The list of reasons is fairly long, but we can certainly start with our favorite gropers at the TSA. In my ideal world, airline safety would be the responsibility of those with the most directly to lose financially from doing it poorly: the airlines and the airports. But even in a world where government has taken on that responsibility, we should be protected by the Fourth Amendment against “unreasonable” searches. It’s one thing to walk through the standard metal detector, which seems reasonable, but when we are expected to pose virtually nude in a submissive position for government agents, and when refusing to do so earns you a feel-up that would count as sexual battery in most states, that is something else entirely.

If I had told you 20 years ago that in 2011 this is what would happen every day to thousands of travelers — including toddlers and the handicapped — at U.S. airports, you would not have believed me. And on top of everything else, it doesn’t work! It’s mere “security theatre.” When residents of the United States have a legitimate fear of being sexually abused by agents of the State when engaging in peaceful air travel, we live in a police state.

SWAT Teams

Add to this 1) the militarization of the police, with no-knock raids by full SWAT teams being the norm for everything from minor possession of marijuana to suspected student-loan fraud, and 2) the Supreme Court’s complicity in eviscerating the Fourth Amendment — and two more pieces of the police state are in place. These raids often feature what writer Radley Balko calls “puppycides.” The cops shoot and kill any dogs in the house routinely, regardless of their behavior. Of course the cops often raid the wrong house, terrifying innocent people in the middle of the night and killing their dogs too. When residents of the United States have serious reason to fear the door being busted down in the middle of the night by armed agents of the State despite having done nothing wrong, we live in a police state.

Then there’s my experience this past week as I drove home from the airport in Syracuse, New York. The Border Patrol and the State Police had set up a roadblock on the county line about 30 miles from my house and at least 20 miles as the crow flies from the border with Canada. This is not uncommon, but this time two things were different. First, both groups of officers were fully armed. Second, they were asking questions. Normally they just peer into your car and let you go. This time, I was asked, “Where are you coming from?”; “Were you out of the state?”; and “Do you have luggage in your trunk?” They did not search the car, nor did they ask for ID (the latter probably because I’m white), but it does not matter. When American citizens are stopped while traveling within their own state and asked to account for their whereabouts, we live in a police state.

Do You Have Your Papers?

Finally, a professional colleague of mine was recently on a train to Chicago with his teenage son. They are of Mexican descent, but both are American citizens. Border Patrol agents boarded the train and conducted a similar inquisition. My colleague and his son were hassled quite a bit and told that they probably should keep proof of citizenship with them when they travel within the United States. When innocent American citizens are told they should have “their papers” on them, we live in a police state.

My experience last weekend reflects the essence of the problem. Why were the cops and the Border Patrol there? They were looking for illegal immigrants, drugs, and potential terrorists. It’s the perfect storm of statism that has brought us to this point. The combination of xenophobia, irrational fear of drugs, and the terror the State has whipped up about terrorists around every corner is the fuel on which this police state feeds. But a police state cannot emerge without many fellow citizens being willing to trade off their actual liberties for the false promise of security.

Since 9/11 the biggest threat to the American people is not radical Muslim terrorists, nor deranged domestic terrorists, but the terrorists with the blue uniforms, badges, and body armor. Their weapons of mass destruction are not bombs, but state-approved guns, latex-gloved hands, and a profound disregard for our rights. Until we stand up and say, “Enough!”these terrorists will keep winning and our rights will continue to be lost.

Marcy criticizes U.S. policy for conflating the drug war and the Cold War, assuming that only leftist forces were benefiting from the drug trade, pressuring South American governments to suppress cocaine supplies using armed force, assisting those countries in eradication efforts by training and equipping their militaries, destroying coca crops by spraying dangerous herbicides without providing options for alternative crops, and ignoring the U.S. demand for cocaine as an important part of the problem.

Although Richard Nixon started the “war on drugs,” Ronald Reagan militarized it and believed the drug trade to be a unique transgression among leftist groups during the Cold War, despite the heavy involvement of his beloved Nicaraguan Contras and many nonleftist government leaders. Contrary to counterinsurgency warfare doctrine, the forced eradication programs turned the coca farmers away from their governments and toward leftist guerillas. Sending the local military to eradicate farmers’ crops only strengthened the bond between the farmers and leftists, and led to corruption in the region’s militaries.

Bill Clinton weakly attempted to reduce U.S. drug demand, but he and George W. Bush both continued the failed, militarized supply-suppression policy aimed at Latin America. Marcy concludes that except for a slight decline in the late 1990s, drug production in the Andes has remained constant or risen since the inception of the drug war in 1970. Between 2003 and 2006, for example, Colombia’s coca production increased by almost 38 percent. In 2007 coca growers expanded land under cultivation and farmers were learning to adapt to eradication efforts.

Marcy’s critique of U.S. policy seems spot on, but his solution leaves something to be desired. He acknowledges that some experts have urged drug legalization but concludes that this option is not yet politically possible in the United States and may actually cause more problems than it solves in northern Andean regions. He argues that rich landowners would benefit from legalization by seeing coca-growing land become more valuable, or multinationals would swoop in and snap up the drug profits—leaving most coca farmers poor in a semifeudal system. But Marcy seems a bit oblivious to the economics of drug production, which would predict that legalization would decrease the price of drugs and therefore lower the value of drug-producing land. Furthermore, most of the profits earned on drugs derive from the risks taken in an illegal business, so most of the losses would fall on cocaine laboratories and traffickers.

Marcy laments that eradication has always trumped providing markets for alternative crops. Yet even if U.S. policy could provide markets for alternative crops, the illegality of drugs likely would make profits from growing cocaine much more lucrative than any other possible crop. And legalization—by reducing drug profits and taking the fire out of the wars funded by them—is also the best way to provide incentives for guerillas to put down their weapons.

To his credit Marcy recommends decriminalization of drugs in the United States to put downward pressure on the price, and thus the production, of cocaine. Economists believe such demand-reduction strategies are superior to supply-suppression strategies. He notes that the northern Andean region is so large and remote that controlling drug production there is impossible. Cocaine growing, production, and trafficking just move around in response to futile efforts by authorities—whether local or a distant superpower—to stamp them out. While Latin American countries correctly complain about U.S. demand being the primary factor, the United States has maintained its costly and ineffective supply-suppression policy for decades. Thus Marcy usefully suggests limiting the U.S. military presence in the region and getting local militaries out of the counter-drug mission.

