Actor Downey another casualty of failed drug
war
By MICHELLE MALKIN
Actor Robert Downey Jr. is
California's glassy-eyed poster boy for the
failed war on drugs. After
numerous arrests dating back to 1996 and several
fruitless attempts by the
courts to rehabilitate him, Downey served a year
in state prison. Barely
three months after his release, the Hollywood
celebrity was arrested again on
Thanksgiving weekend for possession and use
of cocaine and
methamphetamine.
Downey's troubles are the butt of water-cooler jokes
around the country. But
to anyone who has seen a loved one struggle with
addiction, there's nothing
funny about his plight. Downey is a hopeless
junkie whose father reportedly
introduced him to marijuana when he was just 6
years old. Law enforcement
officials may think it's good social policy to
make an example of the
actor's weaknesses. However, Downey's case simply
underscores that the drug
war is a costly and selective form of government
paternalism that has done
far more harm than good.
A new book of
essays issued by the libertarian Cato Institute, After
Prohibition: An Adult
Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century, sheds
harsh light on what
eminent economist Milton Friedman calls the "social
tragedy" of drug
prohibition. In his foreword to the book, Friedman points
out that the list
of illegal drugs includes marijuana -- "for which there is
no recorded case
of a human death from overdose in several thousand years of
use" -- but
excludes alcohol, "for which the annual death toll in the United
States alone
is measured in the tens if not hundreds of thousands."
Friedman decries
the looming conversion of the United States into a police
state as a result
of draconian drug-war tactics. "The annual arrest of
nearly a million and a
half people suspected of a drug offense, most of them
for simple possession
of small quantities, is frightening evidence of how
far along that road we
have already gone."
Most of those behind bars, unlike Downey, can't
afford to post bail or hire
competent lawyers. Julie Stewart of Families
Against Mandatory Minimums
points out that drug offenders now make up 60
percent of the federal prison
population, up from 38 percent 14 years ago; in
1998, 57 percent were first
offenders and 88 percent had no weapons. "We are
not catching drug
kingpins," Stewart writes. "We are catching the little
guys, the
girlfriends, the mules, and we are sending them to prison for five
years, 10
years, and often much longer."
Until recently, the
government often mocked drug-war opponents as a motley
crew of free-market
intellectuals, ex-hippies and potheads. But cops on the
front lines of the
drug war, firsthand witnesses to its futility, are
joining the critics. David
Klinger, a former police officer in Los Angeles
and Redmond, Wa., writes of
his evolution in thinking about drug policy: "At
some point in my first
months on patrol, after handling hundreds of calls
that involved drugs, and
after arresting scores of people for possessing
various sorts of illegal
stuff, I began to have doubts about what my peers
and I were doing. I saw
violent criminals walking the streets because the
jail space they rightfully
deserved was occupied by nonviolent drug
offenders.
"I started seeing
most of the people I dealt with who had some association
with drugs either as
broken souls who made self-destructive choices or
harmless people who
indulged their appetites in moderation -- but not as
crooks who needed to be
punished." Klinger, now a criminology professor,
concluded from his years on
the street: "We cannot protect free adults from
their own poor choices, and
we should not use the force of law to try."
Black and white, young and
old, famous and nameless -- Americans from all
walks of life can identify
with the broken soul of Robert Downey Jr. His
addiction is his own prison.
His public humiliation is its own life
sentence. The war on drugs is an
expensive quagmire that needlessly punishes
people who've already punished
themselves beyond
repair.
------------------------------------------------
Malkin
is a nationally syndicated columnist based in North Bethesda, Md.
malkin1@ix.netcom.com