"At the philosophical core of this war on drugs.. are twin ideas: Drug use is a moral wrong in itself, and drug use makes people more likely to commit a host of other crimes...

"In the past few years, however, these policies have come under attack from surprising quarters. Opponents range from public health activists to libertarian-minded political figures.. On the one hand, the critics have argued, these policies have failed to make progress toward a drug-free America. On the other, the war has proved to be too expensive to sustain...

"..New Mexico's former Governor Gary Johnson is.. the only governor ever to publicly support drug legalization while in office. The significant progress he made on drug-policy reform during his eight-year tenure helped to turn the tide for state reform movements across the country... He combatively declared the war on drugs "a miserable failure" and ambitiously investigated alternatives, including legalization...

"Johnson concluded that policies such as distributing clean needles to addicts and opening up regulated heroin-maintenance programs would do more to manage addiction than simply sending the police out to round up addicts; he also concluded that legalizing some categories of drugs and carefully regulating their sale would remove a huge pool of money from organized-crime cartels, boost government tax revenues and free up large amounts of money to be invested in drug education and health centers.

"Retired Judge Woody Smith... "Legalization and regulation are the only answer," he says now. "It's not a perfect solution, but it's a hell of a lot better than what we're doing now."

"This evolution of thinking in New Mexico has spread across the country in recent years. Increasingly impatient with the costly combination of policing and prosecution, voters, along with a growing number of state and local elected officials, have abandoned their support for incarceration-based antidrug strategies and have forced significant policy shifts. From conservative states like Louisiana to traditionally progressive states like Michigan, from small states like New Mexico and Kansas to large states like California, all the big questions are up for debate: Should marijuana be decriminalized, at least for those with pressing medical needs? Should mandatory minimum sentences for low-level drug offenders be abandoned? Should prison terms for crimes of addiction be replaced by mandated treatment? Should governments fund needle exchanges and other harm-reduction programs for drug users as a way of controlling epidemics? Increasingly, at the local level, the answer are yes, yes, yes, and yes...

"But while state legislatures have opened up to financial and moral debates about drug policy at the local level, the federal government is having none of it... the Administration has blocked even mild attempts at state drug-law reform and has challenged state reformers over issues such as medical marijuana and needle exchange... "We're seeing a new level of pettiness and aggression"...

"...zeal for militarizing the drug wars overseas... the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) has encouraged state prosecutors to go after medical marijuana providers... It has held press conferences against citizens' reform initiatives. And it has sponsored extravagent advertising campaigns.. that demonize teen drug use by linking it to terrorism...

"..the police in many parts of the country routinely arrest users--and even level paraphernalia charges against addicts bringing dirty needles into exchange programs...

"Yet in many ways Walters may be fighting yesterday's war on drugs. States like California, with its extensive system of medical-marijuana buyers' clubs, and New Mexico, with its public support for needle exchange, are beginning to shape up as the vanguard of a whole new approach to drug addiction...

"..researchers produced numerous studies showing that it costs far less to place an addict in treatment than in prison--and that treatment has a higher success rate in breaking the addiction cycle... With drug treatment cheaper than incarceration and increasingly viable in the court of public opinion, drug-law reform is gaining ground despite federal intransigence" (Abramsky, Sasha. "The Drug War Goes Up In Smoke." The Nation, August 18/25, 2003, 25-29).