The flaw in Marcy’s strategy is that it does not go far enough. True, drug legalization efforts are stymied by popular perceptions in the United States and, he observes, by entrenched antidrug bureaucracies in the United States and the northern Andes that garner jobs and large budgets from the war on drugs. But legalization is the only strategy that can work to eliminate the need for the costly—in lives, money, and corruption—war on drugs. Marcy, then, is wrong when he says that the war on drugs might ultimately be won by incremental changes in policy. The war must be abandoned.

It is hard to get people to examine their ideas—“prejudices” might be a better word—about drugs, but in Drug War Crimes, Boston University economics professor Jeffrey Miron has put into the public discourse an attack on the conventional wisdom that is impossible for any serious-minded person to brush off. Written with a professional economist’s careful attention to costs and benefits, both seen and unseen, the book relentlessly challenges all the beliefs that support the criminalization of drugs.

Miron begins by toting up some of the principal costs of our anti-drug crusade. Government spends more than $33 billion annually on it. Arrests for drug-related infractions exceed 1.5 million per year. The United States now has well in excess of 300,000 people behind bars for drug violations. If they’re even aware of the cost, drug-war supporters contend that we would experience a disastrous rise in drug use—which is assumed to be a life-ruining event—and therefore worth it. Prohibitionists assert that “drug use causes crime, diminishes health and productivity, encourages driving and industrial accidents, exacerbates poverty, supports terrorism and contributes generally to societal decay,” Miron writes. Those beliefs are carefully reinforced by spokesmen for the drug war. Our author takes on all those claims and shows them to be erroneous.

Consider, for example, the widely held idea that drug use causes crime. Statistics show that in 35 cities monitored by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2000, at least 50 percent of adult men arrested for crimes tested positive for drugs. That’s enough to frighten the typical citizen into supporting the drug war. After all, who wants more crime? But Miron points out that those statistics don’t show that drug usage causes criminal behavior or that the arrestees were under the influence of drugs at the time of the crime. “The methodology used in these analyses would also demonstrate that consumption of fast food or wearing blue jeans causes criminal behavior,” Miron observes with appropriate sarcasm.

Another mistaken belief that leads to support for the drug war is that any drug use almost inevitably leads to addiction and an increasingly dissolute life. That notion causes people to view drug use as so dangerous as to warrant the extreme measures the government employs in its attempt to prevent anyone from using any illegal drug in any amount. Miron shows that belief to be unfounded. Drug use may be addictive, but is not necessarily so and many drug users lead perfectly normal lives. True, some users suffer adverse health consequences, but, the author observes, “A critical problem with standard depictions of the health consequences of drug use is reliance on data sources that are systematically biased toward those who suffer the worst consequences.”

For all our costly enforcement efforts, Miron shows that drug prohibition has little impact on the incidence of drug use, mainly because drug producers and sellers can evade law enforcement so easily. Yet the costs extend beyond the obvious ones already mentioned. One of them is increased racial tension because drug enforcement is so often targeted at minority areas.

Another is a great increase in violence. Miron argues that without drug prohibition, homicide rates in the United States would fall by half. A third is the non-availability of drugs, particularly marijuana, for medical reasons, thus causing much avoidable pain and suffering. By the time our author is done with his analysis of costs and benefits, it is clear that the war on drugs is an exceedingly foolish policy.

Miron advocates legalization rather than any of the halfway alternatives sometimes advanced. He concludes by saying, “American tradition should make legalization—i.e., liberty—the preferred policy, barring compelling evidence prohibition generates benefits in excess of its costs. As I have demonstrated here, a serious weighing of the evidence shows instead that prohibition has enormous costs with, at best, modest and speculative benefits. Liberty and utility thus both recommend that prohibition end now: the goals of prohibition are questionable, the methods are unsound, and the results are deadly.”

Despite ample lip-service for “hope” and “change,” the Obama administration’s cynical response to the escalating drug prohibition-related violence around the Mexican border epitomizes Einstein’s oft-quoted observation.

Since 2008 more than 7,000 people—over 1,000 last January alone, including Mexican civilians, journalists, police, and public officials—have been killed in clashes with warring drug traffickers. Wire-service reports estimate that Mexico’s drug lords employ over 100,000 soldiers—approximately as many as the Mexican army—and that the cartels’ wealth, intimidation, and influence extend to the highest echelons of law enforcement and government. Where do the cartels get their unprecedented wealth and power? By trafficking in illicit drugs—primarily marijuana—over the border into the United States.

The U.S. Office of Drug Control Policy (more commonly known as the drug czar’s office) says more than 60 percent of the profits reaped by Mexican drug lords are derived from the exportation and sale of cannabis to the American market. To anyone who has studied the marijuana issue, this figure should come as no surprise. An estimated 100 million Americans age 12 or older—or about 43 percent of the country—admit to having tried pot, a higher percentage, according to the World Health Organization, than any other country on the planet. Twenty-five million Americans admit (on government surveys, no less) to smoking marijuana during the past year, and 15 million say that they indulge regularly. This high demand, combined with the drug’s artificially inflated black-market value (pot possession has been illegal under federal law since 1937), now makes cannabis America’s top cash crop.

In fact, according to a 2007 analysis by George Mason University professor Jon Gettman, the annual retail value of the U.S. marijuana market is some $113 billion.

How much of this goes directly to Mexican cartels is difficult to quantify, but no doubt the percentage is significant. Government officials estimate that approximately half the marijuana consumed in the United States originates from outside its borders, and they have identified Mexico as far and away America’s largest pot provider. Because Mexican-grown marijuana tends to fetch lower prices on the black market than domestically grown weed (a result attributed largely to lower production costs—the Mexican variety tends to be grown outdoors, while an increasing percentage of American-grown pot is produced hydroponically indoors), it remains consistently popular among U.S. consumers, particularly in a down economy. As a result, U.S. law officials now report that some Mexican cartels are moving to the United States to set up shop permanently. A Congressional Research Service report says low-level cartel members are now establishing clandestine growing operations inside the United States (thus eliminating the need to cross the border), as well as partnering with domestic gangs and other criminal enterprises. A March 23 New York Times story speculated that Mexican drug gangs or their affiliates are now active in some 230 U.S. cities, extending from Tucson, Arizona, to Anchorage, Alaska.

In short, America’s multibillion-dollar demand for pot is fueling the Mexican drug trade and much of the turf battles and carnage associated with it.

