Really long, but worth it. Bottom line: America has lost the War on Drugs, in every effective measure of those words. You knew that, of course, but what fascinated me about this piece was that despite the moderate, non-foily tone, it’s impossible not to come away with the conclusion that our drug policy is directed by complete idiots or corrupt players or both. More radically minded people like me will point out that a big chunk of the failure must be the result of endemic corruption, but even without that, the shift is complete. The time when we can hopefully and unabashedly speak about drug policy reform is here, even if the media has yet to realize that fact. It’s because there are three groups of people in this country, and one of them is finally in the majority.

The first, and largest, are those who believe it is time for sensible drug policy reform, from top to bottom. That group includes not only dope-smoking hippies and Rave-tripping teens, but experienced law enforcement officials and conservative politicians. One of many choice quotes from the article:

“What we learned was that in drug work, nothing ever stands still,” says Coleman, the former DEA official and current president of Drug Watch International, a law-and-order advocacy group. For every move the drug warriors made, the traffickers adapted. “The other guys were learning just as we were learning,” Coleman says. “We had this hubris.”

Again, for people like you and me, it’s long been completely obvious that interdiction and border “control” is a stupid way to combat domestic drug abuse. But what the article makes clear is that today, there is a growing population who are at least open to the idea that what we are doing isn’t working, and that there has to be a better way. Politically speaking, the tide has turned, and politicians who recognize this can capitalize on it, despite a media environment that acts as if the zeitgeist were still in the early 80s crack-panic years.

The second group of people in this country still think and act as if they were the majority, and are those who are completely opposed to drug policy reform. I think of this group as mostly older folks with little experience with “alternative” cultures in which things like pot or the trippy drugs are common. The media coddles them with fairytales of Law and Order and Victory in the drug war on teevee, but even that is changing (cf popular shows like “The Wire”). And this group shrinks, every time a fundie learns a grandkid has been busted for meth. They are overrepresented in the elected class, but that’s also because the elected class is cozy with the third group.

This last bunch, the smallest and most powerful, are of course the drug pushers and dealers. I’m counting legal drug manufacturers as well as the naughty kind; corruption takes many forms and drug money is laundered in many ways. Of course, making the money they do, they oppose sensible policy reform at every turn. As the RS piece describes in several examples, again and again certain forces have been applied to prevent the implementation of policy and programs that work, in favor of the continuation or expansion of the status quo.

$500b later, we’re no closer to a “drug-free” America than we were in the days when we still had a Constitution. But I’m hopeful that the future holds the reform I long for, if for no other reason than the fact that a post-Bush America, bankrupted and drained, won’t be able to afford costly policy that only makes things worse. An easy savings for troubled states is drug policy reform. I guess only a cokehead president could bring us to this point.