The Christian Science Monitor brings news of a new initiative by an organization called LEAP — Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. Membership consists of law enforcement officers who see the justice system being swamped by thousands upon thousands of arrests for simple drug possession. A spokesman says: “Not only do these officers see the terrible results that their work has had on individuals’ lives, but a lot of what I hear from beat officers and undercover narcotics agents is they’ve seen colleagues die in the line of fire trying to enforce laws that have no positive impacts…. For a lot of them, this is about trying to keep good cops alive by repealing stupid prohibition laws.” The Monitor report mentions that Sen. Jim Webb (D-VA) is drafting legislation to establish a blue-ribbon commission to look into legalization. The Obama administration, for its part, is not on board. “Legalization is not in the president’s vocabulary and it’s not in mine,” states “drug czar” Gil Kerlikowske.

John Gray, a thinker for whom I harbor considerable admiration (click here and scroll down), offered a commentary over the weekend in the London Observer entitled “The case for legalising all drugs is unanswerable.” The bill of particulars he puts together is a harrowing one. “It is in the world’s poorer societies that drug prohibition is having its most catastrophic effects. Mexico is only one of several Latin American countries where the anti-drug crusade has escalated into something like low-intensity warfare, while elsewhere in the world some states have been more or less wholly captured by drug money. Narco-states are one of the drug war’s worst side-effects, with small countries like Guinea-Bissau in West Africa being hijacked…. Not only in Afghanistan but throughout the world, the extreme profits of the drug trade have a well-documented role in funding terrorist networks and so threaten advanced countries.” Furthermore, he holds that it will not do simply to legalize simple possession — the whole production chain will have to be decriminalized, regulated and taxed. “What is required is not a libertarian utopia in which the state retreats from any concern about personal conduct, but a coolly utilitarian assessment of the costs and benefits of different methods of intervention.”

I would conjecture that you will not see legalization in the foreseeable future, despite the considerable upside it might carry. The problem is that criminal prohibition is a major disincentive preventing any number of people from coming users. The way the politics of the matter would work out within this country is that such a measure would be perceived as just one more development on top of many others that have caused parents to feel undermined.