American conservatism rests upon several key tenets. Among them: a limited government restrained by the U.S. Constitution, federalism, property rights and respect for the family. The War on Marijuana subverts these principles. In fact, government’s anti-reefer madness has fueled a wholesale expansion in state activity that only marijuana’s legalization can reverse.

This war is a legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The 1937 Marihuana Tax Act federally prohibited pot. In typical New Deal fashion, government’s anti-cannabis crusade grows incessantly in cost, size and scope.

According to the FBI, 401,982 Americans were arrested nationwide for marijuana offenses in 1980. By 1999, a record 704,812 were nabbed, 88 percent of them for possession rather than trafficking. Since cannabis arrests constitute 44 percent of all drug apprehensions, the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) estimates that the government’s war on pot smokers costs taxpayers $9.2 billion annually.

Using U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics data, MPP calculates that 37,500 federal, state and local inmates were incarcerated for marijuana violations in 1998, 15,400 of them for possession alone. At an average cost of $20,000 each, government spent $750 million to imprison these offenders.

This leviathan would be bad enough if it yielded to the Constitution. Alas, authorities execute this war as Godzilla would tiptoe through the tulips. One after another, the Founding Fathers’ restraints on government power have been trampled underfoot.

The Fourth Amendment’s bulwark “against unreasonable searches and seizures” has buckled beneath this pressure. Paul Weyrich and Lisa Dean of the Free Congress Foundation are among the 31 leading conservative activists who signed a Sept. 3 letter asking the Senate Judiciary Committee to raise “privacy and civil-liberties issues” with drug-czar nominee John Walters. The letter, in part, criticizes a now-disgraced program through which Amtrak shared passengers’ names, destinations and payment methods with Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents. In exchange, Amtrak received 10 percent of the property the DEA seized from its clientele.

This letter also denounces the “drug-courier profiles” that the U.S. Customs Service has employed at domestic airports. It reportedly has detained those who arrived late at night, early in the morning or in the afternoon. Some targets flew one-way and others round-trip. Those who traveled alone were scrutinized, as were those with companions. With such flexible profiles, it’s no wonder — as author James Bovard reports — a DEA spokesman once bragged that narcs “can spot a drug dealer the way a woman can spot a deal at the supermarket.”

The Fourth Amendment did not protect a male high-school student from a teacher who considered his crotch “too well-endowed.” (A strip search found no contraband.) Antidrug surveillance usually is more sophisticated. The Administrative Office of the U.S Courts reports that federal and state courts granted 978 drug-related wiretap applications in 1999 alone, 108 percent more than the 471 authorized in 1989. “Judges approved all applications,” the document states. Courts rarely check and balance prosecutors in drug cases. In fact, magistrates rejected only three of 11,415 wiretap requests between 1989 and 1999.

Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) noted that these bugging devices include “so-called roving wiretaps, which allow the [FBI] to tap any phone a criminal suspect might use, whether that phone is in their home, a nearby restaurant, a neighbor’s home or your office.” Not surprisingly, officials deem 80 percent of intercepted communications as innocent conversations.

In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled June 11 that police needed a search warrant to point an infrared heat-sensing device at an Oregon home whose owner was growing more than 100 marijuana plants. “The Fourth Amendment draws a firm line at the entrance to the house,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. “That line, we think, must be not only firm but also bright.” He worried that warrantless external searches “would leave the homeowner at the mercy of advancing technology — including imaging technology that could discern all human activity in the home.”

The Fifth Amendment requires that private property not be taken “without due process of law.” That may surprise victims of civil-asset forfeiture who have lost property because authorities have claimed “probable cause” that it might be involved in drug offenses despite the owners’ innocence. A Scripps Oceanographic Institute research vessel, for instance, was seized in California after a marijuana-cigarette butt was found in a dismissed employee’s abandoned locker. Government agencies routinely keep such assets even though 80 percent of seizures involve no subsequent prosecutions. As Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) writes in the Cato Institute’s Forfeiting Our Property Rights, such “bizarre havoc” is “fueled by a dangerous and emotional vigilante mentality that sanctions shredding the U.S. Constitution into meaningless confetti.”

The 10th amendment enshrines the notion of federalism. Since the Constitution does not delegate to Washington the power to control marijuana or other drugs, such restrictions “are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” Despite such clear constitutional language, the feds spurn the voters of seven states and the District of Columbia who expanded individual freedom by adopting medical-marijuana initiatives. Arrogant as a Russian autocrat, former drug czar Barry McCaffrey said California and Arizona voters were “asleep at the switch” when they approved these “hoax referendums” [sic] by 56 and 65 percent, respectively, in 1996.

