Why are drugs illegal?

How many times have you heard the local news lead a story with the phrase drug-related? Probably too many times to count.

Indeed, it is an expression so thoroughly imbedded in the media lexicon that it qualifies as a kind of unintentional propaganda.

Like all successful propaganda, drug-related has become so hackneyed that no one bothers to examine its fundamental truthfulness.

And, also like successful propaganda, the phrase is rarely a complete falsehood but at the same time is rarely completely truthful.

Drugs are often given central importance as the key motivating factor for crime, artfully shifting attention away from what is really central.

DRUGS = MONEY = POWER

The drug-related crime, with the exception of some domestic crime, to which the media refer, is, in fact, crime motivated by something else.

People are actually fighting and stealing for what they have always fought and stole for: money.

This distinction may well seem obvious or even trivial, but it is in fact absolutely crucial.

The general public, exposed as it has been to thousands upon thousands of these so-called drug-related events, accepts the current drug laws as if they were as natural as a blue sky or green grass.

Year after year, politicians of every stripe, hoping to gain some cheap political mileage, call for tougher drug laws.

That even a small portion of the polity believes tougher laws will solve such problems as addiction, crime or even the rising tide of gang violence is incredible.

For never in the century or so that drugs have been outlawed has the public benefited in any way from tough drug laws.

There is little understanding of just how central our drug policies are in aggravating a host of national and international social ills.

After years and years of funneling vast sums of money into the hands of the most anti-social individuals and organizations, the world has developed a very serious money problem. It is a problem that is totally unique and without precedent.

Through the accumulation of vast sums garnered in their illicit drug trade, criminal organizations have acquired power and influence heretofore not dreamt of.

The Perils Of Prohibition

Contemporary photos of drug kingpins reveal eyes that are virtually identical to those seen in pictures of Prohibition-era underworld figures. Lifeless, soulless and cruel, they are the eyes of men who have decided that the rules do not apply to them.

It is not generally understood that these men and their element are presently the principal beneficiaries of the nation's drug laws.

The Harrison Act, which prohibited most drugs, was passed by Congress just before World War I amid promises of great things for society. In reality all it did was launch thousands of nefarious criminal careers.

These tough anti-drug laws are not the front line in the fight against dealers and drugs, despite what politicians tell us. Our nation's drug laws are, in fact, the drug dealer's most important ally and principal business partner, forming as they do the economic raison d'etre for the entire trade in illicit drugs.

Cocaine, opiates, marijuana or practically any illegal drug you can mention are not in and of themselves inherently valuable. Gold has a high intrinsic value; cocaine does not.

These drugs' status as among the world's most profitable commodities comes only and exclusively from the fact that their production, distribution and consumption is illegal practically everywhere on earth. That this is true is not a debatable point.

The foundation of our policies toward drugs has been that they should be illegal, and that the public was protected from their dangers by keeping them so.

When it becomes generally recognized that the central problem has become one of untamed criminal financial power, the thorny and explosive question of drug legalization will inevitably be raised.

People should be aware that this is likely to be a very nasty and divisive political battle. A host of powerful interest groups, such as the law enforcement community, the prison system, lawyers and many others, will be fighting very hard to oppose legalization. For many in these groups, their very livelihoods will be at stake.

That money is the problem must be recognized by the polity immediately -- I mean right now. The reason is that the money is getting so big that the global balance of power may be shifting toward the world's criminal elements.

This is no hysterical rant, but the sober judgment of a number of very senior European law-enforcement officials I spoke to recently.

The estimates of how big the money is getting are truly staggering. Every year in Davos, Switzerland, the world's top financial and economic minds meet for a few days.

At one of the recent seminars it was estimated that the global take from illicit activities had reached over $1 trillion annually, the vast majority of which comes from drug dealing.

While that number is mind-boggling -- it is equal to about 85% of the annual budget of the government of the United States of America -- it actually does not show how much the power of the drug cartels has grown.

That's because in some regions and countries the financial power of the drug dealers is already greater than that of the legitimate interests.

The Mexican Example

Mexico is an excellent, and alarming, example. It is not necessary to commission a multimillion-dollar congressional study to figure out who has the power in Mexico.

The country's gross domestic product was $280 billion last year, while estimates of drug money flowing through the country range from $70 billion to $200 billion annually.

That a shift in financial power has occurred in Mexico is evident from another source: Presidents there are now turning to the drug cartels to ensure financing of their traditional, and unofficial, multimillion-dollar retirement accounts.

In the days of Miguel de la Madrid and earlier, Mexican presidents retired rich by siphoning money from oil revenues. The last Mexican presidential retiree, Carlos Salinas, assured his millionaire retirement status by taking bribes from drug cartels on a massive scale.

Not surprisingly, this shift in the financial power center toward the drug cartels has resulted in a huge increase in violence among the Mexican political elite, a problem previously found principally in Columbia.

Unbeknownst to Americans, in countries like Mexico and Columbia, the War on Drugs is an actual war, with tens of thousands of casualties over the last two decades.

Drugs And Corruption

Daniel Bell, the eminent and incredibly prescient Harvard sociologist, made many accurate assessments of post-war trends during his remarkable and productive career.

Upon experiencing the 1991 fall of the Berlin Wall, in what would be among his last public observations, Bell warned that, with communism no longer a force, the gravest threat to democracy would now come from a rapid and insidious spread of corruption.

Over the past decade a host of countries have experienced alarming and destabilizing levels of corruption.

While not all of this corruption is related to the illicit drug trade, drug dealers are probably by far the largest single force for corruption worldwide. And remember that this corruption is not drug-related, it is corruption greased by what corruption has always been greased by money.