RAT POISON

By William F. buckley

We are with reason angry at the Mexican officials who ho-hummed their
way through an investigation of the torture and killing of a U.S. drug
agent. It is true that a few years ago the government of Mexico
cooperated in a program designed to spray the marijuana crop, but it
proved temporary. Somewhat like wage and price controls. If for a season
the marijuana crop from Mexico declines, then marijuana from elsewhere -
Hawaii, for instance will increase. If there is less marijuana being
smoked today than 10 years ago, it is a reflection not of law
enforcement but of creeping social perception. It has gradually
transpired that the stuff is more harmful that originally thought, and a
culture that spends billions of dollars on health foods and barbells is
taking a longer, critical look at marijuana.

We read about cocaine. In a vivid image, someone recently said that the
big radars along the 2,000-mile border between Mexico and the United
States begin, night after night, to track what looks like a swarm of
locusts headed our way. Private planes, carrying coke to the American
market.

So we bag a large number of them today, and they show up on the
television news. That plane over there was carrying $10 million (or was
it $100 million?) worth of coke, hurray for the Drug Enforcement Agency.
But then the sober evaluation comes through. Last year - a splendid year
for drug apprehension - resulted in interdicting, oh, maybe to percent,
20 percent of the stuff coming in.

And of course the measure of success in the drug business, like that in
the business of robbing banks, is, what are your chances of getting
through? Answer: terrific. The odds will always be high, when you
consider that the amount of coke you can stuff into a single pocket of a
man's jacket can fetch $200,000, and that the cost of the stuff where
picked up can be as low as $1,000. A profit of 2,000 percent (modest in
the business) is a powerful engine to try to stop in a free society.

So what are we going to do about it? My resourceful brother William
Safire has a hot bundle of ideas aimed at catching the people who
launder the profits from drugs. These ideas include changing the color
of our currency, so that the boys with big sackfuls of green under their
mattresses will be forced to bring them out, revealing their scarlet
letters. Maybe we should breed 5O million drug-trained dogs to sniff at
everyone getting off a boat or an airplane; what a great idea!

No, we are face to face with the rawest datum of them all which is that
the problem would not exist, except that in the United States there is a
market for the stuff, and that the stuff is priced very high. If we
cannot effectively prevent its insinuating its way into the country,
what is it that we can prevent? The answer, of course, is its price. The
one thing that could be done, overnight, is to legalize the stuff. Exit
crime, and the profits from vice.

It is hardly a novel suggestion to legalize dope. Shrewd observers of
the scene have recommended it for years. I am on record as having
opposed it in the matter of heroin. The accumulated evidence draws me
away from my own opposition, on the purely empirical ground that what we
have now is a drug problem plus a crime problem plus a problem of huge
export of capital to dope-producing countries.

Congress should study the dramatic alternative, which is legalization
followed by a dramatic educational effort in which the services of all
civic-minded, and some less than civic-minded, resources are mobilized

Ours is a free society in which oodles of people kill themselves with
tobacco and booze. Some will do so with coke and heroin. But we should
count in the lives saved by having the deadly stuff available at the
same price as rat poison.

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Greetings All!

And another, Jim has been digging through his database again.

     [michael hess] at [f48.n375.z1.fidonet.org]