Same Old “Solutions”

So what are the administration’s plans to quell the cartels’ growing influence and surging violence? Troublingly, the White House appears intent on recycling the very strategies that gave rise to Mexico’s infamous drug lords in the first place.

In March the administration requested $700 million from Congress to “bolster existing efforts by Washington and Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s administration to fight violent trafficking in drugs . . . into the United States.” These efforts, as described by the Los Angeles Times, include: “vowing to send U.S. money, manpower, and technology to the southwestern border” and “reducing illegal flows (of drugs) in both directions across the border.” The administration also announced that it intends to clamp down on the U.S. demand for illicit drugs by increasing funding for drug treatment and drug courts.

There are three primary problems with this strategy.

First, marijuana production is a lucrative business that attracts criminal entrepreneurs precisely because it is a black-market (and highly sought after) commodity. As long as pot remains federally prohibited its retail price to the consumer will remain artificially high, and its production and distribution will attract criminal enterprises willing to turn to violence (rather than the judicial system) to maintain their slice of the multi-billion-dollar pie.

Second, the United States is already spending more money on illicit-drug law enforcement, drug treatment, and drug courts than at any time in our history. FBI data show that domestic marijuana arrests have increased from under 300,000 annually in 1991 to over 800,000 today. Police seizures of marijuana have also risen dramatically in recent years, as has the amount of taxpayer dollars federal officials have spent on so-called “educational efforts” to discourage the drug’s use. (For example, since the late 1990s Congress has appropriated well over a billion dollars in anti-pot public service announcements alone.) Yet despite these combined efforts to discourage demand, Americans use more pot than anyone else in the world.

Third, law enforcement’s recent attempts to crack down on the cartels’ marijuana distribution rings, particularly new efforts launched by the Calderón administration in Mexico, are driving the unprecedented wave in Mexican violence—not abating it. The New York Times states: “A crackdown begun more than two years ago by President Felipe Calderón, coupled with feuds over turf and control of the organizations, has set off an unprecedented wave of killings in Mexico. . . . Many of the victims were tortured. Beheadings have become common.” Because of this escalating violence, Mexico now ranks behind only Pakistan and Iran as the administration’s top international security concern.

Despite the rising death toll, drug war hawks at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) remain adamant that the United States’ and Mexico’s “supply side” strategies are in fact successful. “Our view is that the violence we have been seeing is a signpost of the success our very courageous Mexican counterparts are having,” acting DEA administrator Michele Lionhart said recently. “The cartels are acting out like caged animals, because they are caged animals.” President Obama also appears to share this view. After visiting with the Calderón government in April, he told CNN he intended to “beef up” security on the border. When asked whether the administration would consider alternative strategies, such as potentially liberalizing pot’s criminal classification, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano replied that such an option “is not on the table.”

A New Remedy

By contrast the Calderón administration appears open to the idea of legalizing marijuana—or at least reducing criminal sanctions on the possession of small quantities of drugs—as a way to stem the tide of violence. Last spring Mexican lawmakers made the possession of personal-use quantities of cannabis and other illicit substances a noncriminal offense. And in April Mexico’s ambassador to the United States, Arturo Sarukhan, told CBS’s Face the Nation that legalizing the marijuana trade was a legitimate option for both the Mexican and U.S. governments. “[T]hose who would suggest that some of these measures [legalization] be looked at understand the dynamics of the drug trade,” Sarukhan said.

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox recently echoed Sarukhan’s remarks, as did a commission of former Latin American presidents. “I believe it’s time to open the debate over legalizing drugs,” Fox told CNN in May. “It can’t be that the only way [to try to control illicit drug use] is for the state to use force.”

Writing recently on CNN.com, Harvard economist and Freeman contributor Jeffrey Miron said that ending drug prohibition—on both sides of the border—is the only realistic and viable way to put a permanent stop to the rising power and violence associated with Mexico’s drug traffickers. “Prohibition creates violence because it drives the drug market underground,” he wrote. “This means buyers and sellers cannot resolve their disputes with lawsuits, arbitration or advertising, so they resort to violence instead. . . . The only way to reduce violence, therefore, is to legalize drugs.”

Growing Support

Americans’ support for legalizing the regulated production and sale of cannabis—an option that would not likely rid the world of cartels, but would arguably reduce their primary source of income—is at all an all-time high. In May a national Zogby telephone poll of 3,937 voters by the Republican-leaning O’Leary Report discovered, for the first time ever, that a slight majority (52 percent) of Americans “favor the legalization of marijuana.” A separate Zogby poll reported even stronger support (58 percent) among west-coast voters.

Predictably, critics of marijuana legalization claim that such a strategy would do little to undermine drug traffickers’ profit margins because cartels would simply supplement their revenues by selling greater quantities of other illicit drugs. Although this scenario sounds plausible in theory, it appears to be far less likely in practice.

As noted, Mexican drug lords derive an estimated 60 to 70 percent of their illicit income from pot sales. (By comparison, only about 28 percent of their profits are derived from the distribution of cocaine, and less than 1 percent comes from trafficking methamphetamine.) It is unrealistic to think that cartels could feasibly replace this void by stepping up their sales of cocaine, methamphetamine or heroin—all of which remain far less popular among U.S. drug consumers anyway. Just how much less? U.S. Department of Health and Human Services survey data show that roughly two million Americans use cocaine, compared to 15 million for pot. Fewer than 600,000 use methamphetamine, and fewer than 155,000 use heroin. In short, this is hardly the sort of demand that would keep Mexico’s drug barons in the lucrative lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed.

Of course, it’s unrealistic to think that pot legalization would wipe out prohibition-inspired violence altogether. After all, ending alcohol prohibition in America didn’t single-handedly put the Mafia out of business (though it greatly reduced its power and influence). And it’s always possible that Mexico’s drug cartels would continue to engage in violent acts toward one another as competing factions fought over the crumbs of America’s drastically shrunken illicit-drug market.

That said, it’s equally unrealistic, if not more so, to think that continuing our same failed drug war policies will do anything but exponentially increase the catastrophe they’ve spawned, both in Mexico and at home. It’s time to engage in a different strategy. It’s time to seriously consider legalizing marijuana and other drugs.