McCaffrey’s office announced on Feb. 11, 1997, that it would prosecute patients who use such legalized medical marijuana. Also, doctors who recommended cannabis would lose Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements along with their licenses to prescribe federally controlled, but legal, substances, including cocaine and morphine.

U.S. District Judge Fern Smith temporarily blocked those regulations April 30, 1997, ruling that the “First Amendment allows physicians to discuss and advocate medical marijuana.” On Sept. 8, 2000, District Judge William Alsup permanently barred the Justice Department from punishing doctors for suggesting marijuana to their patients.

The 14th Amendment’s “equal-protection” guarantees seem suspended for some drug offenders. The late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall typified this problem when he said in 1987: “I ain’t giving no break to no dope dealer.” Mandatory minimum sentences have trashed judicial discretion and forced judges to sentence first-time, nonviolent offenders to five years in federal prison, as befalls anyone who grows 100 marijuana plants, including even saplings and diseased specimens.

Rolling and smoking the Constitution isn’t cheap. The National Drug Control Budget has swelled from $1.65 billion in fiscal 1982 to $11.56 billion in fiscal 1992 to $19.17 billion requested for fiscal 2002. States and cities spend even more. Predictably, this budget inspires a fiscal feeding frenzy. “Virtually every federal agency gets a piece of the drug-war pie,” says the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation’s Chad Thevenot. “One reason it keeps expanding is that bureaucracies that get a piece of that pie want more.”

The drug czar lavishly funds agencies that conservatives love to hate. For instance, the IRS received $73.5 million last year to pay 817 employees to process, among other things, Foreign Bank Account Reports, Casino Currency Transaction Reports and Suspicious Activity Reports. For budget purposes, this activity “is scored as 100 percent drug-related.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spent $1 million to uproot marijuana plants and eliminate drug use among hunters. AmeriCorps, Bill Clinton’s brainchild, forecasts that in fiscal 2001 its $5.2 million in grants will “have an impact on drug-prevention efforts.” So far, though, the budget’s “Program Accomplishments” section says: “No new program accomplishments are reported.”

Taxpayers are forced to fund the militarization of domestic law enforcement. National Guardsmen in helicopters conduct marijuana-eradication missions. Active-duty armed forces have trained 46 percent of America’s police departments. SWAT units routinely serve drug-related search warrants, sometimes calamitously. For instance, Mario Paz, a 64-year-old grandfather, was shot twice in the back by an El Monte, Calif., SWAT team in August 1999, yet police found no drugs, nor did they prosecute any of Paz’s relatives. Paz’s fatal mistake was that he sometimes received mail for a former neighbor suspected of drug dealing.

The War on Marijuana also weakens families in two ways. The constant proselytizing by politicians and police officials teaches children to look to the state for moral leadership rather than dare to ask their parents for ethical guidance.

The incarceration of drug offenders is even more antifamily. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimated in December 1999 that each of 1,941,796 American children has at least one parent in local, state or federal custody on a drug violation.

“I found that mandatory drug sentences do not lessen drug use, but they do destroy families and neighborhoods,” Hoover Institution scholar and former Kansas City police chief Joseph McNamara wrote in the Aug. 25 Economist magazine.

Despite this monumental expense and exertion, the number of 12th-graders who have told University of Michigan researchers that marijuana is “fairly easy” or “very easy” to obtain has gone from 84.3 percent in 1989 to 90.4 percent in 1999. In the private sector, such abject failure would prompt tumbling stock prices and resignations rather than ever-swelling budgets.

Uncle Sam should depart this demolition derby to which he never was invited. Instead, let 50 flowers bloom. Some states may keep fighting marijuana. Others may decriminalize it. Some may make pot — like alcohol — legal for adults, provided they neither drive nor operate heavy machinery while intoxicated.

Drug warriors may respond that legalization could present its own problems. Perhaps. The perfect public policy that satisfies everyone has yet to be proposed. However, the War on Marijuana assaults individual liberty, weakens families and militarizes cops while burning taxpayer dollars and the Constitution as if in a bong.

The American Right should stand athwart this wreckage and yell, “Stop!” Marijuana legalization is a conservative idea whose time indeed has come.

Murdock is a broadcast commentator, a syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which is based in Fairfax, Va.