From the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) organization's website:

"The one reason I will miss Milton Friedman"

(Over 40 years, he made the smartest case for the full legalisation of drugs that we have seen.)

Johann Hari, The Independent, London (UK) 23 November 2006

Even in death, the Right misses the point. Milton Friedman -- the Messiah of Monetarism, saviour of small-state conservatism -- is about to be buried, but his mourners have conspicuously failed to laud his one great argument.

In the past week, his conservative obituarists have concentrated on the slew of issues he got wrong, lathering praise on his claims that a limp, slashed-back state delivers greater social mobility and a broader middle class than a mixed social democratic economy. Just compare Sweden and Texas to test that one. Yet, on one issue, Friedman applied the forensic brilliance of his brain to a deserving purpose: over 40 years, he offered the most devastating slap-downs of the "war on drugs" ever to be written.

He was a child when alcohol was criminalised in America. The Prohibitionist crusade to banish the "demon rum" and dry out the United States lasted until he was in his twenties. The lessons lasted his lifetime. He saw that even when you use force to prevent people from using a popular intoxicant, you don't actually reduce its use very much. "I wasn't very old, and was not much of a drinker, but there was no difficulty in finding speakeasies," he explained.

But while prohibition didn't succeed in the fantasies of its fans that it would "end alcoholism", it did succeed in one respect. It handed a massive industry to armed criminal gangs, who succeeded in ramping up the murder rate up by 78 per cent and making a mockery of the rule of law. "We had this spectacle of Al Capone, of the hijackings, of the gang wars..." Friedman wrote. "Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse - for both the addict and the rest of us."

Friedman saw -- way ahead of almost any other commentator -- how prohibiting cannabis, cocaine and heroin would spawn a thousand Capones. He warned: "Al Capone epitomises our earlier attempt at prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomise this one." The Chicago gangster famously gunned down six of his alcohol-hawking competitors on St Valentine's Day in 1929. But in the age of drug prohibition, there are equivalent dealer shoot-outs every minute of the day in South Central Los Angeles -- and in Hackney, Bogota and Kabul. Late in his life, Friedman calculated that 10,000 people died this way every year in the US alone, equivalent to more than three September 11ths. Most were bystanders caught in the cross-fire.

And by globalising this puritanical war on drugs, the US government has globalised this gangsterism. Friedman warned that the war on drugs has "condemned hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Colombians to violent death". I have just returned from Mexico, which is rapidly Colombianising, with areas controlled by drug mafias who bribe or out-gun the police force and terrorise the local population. The same thing is happening on a huge scale in Afghanistan. "By what right do we destroy other people's countries this way?" Friedman demanded.

But armed gangsters are not the only species of crime generated by prohibition. Friedman proved that criminalising drugs causes an explosion in muggings and burglary, making us all victims of this war at some time in our lives. How? A kilo of heroin passes through six different dealers in the supply chain before it reaches the veins of a Londoner. Each link in the chain demands a fat fee for risking jail. This means heroin costs 3,000 percent more than it would in a legal, risk-free market - so a heroin addict must steal 3,000 per cent more to buy it; 3,000 per cent more grannies mugged, 3,000 per cent more homes burgled. That's why so many police officers are now coming out in favour of unpicking hard-line prohibition and prescribing heroin, with Howard Roberts, the deputy chief constable of Nottinghamshire, joining the queue yesterday. They know from the experience in Switzerland - an ultra-conservative country that now nonetheless prescribes heroin - that it a silver bullet (or syringe?), bringing crime rates crashing down.

This does not mean Friedman was in favour of drugs. Friedman thought (rightly) that heavy drug use -- whether it was alcoholism, cannabis addiction or junkiedom -- was a human disaster. He once told Bill Bennett, Bush Snr's drugs tsar: "You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. Your mistake is failing to recognise that the very measures you favour are a major source of the evils you deplore."

He proved, for example, that prohibition changes the way people use drugs, making many people use stronger, more dangerous variants than they would in a legal market. During alcohol prohibition, moonshine eclipsed beer; during drug prohibition, crack is eclipsing cocaine. He called his rule explaining this curious historical fact "the Iron Law of Prohibition": the harder the police crack down on a substance, the more concentrated the substance will become.

Why? If you run a bootleg bar in prohibition-era Chicago and you are going to make a gallon of alcoholic drink, you could make a gallon of beer, which one person can drink and constitutes one sale - or you can make a gallon of poteen, which is so strong it takes 30 people to drink it and constitutes thirty sales. Prohibition encourages you produce and provide the stronger, more harmful drink. If you are a drug dealer in Hackney, you can use the kilo of cocaine you own to sell to casual coke users who will snort it and come back a month later - or you can microwave it into crack, which is far more addictive, and you will have your customer coming back for more in a few hours. Prohibition encourages you to produce and provide the more harmful drug.