SEBASTOPOL, Calif. | The medical marijuana dispensary in this California wine country town is in a former auto dealership and has more registered patients than the town has residents. Los Angeles has more pot shops than Starbucks or schools.The surge in medical marijuana in California has left many communities scrambling to regulate the free-for-all, while others are trying to ban the drug altogether. The issue took on greater urgency after the Obama administration announced looser federal marijuana guidelines last month.Some local governments are looking to take an approach similar to Sebastopol, where officials welcome the business as a strong source of tax revenue during the recession.

Not to mention jobs.

Does anyone still think the “war on drugs” is a good idea?

That may strike some people as an odd question under the circumstances, so let’s take it from another direction. Have you seen the news stories about the violence on the border being perpetrated by the Mexican whiskey and cigarette cartels?

No? That’s probably because there was no such violence and are no such cartels.

So why are there violent cartels in marijuana, cocaine, and heroin but not in whiskey and cigarettes?

All together now: prohibition.

“Our” Fault?

Of course the politicians blame everything and everyone but themselves for this spreading violence. “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said. “Our demand”? Including hers? “Our inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police officers, soldiers and civilians.” Her answer, in addition to sending the Mexican government taxpayer money, is to go after consumers of drugs and manufacturers and dealers of guns she doesn’t like.

Drug users and gun dealers are to blame for drug-cartel violence? That makes no sense. If it did, then drinkers and smokers would be creating violence, too. What’s missing?

Once again in unison: prohibition. Who brought us prohibition? Politicians. Every politician, bureaucrat, and agent who facilitates or enforces prohibition is an accomplice in the violence because he or she helps to create the conditions in which thugs have a comparative advantage in dealing drugs.

For years advocates of free trade in drugs—that is, basic rights to life, liberty, and property for drug consumers, producers, and merchants—have pointed out that prohibition, besides being an immoral invasion of liberty by the state, sets in motion a variety of concrete evils that harm innocent people. (No one has been more consistent and rigorous in this than Thomas Szasz). These evils include the corruption of law enforcement, violent crime, and the expansion of intrusive government. Besides these domestic evils, the U.S. government has alienated farmers in foreign lands by helping to destroy their crops and livelihoods. If that’s not terrorism, nothing is. Crop destruction has been a recruiting tool for guerilla organizations, while black-market profits finance them and others with malign intent.

Few listened to these Cassandras against the anti-drug crusade. Maybe people will listen now.

Government Impotence

While violent gangs that make their money selling drugs in the black market are murdering and kidnapping people, invading homes, and committing other atrocities, the politicians have nothing to say but the same bromides they’ve been repeating for years. Thinking we’re either simpletons or amnesiacs, they expect us to be comforted by their words. (Will they be right?) They promise to defeat the cartels, crack down on drug use, and disrupt the gun trade. It won’t work. It’s never worked. It can’t work. Black-market operators are always steps ahead of the plodding bureaucrats. Break up one gang and another emerges. The drugs keep flowing (there’s plenty of bribe money), and consumers will have what they want when they want it. The profits made possible by the black market are powerful incentives to keep the industry going. Government is impotent. (They can’t even keep drugs out of prisons!)

Yet the gangs could be put out of business overnight. How? By removing the criminal penalties for the production, trade, and consumption of all drugs; by bringing the black market into the open, so disagreements can be resolved through civil channels and a talent for violence is no longer an advantage; by dissolving the extraordinary profits that illegal industries always reap.

Yes, it is that easy.

People will recoil. We can’t do that! No? Then accept as normal the unspeakable violence that is starting to spread from city to city, because that is the alternative to the stubborn refusal to end the “war on drugs,” which is really a war on people. Even full police-state tactics will not be able to control it, though that won’t stop demagogic politicians from giving them a try.

The Drug War Finances Government Careers

I don’t expect the multitude of officials who depend on the drug war for their livelihoods and power to endorse an end to prohibition. They have shown themselves more than willing to accept the violence (against others) as the price of their ambition. The new threat to us is an opportunity for them to amass more power, bigger budgets, and higher salaries.

But the rest of us have no reason to support the complex of government and “private” tax-financed agencies that grow fat prosecuting this war. The worn-out rationalizations can’t stand examination. Prohibition keeps no one from getting any drug he wants at an affordable price. On the contrary, it encourages the creation of cheaper, more potent drugs, just as alcohol prohibition replaced wine and beer with hard liquor. (More bang in a more compact form.) Prohibition doesn’t keep our children safe. It makes drugs into enticing forbidden fruits and pushes the trade into less-visible channels. Drugs aren’t “dangerous,” though people are capable of doing harmful things with them—and many other things. (Jacob Sullum’s Saying Yes is an eye-opening book that I highly recommend.) Addiction is not a disease; it’s a choice.

Everything the drug warriors have said is wrong—and often a conscious lie.

Drugs are to our society what Eurasia and East Asia were to Oceania in Orwell’s 1984: a convenient conjured-up demon to justify expansion of power and the usurping of liberty—in the name of keeping us safe.

What will it take, if not the current violence from Mexico, to make people see through the scam?

Look around. It’s our self-proclaimed protectors from whom need we protection most.

Violence among Mexico’s drug cartels and government has spilled over the U.S. border and beyond. Does anyone still think the “war on drugs” is a good idea?

The rest of TGIF is here.

I had attended a Marijuana Policy Project event celebrating the New York State Assembly’s passage of a medical-marijuana bill. I told the audience I thought it pathetic that the mere half passage of a bill to allow sick people to try a possible remedy would merit such a celebration. Of course medical marijuana should be legal. For adults, everything should be legal. I’m amazed that the health police are so smug in their opposition.

After years of reporting on the drug war, I’m convinced that this “war” does more harm than any drug.

Independent of that harm, adults ought to own our own bodies, so it’s not intellectually honest to argue that “only marijuana” should be legal—and only for certain sick people approved by the state. Every drug should be legal.

“How could you say such a ridiculous thing?” asked my assistant. “Heroin and cocaine have a permanent effect. If you do crack just once, you are automatically hooked. Legal hard drugs would create many more addicts. And that leads to more violence, homelessness, out-of-wedlock births, etc.!”

Her diatribe is a good summary of the drug warriors’ arguments. Most Americans probably agree with what she said.

But what most Americans believe is wrong. (For details, see the links here.)

Myth No. 1: Heroin and cocaine have a permanent effect.

Truth: There is no evidence of that.

In the 1980s, the press reported that “crack babies” were “permanently damaged.” Rolling Stone, citing one study of just 23 babies, claimed that crack babies “were oblivious to affection, automatons.”

