It may be more than a like-duh coincidence that, during the past week, two pieces dealing with America's so-called "War on Drugs" have been uploaded onto PRX. The dog days of summer have given us Cary Goldstein's excellent piece on August 2nd, "Seventy Years of Federal Cannabis Prohibition," about our dismally antiquated marijuana laws -- as well as Anton Foek's August 4th piece under review here. You guessed it: the United States is mired in the dog days of the drug war.

In his dauntingly knowledgeable interview -- marred, alas, by some off-mic noises toward the end -- University of Wisconsin history professor Alfred McCoy outlines the failure of our narcotics policy. Rather than stemming the flow of drugs, our zero-tolerance for them has resulted in a quandary similar to what existed during the Prohibition era. From South America and Afghanistan to the Far East, growers depend upon America for drug bucks. Like producers of foreign oil, they supply our country's bottomless demand for the bathtub gin of the moment: everything from cannabis and cocaine to heroin. Sure, a few states have decriminalized drug possession, most notably California, but most of our states spend mega-bucks sentencing millions of first-time marijuana dealers to absurdly long prison terms.

Instead of outsourcing our production to foreigners or relying on homegrown purveyors of "Triple C," "Robo," and "Red Devils," and then incarcerating them for felonies, Prof. McCoy argues that it would make more sense to decriminalize these substances. For one, with decriminalization their supply would increase, lowering their price and eventually making them less profitable for dealers. Meanwhile, more funds could be devoted to the social problems responsible for drug use. Most important, we would be going beyond global, federal, and local anti-drug laws based on a temperance zeitgeist we inherited from the nineteenth century. We would be throwing off a puritanical theological movement, a "doomsday machine," and relying on education and mandatory drug rehabilitation, rather than packed penitentiaries, to win the war on drugs.

Put this in your pipe and smoke it. Bogart this interview!