It’s been 40 years since former
President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs. It’s been 40 years of failure,
of an increased prison population and of a militarized police reaction that
kills innocent people and destroys liberty.

Some people don’t seem to care
about those facts. State Rep. Stephen Barrar, R-160, of Boothwyn, seems to be one of them.

Just moments after bragging
about the two cases of Pennsylvania wine in the trunk of his car, Mr. Barrar
said he would never vote for a libertarian because they advocate the
legalization of marijuana. So, if libertarian-leaning Republicans such as Gary
Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, or Ron Paul, a current U.S.
representative from Texas should wind up on a ballot in Pennsylvania, neither
would get Mr. Barrar’s vote.

While he is entitled to his
opinion and vote, his reasoning is faulty and reflects a double standard.

Two years ago he refused to
believe that there were Chadds Ford residents who advocated the legalization of
marijuana for fiscal reasons. He said so during a public meeting, but changed
the subject when six of the roughly two dozen people in the room raised their
hands in favor of legalization.

Recently, he blanked out
completely when told that a local pastor said prohibition just adds the appeal
of forbidden fruit, that legalization, even decriminalization would reduce use.
Mr. Barrar also refused to accept figures from Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition that indicate the percentage of people addicted to drugs now is the
same as it was before the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, when there was no
federal prohibition against drugs. He said the percentage is probably higher
now.

However, if that were the case,
that a larger percentage of people have a drug problem now, with drugs illegal,
than when they were legal, that would indicate the pastor is correct and prove
the failure of the prohibitionist policy.

He trotted out the gateway drug
theory, but couldn’t respond when reminded that an estimated 22 million
Americans use marijuana on a regular basis without ever snorting coke or
injecting heroin.

Mr. Barrar said the difference
is that people can like the taste of beer and wine, but people only smoke pot
to get high. Perhaps people do only use pot to get high, but so what? It’s
legal to get drunk and watch a ballgame, but illegal to get high and watch The
Simpsons. Such a policy is hypocritical.

There is evidence that
prohibition causes more harm than the drugs that are prohibited, and that
legalization is more than just a libertarian idea. In June, a Report of the
Global Commission on Drug Policy said:

“The global war on drugs has
failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the
world. Fifty years after the initiation of the UN Single Convention on Narcotic
Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the US government’s war on
drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are
urgently needed.”

What are those reforms?

“End the criminalization,
marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm
to others. Challenge rather than reinforce common misconceptions about drug
markets, drug use and drug dependence.”

Among the people on that
commission was George Schultz, a former U.S. Secretary of State under Ronald
Reagan.

Also adding to the debate is a
report out of Portugal that says in the 10 years since that country
decriminalized all drugs, “The number of addicts considered ‘problematic’ --
those who repeatedly use ‘hard’ drugs and intravenous users -- had fallen by
half since the early 1990s.”

There have been other
Republicans who opposed the criminalization of marijuana during the Nixon
years. One commission wrote: "The criminal law is too harsh a tool to
apply to personal possession even in the effort to discourage use... the actual
and potential harm of use of the drug is not great enough to justify intrusion
of the law into private behavior, a step which our society takes only with the
greatest reluctance."

One member of that commission—
National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse—was former Pennsylvania Gov.
Raymond Shafer

Perhaps if either Messrs
Johnson or Paul got the Republican Party nomination for president, Mr. Barrar
would vote for the re-election of Barack Obama since he and the president both
like prohibition.