It simply wasn’t true. There is no proof that crack babies do worse than anyone else in later life.

Myth No. 2: If you do crack once, you are hooked.

Truth: Look at the numbers—15 percent of young adults have tried crack, but only 2 percent used it in the last month. If crack is so addictive, why do most people who’ve tried it no longer use it?

People once said heroin was nearly impossible to quit, but during the Vietnam War, thousands of soldiers became addicted, and when they returned home, 85 percent quit within one year.

People have free will. Most who use drugs eventually wise up and stop.

And most people who use drugs habitually live perfectly responsible lives, as Jacob Sullum pointed out in Saying Yes.

Myth No. 3: Drugs cause crime.

Truth: The drug war causes the crime.

Few drug users hurt or rob people because they are high. Most of the crime occurs because the drugs are illegal and available only through a black market. Drug sellers arm themselves and form gangs because they cannot ask the police to protect their persons and property.

In turn, some buyers steal to pay the high black-market prices. The government says heroin, cocaine, and nicotine are similarly addictive, and about half the people who both smoke cigarettes and use cocaine say smoking is at least as strong an urge. But no one robs convenience stores for Marlboros.

Alcohol prohibition created Al Capone and the Mafia. Drug prohibition is worse. It’s corrupting whole countries and financing terrorism.

The Post wrote, “Stossel admitted his own 22-year-old daughter doesn’t think [legalization] is a good idea.”

But that’s not what she said. My daughter argued that legal cocaine would probably lead to more cocaine use. And therefore probably abuse.

I’m not so sure.

Banning drugs certainly hasn’t kept young people from getting them. We can’t even keep these drugs out of prisons. How do we expect to keep them out of America?

But let’s assume my daughter is right, that legalization would lead to more experimentation and more addiction. I still say: Legal is better.

While drugs harm many, the drug war’s black market harms more.

And most importantly, in a free country, adults should have the right to harm themselves.

Fear not. As is usually the case, beyond the scary headline, deep into the copy, came the real story. Both diseases are in steady decline. Cancer rates and deaths from cancer have fallen every year since the early 1990s. The thing is, incidence and mortality rates of heart disease and stroke have fallen even more over the same period (25 percent since 1990). So while it’s true that cancer has “overtaken” heart disease, that’s really not the story. The story is that both are in decline, heart disease remarkably so.

Late last February, another health story hit the wires: Americans are living longer than ever before. Life expectancy is up across the board, among both genders and all ethnicities. The gaps in life expectancy between men and women and between black and white are shrinking, too.

At the same time all of this good news has transpired, the number of Americans classified as “obese” and “overweight” has been on a steadily upward trajectory since about the mid-1970s. In 1985 eight states reported that at least 10 percent of their populations were obese. By 1990 the number rose to 33. By 2001, it was all 50.

Of course, as you might expect, the scariest numbers about the condition of America’s waistline are overblown—there are significant problems with the way the government measures obesity, which I’ll discuss in a moment. But most researchers agree that the average American is carrying 10–15 more pounds than he was 30 years ago.

If you believe the media, nutrition activists, and public officials, those extra 10–15 pounds portend a looming health-care catastrophe. U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona, for example, said in 2004 that childhood obesity is “every bit as threatening to us as the terrorist threat.” A congressionally commissioned report from the Institute of Medicine published in the fall of 2004 called for massive government intervention to stave off the crisis. One author said we need “nothing short of a revolution.” The World Health Organization warned, “If immediate action is not taken, millions will suffer from an array of serious health disorders.”

But if we’ve been getting fatter for 30 years, shouldn’t we be seeing at least the front end of this coming crisis? Why are we getting healthier? In fact, a closer look at the statistics suggests that even some of the diseases most associated with obesity are in retreat.

Take cancer, for example. In 2002 the BBC reported researchers had found that “the more excess weight a person carries, the greater their risk of certain types of cancer.” In 2004 USA Today echoed that claim. “The nation’s current epidemic of overweight and obesity is likely to drive up cancer rates in coming years, ”the paper wrote. The Associated Press said that “heart disease and diabetes get all the attention, but expanding waistlines increase the risk for at least nine types of cancer, too.” (Other sources put it at ten.)

But of the ten types of cancer commonly associated with obesity, deaths from nine—pancreatic, ovarian, gall bladder, stomach, prostate, kidney, colorectal, cervicaluterine, and breast—have decreased since 1992, some of them significantly. Only one—esophageal cancer—has seen an increase in mortality rates over that period.

And heart disease? Case Western Reserve University researcher and obesity skeptic Paul Ernsberger notes that “The greatest improvements are in cardiovascular disease deaths, which are most strongly linked to obesity.”

As noted, the gap in life expectancy between black and white is shrinking. But at the same time, blacks as a group have put on more weight than whites. Incidence of obesity among black women, for example, jumped 11.7 percent between 1988 and 2001, compared to 7.3 percent among white women. Yet black women increased their life expectancy by 2.3 years, versus 1.3 years for white women over that period. It’s true with men too. The rate of obesity among black men jumped by 7.5 percent, versus 7.0 percent among white men, yet black men on average added 4.2 years to their lives, versus 2.8 for white men. So blacks have narrowed the longevity gap with whites, even while widening (pardon the pun) the “obesity gap.”

In 2003 the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control that said 400,000 annual American deaths are attributable to obesity. A Lexis search reveals that as of late fall 2004, that 400,000 figure had been cited over a thousand times in mainstream media outlets. It was also routinely cited by politicians, activists, and bureaucrats as justification for large-scale government intervention to curb our pudginess. At a Time-ABC News summit on obesity in June 2004, attendees were inundated with the refrain that “obesity will soon overtake smoking as the number one cause of preventable death in America.” Demands for government action inevitably followed.

But there were fatal flaws in the CDC study’s methodology. First, it was a “meta” study, which incorporated data from dozens of other studies, some of them dating back to the 1940s, and attempted to apply that data to today’s demographics. Second, the study used the Body Mass Index (BMI) as its arbiter of obesity, a crude formula that factors only height and weight and which consequently mislabels as “overweight” or “obese” people who are extremely fit. According to the BMI, for example, half the National Basketball Association is either overweight or obese. But few would suggest they’re out of shape or unhealthy. Third, the study assumed that all premature deaths by obese people were caused by obesity—a leap of faith, to say the least. Finally, the study lumped the “overweight” in with the “obese,” even though there’s little evidence that overweight has any seriously ill-effects on health. The study’s own data showed no correlation between being overweight and premature death, and in fact showed some benefit.

