I’m catching up with the Weekly Standard, and ran across a “Scrapbook” item in the December 29/Jan 5 issue. According to the item, someone at NRO criticized the drug war on Dec. 19, assuming that the war was being lost. The same day, the drug czar’s office announced “an astonishingly good piece of news”: Drug usage among 8th, 10th, and 12th graders has dropped 11 percent over the past two years. (The 9th graders were conspicuously absent from the list–maybe they’re hoarding all the other students’ drugs?) A big factor in changing the kids’ drug use was that office’s controversial ad campaign. One reason that campaign was controversial was that it linked drug use (and, indeed, advocacy of legalization) to terrorism. The same day as the drug czar’s announcement, and NRO’s anti-drug-war commentary, “[t]he Navy announced . . . that it had intercepted a boatload of hashish in the Persian Gulf. Three of the men on board were believed to have al Qaeda ties.” Both announcements show the good reasons, the Standard concludes, for continuing the drug war.

The Standard does not provide enough information for a full evaluation of its argument. Has the decline in drug use been a decline in casual use, or a decline in hard-core addiction? What is the evidence for concluding that the ads were the reason for the decline?

But its argument is also a little beside the point. Does anybody really think that the major argument against the drug war is that it never succeeds in bringing drug use down? Actually, we have to qualify that further: Does anybody think that the major argument against the drug war is that it never succeeds in bringing drug use down for some period of time among some segments of the population? That would be an absurd argument. We have had a federal drug prohibition for ninety years, and a metaphorical war for at least two decades. That prohibition is enforced more and less harshly at different times, and drug use goes up and down–partly, no doubt, in response to changes in enforcement. It is not crazy, however, to suggest that the policy has overall been a failure.

Also, not many people argued that the problem with the drugs-and-terror ads was that they would not be effective at reducing drug use. The point legalizers made, which I’ve never seen a good or even half-good refutation of, is that the drug trade would not be providing terrorists with cash if not for the drug war.