For Friedman, the solution was stark: take drugs back from criminals and hand them to doctors, pharmacists, and off-licenses. Legalise. Chronic drug use will be a problem whatever we do, but adding a vast layer of criminality, making the drugs more toxic and squandering £20bn on enforcing prohibition that could be better spent on prescription, prevention and rehab, has failed, utterly. "Drugs are a tragedy for addicts," he said. "But criminalising their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike."

Today, an end to drug prohibition seems like a distant fantasy. But in 1924, even as vociferous a wet as Clarence Darrow was in despair, writing that it would require "a political revolution" to legalise alcohol in the US. Within a decade, it was done. We are approaching a tipping-point in the drugs debate. As we wait, I can still hear Milton Friedman in one of his last interviews, demanding: "In the meantime, should we allow the killing to go on in the ghettos? 10,000 additional murders a year? In the meantime, should we continue to destroy Colombia and Afghanistan?"

Milton Friedman, Economist and LEAP Member - Law Enforcement Against Prohibition


An interview with Milton Friedman can be found at:

YouTube - Milton Friedman: interviewed on America's Drug Forum

The Drug Cartel most present on the border now were orginal Mexican Special Forces trained bu the US for drug interdiction. I guess the money did it:

Mexican Drug Commandos

KPHO | May 19, 2005
They were the elite "special forces" of the Mexican military, trained in the U.S. at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia and sent to "wipe out" one of the most powerful Mexican drug cartels.
But these soldiers deserted and became the muscle for the very cartel they were supposed to destroy.
According to this Department of Justice "Intelligence Bulletin" obtained by the 5i-Team, these rogue commandos now known as "Los Zetas" may be heading our way.
RELATED:Federal agent killed in Brownsville gun battle
U.S. officials say Zetas (Mexican Commandos) have killed in Texas
US-trained Mexican commandos pose threat to authorities

The normally busy streets and busy stores in Nogales Sonora have been a little less bustling lately. Caesar Fierro says, "It's been slow this year." Caesar Fierro says his empty store is the result of rumors about a drug war. Tourists are scared.
Out on the streets, other vendors play down the speculation the Mexican Commandos are already here. Tony Marques says, "The Zetas.. I don't think they'll operate here you know." Marques says, "Maybe in the big cities like Juarez , Tijuana , now you're talking seriously like that."
The Intelligence Bulletin we obtained says the Zetas are responsible for hundreds of violent drug-related murders. It says they've executed journalists, murdered people in Dallas, McAllen and Laredo, Texas. They even detained two DEA agents and recently they've shot at Border Patrol agents. At the Arizona border with Mexico agents are already seeing a major increase in violence.
Jose Garza says, "Last year we had documented only nine shootings against our agents. This year we're up to about 18 shootings already."
Agent Jose Garza says his agents have seen no direct evidence the Zetas are responsible for the shootings here, but as far back as three-years ago, the Zeta-like tactics started to appear.
In March of 2002, U.S. Customs agents were involved in a shootout south of Phoenix with an enemy they had not seen before. Equipped with automatic weapons, body armor, and state-of-the-art communications, in a word - it looked "military."
Kyle Barnette says, "I'd be lying if I didn't say it concerns us."
Now, as a drug war between the Gulf Cartel to the east and the Tijuana Cartel to the west starts to heat up, the Justice Department bulletin warns: "The violence will spill over the Mexican border into the United States and law enforcement agencies in Texas, Arizona and Southern California can expect to encounter Los Zetas in the coming months."

The current US government's worldwide "Drug War" has arguably created a far greater risk to society around the globe than the risks of drug use and abuse itself.

And, with the attraction of enormous potential for profit, there will always be people who are willing to break the law in order by provide drugs to whomever wants to purchase them.

Hence, this so-called "Drug War" really isn't, in effect, a war at all.

This "Drug War" is, in actuality, the protection racket, so to speak, for an illegal and dangerous industry.

President LBJ's "War on Poverty" wasn't really a "war", in the martial sense.
It was a "war" in name only.
But that was enough.
For though it was not fought with bullets, guns, paramilitary troops, wiretaps, property searches, & pre-dawn raids; calling it a "war" served as a semantic rallying point. It provided focus to the national effort.

But the War on Drugs is not a "war" by semantics alone.
For the War on Drugs IS waged with bullets, guns, paramilitary troops, wiretaps, property searches, & pre-dawn raids. Over a million citizens have been taken prisoner since this Drug War began; and hundreds of thousands of them are still being held.
The War on Drugs is a real War.
United States government is in actuality a protection racket.

In the 18th Century, U.S. government was founded to guard our Liberties.
In the 21st, U.S. government infringes & usurps more of our Liberties than all of the other governments of the world, COMBINED!!

Some "protection".