In December 2004 the CDC reluctantly admitted its study was flawed, but only by a little—20 to 25 percent. Critics insisted the flaws in the study’s methodology were much more significant, and in response the National Institutes of Health finally commissioned a review. In April an independent team of researchers led by the University of North Carolina’s Katherine Flegal released a new study sharply at odds with the original study. Flegal’s team determined that it exaggerated the effects of obesity by some 300 percent. She put the real number of annual deaths attributable to overweight and obesity closer to 100,000. What’s more, the new study found that modest overweight actually protects against premature death. When adjusted for the lives saved by extra weight, the number of deaths due to obesity falls to around 25,000—putting the original figure off by a factor of 15.

A subsequent internal investigation revealed that CDC officials were actually made aware of the original study’s flaws during the peer-review process. So why was the more alarmist study published and relentlessly promoted anyway?

As it turns out, one of the co-authors of the original study was Dr. Julie Gerberding, who also happens to be the current director of the CDC. Comments from members of the internal-investigation team reveal that the study was likely published over objections from other scientists at the CDC because the head of the agency’s name was on it.

Gerberding still refuses to accept the new numbers. She has told the media that the CDC will continue with its anti-obesity campaign, which will continue to ignore the subsequent study.

Governments Spring into Action

Local and state legislatures, the U.S. Congress, regulators at all levels of government, and public-health advocates have already seized on the idea that nearly a half million people are needlessly dying every year because of their love handles. The Bush administration has earmarked millions of federal dollars for anti-obesity initiatives (though not nearly enough for the obesity warriors). Congress is considering menu-labeling laws; some in Washington have suggested taxes on high-fat or high-sugar foods; and others are calling on the Federal Trade Commission to regulate the marketing of junk food. Many states have banned junk food from school cafeterias. And Medicare announced last summer that it would begin considering paying for treatment for obesity, a new entitlement that could prove nearly as costly as the prescription-drug benefit.

America is at war with obesity. We could eventually come to find, however, that this war’s origins are as dubious as the sinking of the Maine.

None of this is to say extreme obesity is healthy, or even benign (though, as we’ve seen, some studies suggest a few extra pounds may give a mild protective effect, particularly among the elderly). The decline in incidence and deaths from heart disease and cancer are almost certainly due to advances in medical research and technology. We’re getting better at uncovering these diseases early, and with pharmaceutical marvels like statin drugs and chemotherapy, we’re making huge leaps in treatment once we’ve diagnosed them. And it’s of course likely that the gains we’ve made would be even more significant were the most obese among us a bit more svelte.

But the notion that our expanding waistlines have put us on the verge of a calamitous offensive against our health-care system simply isn’t borne out by the evidence. And so these incessant calls for immediate, large-scale government interference in how we grow, process, manufacture, market, prepare, sell, and eat our food ring hollow, hyperbolic, and needlessly invasive.

A recent Seattle Times investigation of the obesity hype found that much of the panic can be traced back to an aggressive campaign in the late 1990s by the pharmaceutical companies with diet drugs like Phen-Phen in the pipeline to get the government in the business of weight-watching. In 1996 the industry convinced the federal government to move the goalposts when it comes to defining “overweight” and “obesity.” At hearings dominated by researchers with ties to the pharmaceutical industry, an FDA panel eventually agreed. One magical night in 1997, some 29 million Americans went to bed healthy and woke up the next morning “overweight” or “obese.” And none of them gained a pound.

Debunking junk-science studies and bogus Chicken-Little pronouncements are important to refute the idea that obesity represents a looming health-care crisis. But those of us who value free markets and personal liberty wouldn’t support government intervention even if the worst pronouncements of the anti-fat activists were proven true. What we put into our mouths, how often we exercise, and what we feed our children are simply none of the government’s business. How did we get to the point where it could be?

There are two answers to that question, and they should be considered separately. First, we’ve vastly expanded the concept of “public health” to include government intervention into nearly every sphere of our lives. And second, our health-care system is slouching toward socialism, a troubling trend that undermines personal responsibility and exacts a public cost on private behavior.

Public Health

The proper conception of “public health” is innocuous enough. There are unquestionably some threats to our health and safety for which the remedies constitute a legitimate public good. They’re limited to risks to which no rational person would subject himself—examples might include communicable diseases like tuberculosis or typhoid, calamitous events like asteroid impacts or tsunamis, or biological or chemical terrorism. Under these limited circumstances, it’s understandable, even advisable, for a government limited to protecting the lives and property of its citizens to take collective measures to eradicate or minimize such risks, or minimize the damage should they come to pass.

But “public health” as it’s advocated today goes well beyond public goods. Over the last century, “public health” has come to mean state pressure coercing us to avoid risks, even risks we knowingly and willingly undertake. The most obvious and conspicuous example was alcohol prohibition. And though Prohibition took an untold number of lives, bred corruption, and legitimized criminal behavior, it is distinguishable from more recent expansions of public health in that lawmakers at least recognized it as a failure and repealed it. (Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have learned. The last 20 years have seen increasingly aggressive restrictions on the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol by local, state, and federal government.)

But the Harrison Act—which fired the first shots of the drug war—was passed even earlier, in 1914. Drug prohibition has marched onward since. Its episodic ratchetings-up and coolings-down have progressed to a particularly aggressive and militaristic incarnation over the last 25 years.

Once we’ve accepted a definition of “public health” expansive enough for government to dictate what we can and can’t put into our bodies, it’s a short leap to seatbelt laws, motorcycle-helmet laws, and prohibitions and restrictions on all sorts of other risky behavior. More recently we’ve been given “public” smoking bans that extend to private businesses such as bars and restaurants. The Supreme Court recently upheld an Alabama ban on sex toys and marital aids. And parents are all too aware of the myriad regulations on the risks to which they can legally subject their children. Over just the last several years, governments at some level have prohibited motor scooters, “pocket bikes,” all-terrain vehicles, snowmobiles, alcohol vaporizers, and fireworks, to name just a few—all designed to keep people from hurting themselves.

So it shouldn’t be the least bit surprising that “public health” might now come to include the size of our pants and the content of our refrigerators.

