader of courage and integrity. Like Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who opposed big government before it was popular to do so, and Mike Gravel of Alaska, who campaigned against the draft and the Vietnam War, Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico is a man who says what he thinks.

On such issues as school vouchers and the right to bear arms, Johnson has shown two strong tendencies: a commitment to individual freedom and a willingness to take a hard look at the evidence. Looking at the facts, he concluded that crime is reduced when law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry guns and that kids would get a better education if their families had a choice of schools.

Now Johnson has shown those same characteristics on another controversial issue. He's one of the first high-ranking elected officials to question the war on drugs. "I believe that our war on drugs has been a dismal failure. We are putting more and more money into a war that we are absolutely losing," he told the Taos Chamber of Commerce.

It's hard to argue with that. Futile efforts to enforce prohibition have been pursued even more vigorously in the 1980s and 1990s than they were during alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Drug enforcement cost about $22 billion in the Reagan years and another $45 billion in the four years of the Bush administration. The federal government spent $16 billion on drug control programs in 1998 alone and plans to spend $18 billion this year. States and local communities spend even more.

What good has it all done? Well, total drug arrests are now more than 1.5 million a year. There are about 400,000 drug offenders in jails and prisons now, and over 80 percent of the increase in the federal prison population from 1985 to 1995 was due to drug convictions. Drug offenders are about 60 percent of all federal prisoners, while those in federal prison for violent offenses are only 12.4 percent of the total.

But of course, all the arrests and incarcerations haven't stopped the use and abuse of drugs, or the drug trade, or the crime associated with black-market transactions. Cocaine and heroin supplies are up; the more our Customs agents interdict, the more smugglers import.

As for discouraging young people from using drugs, the massive federal effort has largely been a dud. Despite the soaring expenditures on anti-drug efforts, in 1995 about half the students in the United States tried an illegal drug before they graduated from high school. Every year from 1975 to 1995 at least 82 percent of high school seniors said they found marijuana "fairly easy" or "very easy" to obtain.

That's why more and more thoughtful people have been questioning the war on

drugs and calling for decriminalization, from Kurt Schmoke, a former prosecutor and now the Democratic mayor of Baltimore, to George Shultz, who was Ronald Reagan's secretary of state, to Jesse Ventura, the Reform Party governor of Minnesota.

When a public policy isn't working, we should try something different. If spending more than $30 billion a year and arresting 1.5 million people a year isn't stopping drug use and abuse, then we should try a different strategy. Gary Johnson has said that he doesn't want New Mexico to legalize drugs on its own, lest the state become a haven for addicts from the rest of the country. That's a legitimate concern. What we should be debating right now is federal policy, and we should start by remembering that the United States is a federal republic, in which the 50 states make most of the decisions. Congress should deal with drug prohibition the way it dealt with alcohol prohibition.

to the states the authority to set alcohol policy. States took the opportunity to design diverse liquor policies that were in tune with the preferences of their citizens. After 1933 three states and hundreds of counties continued to practice prohibition. Other states chose various forms of alcohol legalization.

Congress should withdraw from the war on drugs and let the states set their own policies, just as they already do for alcohol. For their part, the states should prohibit drug sales to children, just as alcohol sales to children are prohibited today. Driving under the influence of drugs should be illegal. But beyond such obvious restrictions, states should be free to set the drug policies that make sense to them, up to and including sales to adults by licensed stores, much as alcohol is sold today.

Federal withdrawal from the drug war would be an acknowledgment that our current drug policies have failed. It would restore authority to the states, as the Founders envisioned. It would save taxpayers' money. And over time it would allow us to develop an approach to drug use that abandons prohibition and massive incarceration in favor of a common-sense system in which the propensity of some people to use drugs is accepted and dealt with sensibly.

Whether or not we eventually adopt such a policy, we should certainly have an honest debate on the subject. Voters in every state should be glad that New Mexico has a citizen-governor who is not afraid to take on tough issues and challenge the status quo.