Glenn Greenwald, who has been writing so eloquently the past few weeks about the Bush administration’s many failings and the Democrats’ many missed opportunities, has an entry today that deserves reading. In fact it needs to be a must read for anyone involved in public policy regarding the criminalization of drugs in this country.

While the War on Terror (or “The Long War”) preoccupies the nation, there’s another war on an abstract noun (”The Other Long War”) that continues to be fought against Americans: The War on Drugs. That war’s central weapon is prison, but the enemy is not the select substances on which the war is ostensibly declared. Rather, the guns are aimed at — often enough, literally — every citizen who acts as if the individual, as opposed to the state, should be deciding what to put into his or her body. The human costs of this “war” on citizens have been incalculable, primarily because of prison.

While the United States constitutes 5% of the world’s population, this “land of the free” holds 25% of the world’s prisoners – a third to a half are there for drug offenses . With all the talk of Guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, many overlook that we have a Gulag Prison System here at home, fueled by our drug laws.

His entire piece is brilliant, as I’ve come to expect from Glenn but even his comments section gets insightful entries, as this one from Hypatia illustrates.

In the U.S., the vast majority of people do not refrain from murdering becasue they fear prosecution; they are acculturated to believe it is wrong, and don’t do it.But many, many people don’t think smoking a weed or sniffing the powder of a plant is a “crime,” because it just doesn’t feel like one. And I’ll bet everyone here has either used some of the illicit substances, or has close family members or friends who have — we don’t think of them as criminals who ought to be in prison. Passing Draconian laws prohibiting behaviors that millions upon millions of Americans have engaged in — including George W. Bush — is just absurd. We would not elect a murderer or rapist to the presidency, but even most of the worst Bush-haters understood that a past which included coke use is just not truly criminal, no matter what the law says.

Read the entire comment as it is an effective rebuttal to the “they did this to themselves” critique we often hear.

Glenn’s entry is thoughtful and deals perfectly with the social, personal and moral costs of the drug war (not the use of drugs) but he leaves out any mention of the economic cost of the drug war. Drugs are often cited as the causes of crime but drugs don’t cause crime, else we’d be awash in criminality from all the booze drinkers out there. It is the the high acquisition costs of drugs and the fact they are criminalized that “causes” the crime. If drugs were more readily available at low cost it would be far easier to manage the problem of drug addiction because the costs of the crime associated with drugs would be effectively eliminated. Besides, most of the “crime” has to do with the import and sale of the drugs themselves as much as with any collateral crime. By removing the economic incentive caused by high drug prices you remove the incentive to smuggle drugs and all the underground economy associated with drug money.

Drug money that flows from the illegality of drugs funds terrorism (remember Reagan’s terrorists, the Contras?) and it infects businesses and local economies everywhere. The billions of dollars spent on a futile drug war and the billions more spent incarcerating people who take a toke are dwarfed by the economy of the illegal drug trade.

Believe me, those who make a living selling drugs that are illegal have no inerest whatsoever in the decriminalization of drugs or the legalization of drug use. Their entire economy would collapse almost overnight if people could simply grow their own and the billions spent “fighting” the “drug war” would no longer be wasted each year. Studies have shown that the cost of treating drug abuse (a very real problem, just like alcoholism) as a medical problem would be but a small percentage of what is spent every year in the drug war, let alone incarceration.