The justification for expansions of the government’s power to promote “public health” is typically couched in “the number of lives this will save.” Sometimes, we’re told that a law will add x number of years to the average life. The most-used and easiest tactic is to simply state that the law’s necessary to protect “the children.”

The ad nauseam recitation of the 400,000 figure is a good example, as is a report released in January 2004 stating that being overweight at 40 would cut several years off the typical life. The public-health activists at the Center for Science in the Public Interest have long been fighting for marketing restrictions on junk food, particularly on programs directed “at our children.”

Longevity seems to be an obsession among the public-health crowd. Apparently, there is no limit to the costs they’re willing to endure if some policy promises to lengthen lives. It seems improbable to them that there may be people who’d sacrifice a month or two of their senior years for the lifetime of pleasure some get from cigarettes, a night of hard drinking, or a slice of cherry pie after dinner. It’s as if adding more days to the end of our lives were the only reason for living.

Even then, as British doctor and author Michael Fitzpatrick explains in his book The Tyranny of Health, death can’t be prevented. It can only be postponed. And “death can generally be postponed only for a relatively short time by relatively intensive preventative measures,” Fitzpatrick writes. That is, high-cost measures that would typically add just a few days or months to the average life.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with studies or public-awareness campaigns designed to discover and inform us about how we can make healthier choices. It’s that the “advice” rarely stops there. Inevitably, such studies and campaigns lead to calls for government policies aimed at increasing longevity, policies that take options away from people who may value pleasure, convenience, or indulgence more than perfect health or a prolonged geriatry.

In the eloquent polemic Cigarettes Are Sublime, Richard Klein writes,“Healthism in America has sought to make longevity the principal measure of a good life. To be a survivor is to acquire moral distinction. But another view, a dandy’s perhaps, would say that living, as distinct from surviving, acquires its value from risks and sacrifices that tend to shorten life and hasten dying.”

Classical liberals should argue against the ever-expanding “public health” initiatives not only because they’re supported by junk science or manipulated data (though that’s often the case), but because the freedom to risk, indulge, and “sin” are essential to preserving individual liberty and a free society. Governments of free people aren’t authorized to ensure good health. They’re charged with securing liberty, which most certainly includes the liberty to have bad habits.

Socialized Medicine

The other chief reason why “public health” has been able to include ridiculous measures like obesity legislation and seat-belt laws is our increasingly collective system of health care. Even private health care has a collective component to it. Today, routine maintenance-oriented doctor visits are typically paid for by employer-provided health insurance, calling to mind the old Milton Friedman axiom about how generous we tend to be with other people’s money. Health insurance by definition pools risk. But many states (as well as the general culture of the health-care industry) put restrictions on so-called “medical underwriting”—or allowing health insurers to vary premiums based on risk, the same way auto or life insurers do. All these factors together create a system of perverse incentives that undermine the notion that we ought to let people take personal responsibility for their own health and well-being. Healthy people subsidize unhealthy people. When the consequences of poor decisions are shared, there’s less incentive to make good ones.

And that’s just the private sector. At the same time, politicians seem to be falling all over themselves in a rush to expand Medicare and Medicaid benefits for the aging, politically potent Baby Boom generation. The Cato Institute estimates that the new prescription-drug benefit could in the end exceed a trillion dollars. Medicare’s noodling with the idea of covering obesity treatments could very well end up costing nearly as much.

This creeping socialization of medicine gives government new license to meddle with our private affairs. It creates a climate where excessive state interference in the most intimate of personal matters—what we put into our mouths—becomes not only acceptable among the electorate, but desirable. After all, if that cheeseburger you’re eating clogs your arteries and puts you in the hospital, your poor choices will be reflected in my health insurance premiums. If you’re on Medicare or Medicaid, it’ll show up in my taxes.

That’s exactly the argument the government put forward in the summer of 2004, when the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that Medicare would consider covering the costs of obesity treatments, including diet plans, counseling, and gastrobypass surgery, all new frontiers for preventative government intervention. HHS officials insisted that the change would save taxpayers money over the long haul if obesity were prevented or treated before the ill-health effects associated with the condition begin to present themselves.

It isn’t difficult to see how this argument could be applied in a larger sense—that we need to tax fatty or sugary foods, for example, to save everyone money on health-insurance premiums and to keep the obesity problem from bankrupting Medicare and Medicaid. In fact, that exact argument has been made—and by a credentialed conservative, no less. On National Review Online, David Frum wrote: “And as Americans struggle with an epidemic of obesity—and the ensuing costs to the taxpayer—conservatives who favor (as almost all conservatives do favor) Medicare and Medicaid need to ask themselves whether their easy libertarian attitude to the worst practices of the fast food industry retains its relevance. Big Gulp drinks and super-sized fries are making America sick—and you are paying the bill. A little moderation would cure a lot of medical and fiscal ills; and a little incentive might induce that moderation.”

It’s bad enough hearing that kind of talk from the left. But when it comes from the right, too, it’s a bad harbinger for what might be ahead.

The solution to this is to return some semblance of personal responsibility to the health-care system. Health, or medical, savings accounts (HSA, MSA), for example, enable consumers to roll money not spent on routine medical procedures into a retirement account, tax-free. In contrast to the current system—which if anything encourages poor decisions — HSAs or MSAs encourage consumers to take care of themselves. Money not spent on visits to the doctor’s office is money saved for retirement.

Another suggestion would be to free up health insurers to do medical underwriting. The Bush administration has said it sees no federal barriers to the practice, so to the extent that barriers exist, they’re likely at the state level. Consumers in any state should be free to purchase health insurance from companies in any other state under the laws and regulations of the state where the insurer is incorporated. This would not only free up health insurers to medically underwrite, it would create a kind of competition between the states to ease regulatory burdens to attract insurers.

The result would unleash market forces on the task of finding the best carrot-and-stick approach to encouraging healthy lifestyles. Insurers would compete for customers, while states would lower regulatory barriers. Currently, there’s much debate over whether the illhealth effects often associated with obesity are from obesity itself or from the sedentary activity levels that often accompany being overweight. Hundreds of insurers competing with one another to both attract consumers and develop plans that reward the healthiest habits among their patrons (which of course benefits the insurers through lower health-care costs) might bring us closer to an answer to such questions. At the very least, if each of us were solely responsible for the consequences of our diet and activity level, the point would be rendered moot from a public-policy perspective.

The bizarre thing about the obesity debate is that less than a decade ago, the very thought of it was often discussed only in parody, or in a reductio ad absurdum context. Opponents of the tobacco lawsuits often invoked the idea of trial lawyers suing fast-food restaurants as one example of the “parade of horribles” that might follow should the tobacco suits be allowed to go forward.

Well, we’re here now. This is post-reductio America. If the anti-obesity proposals currently up for debate become law, it would be difficult to think of any aspect of our lives that would be out of the reach of the public-health activists. Or, as one advocacy group that represents the food industry has put it, the question will no longer be “what’s next?” . . . but “what’s left?”

U.S. District Judge Claire Eagan last November granted the FDA and Justice Department’s request for a preliminary injunction shutting down the company doing business as Rx Depot and Rx of Canada. The company operated 85 stores nationwide and served as the middleman for consumers wishing to benefit from cheaper prescription-drug prices outside U.S. borders. The decision has thrown a monkey wrench into the plans of several state governments—including those of Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin—that have been considering importing drugs to ease their tight budgets by lowering the costs of state employee health-care programs.

What began as a few busloads of senior citizens entering Canada to keep their health-care costs down has ballooned to an $800 million business, as an estimated 1 million to 2 million Americans now get their drugs from our northern neighbor. Consumers are realizing that they can save up to 85 percent on the same drugs sold in the United States. One heart-transplant patient and Rx Depot customer, for example, testified at a hearing during the case that he saved $9,000 per year by using the company’s services.

The problem is that the U.S. government, in its infinite wisdom, has deemed it a crime to purchase and import prescription drugs, even if they are the same drugs manufactured in the United States and approved by the FDA. The government’s argument, according to FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan, is that the “FDA’s job is to assure drug safety in the United States, and unapproved, imported drugs are illegal because FDA does not have the resources under current law to assure their safety.” He added, “[Consumers] are buying under buyer-beware conditions.” Heaven forbid people purchase prescription drugs without the government’s approval, as they do countless other products!

In analyzing the FDA’s position that it is necessary for the government to monitor imported drugs (and numerous other food and drug products) for our own safety, let us ignore that, as Rep. Rahm Emanuel has pointed out, “[Importation opponents] cannot tell you a single case they’ve discovered of anybody getting ill” from Canadian drugs. The government has already conceded the argument and called the law’s merits into question by its own actions. As FDA witnesses in the Rx Depot case testified, the agency uses “enforcement discretion” in cases where individuals cross the border to purchase small amounts of drugs and bring them back into the country. According to government attorneys, the Rx Depot case was special, however, since it involved a large company making a commission on the sale of large quantities of drugs. But if importing drugs is harmful and illegal, why should the amount or the existence of a middleman make any difference? If the product in question were cocaine, it wouldn’t matter if the smuggling was being done by granny or a large cartel. Granny would do time.

Others have argued against drug importation on the grounds that it is “unfair” trade since Canada keeps its drug prices down through price controls. Said Jeff Trewhitt, spokesman for Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), “We don’t want somebody else’s failed government-mandated price-fixing schemes being brought into this country.” Indeed, Canada’s price-fixing system is anti-free market, but the answer is not to prohibit trade. Every nation has policies that are anti-free market or anti-free trade (including the United States), but to isolate ourselves by halting trade with all of them would surely bring only economic harm.

To be sure, the pharmaceutical industry would stand to lose big if importation were legalized. Thus it should come as no surprise that PhRMA spent roughly $8.5 million lobbying in 2003, much of it against legislation that would have allowed the practice. The industry and its proponents argue that permitting drug importation would lead to smaller profits for U.S. drug makers, which in turn would cause the companies to slash research and development budgets, resulting in a diminution of innovative drugs brought to market. (This may or may not be the case, as firms would still have to introduce new products to compete with one another.)

The Bush administration’s answer to rising pharmaceutical prices was to create a “limited” prescription drug benefit under Medicare. Apparently it is the scope of the program—not the cost—that will (initially) be limited; the administration requested, and Congress approved, a Medicare and prescription-drug plan that was supposed to consume $395 billion over the next ten years. Two months after the bill was signed, the cost estimate rose by one third, to $535 billion. Given the government-inertia principle, Americans should expect that “limited” benefit to be universal before too long.

Market Protection

I have a different solution: abolish the FDA and the drug-importation ban altogether. But without the FDA, you might ask, how are we to know that our food and drug products are safe? There are two checks to combat this problem that are built into the free market: reputation and the legal system.

Reputation is perhaps the most important, and least discussed, aspect of doing business. What would happen, for example, if certain state governments stopped licensing exterminators, chiropractors, and barbers? People would be living in bug-infested dwellings and running around with bad backs and bad haircuts? Of course not. People would find a way to manage without government regulation. When looking for a place to get your hair cut, you probably just ask your friends for a good referral. If you happen to get a bad haircut anyway, you simply go somewhere else next time. Herein lies the beauty of the free market: businesses have an incentive to provide the goods and services customers want at the best possible price and quality. Bad service is just as much a killer for businesses as high prices.

In cases where a single indiscretion may lead to serious injury or even death, such as unsafe prescription drugs, the legal system provides an additional incentive for businesses to provide high-quality goods and services. If you are injured by a defective product, you can sue the manufacturer for negligence and perhaps fraud. If the stigma of being tried and convicted for selling faulty products is not enough to deter shady business practices, the economic effects of a guilty verdict certainly are. Any company foolish enough to hawk faulty and dangerous goods would quickly be put out of business by legal judgments.

Abolishing the FDA would relieve drug makers and other businesses of costly regulations that make it difficult to bring products to market. As it is, pharmaceutical companies have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and waste years jumping through regulatory hoops. Any lost profits the drug companies would suffer from importation would at the very least be partially offset by the removal of these burdensome and unnecessary regulations. As the Cato Institute points out, “85 percent of the cost of pharmaceutical development goes to complying with FDA regulations.” (See Cato’s Handbook for Congress, chapter 32, www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb105-32.html.) Furthermore, the elimination of FDA regulations would reduce certain “non-monetary” costs—such as the loss of human life—by allowing life-saving and life-enhancing drugs to come to market sooner.

The FDA’s attack on the right of consumers to do business with whomever they choose has nothing to do with product safety and everything to do with special-interest politics. The additional government interference sought by the Bush administration will only repeat previous governmental failures. Of course, this will once again provide politicians with a campaign issue and a “crisis,” they will claim, that only government can solve.