Legalize drugs.

LET ME introduce Barbra: 22, pretty, Jewish, sweet. I got to know her last autumn while researching my new novel, Topless. Barbra is a go-go dancer. She can earn $1,000 a week, tax free. (Some industrious dancers triple that figure.) With Barbra as my chaperone, I traveled the New Jersey and upstate New York topless circuit-areas that were then unknown to me. In payment for her guide service I supplied transportation, a good tip, and breakfast at 5 Am. Barbra was living with this guy, Joe. She always insisted we bring him a cheeseburger. I didn't think much about it. I liked Barbra. She was affable, unassuming, and streetwise. She did sleep a lot in the car, though.

Then, one Sunday afternoon, Barbra phoned me at home. The police were in her apartment. Joe had just threatened to kill her. Would I, she said, take care of her kitten for a while? She had to ... go away. I said, Yes. Barbra came through my front door looking anxious and hypre. Everything distracted her. Where was she going away to? Well, Barbra said, she had a little problem.... So tell me, I said. Well, her little problem was with ... heroin.

You coulda fooled me. I had no idea. I mean, heroin is such an unstylish drug, so 1950s. Barbra snorted it, she didn't skin-pop.) And, frankly, she got along pretty well. She functioned. I thought: Well, at least she'll be rid of Joe, that's good-Joe, she told me (now she told me) was 49 years old, six-foot-five, black, and jealous. Joe had first given Barbra heroin when she was 19-he wanted to make her dependent on him. (He told Barbra it was some cocaine variant.) On Monday she took out an order of protection against Joe and went into the neighborhood methadone program.

That was November. Barbra hasn't kicked heroin yet. It isn't so easy to do, my friends. And, given that circumstance, I was wrong. Dumping Joe hasn't been such a good thing at all. Now, you realize, Barbra will have to score her own heroin. Last time I saw her-fragile, vulnerable, very white, afraid-she was headed for Harlem. One week before, her money had been stolen there. As Barbra went down the subway staircase, she said: "I don't understand. Why do I have to do this? Why won't they let me have any junk?"

Because," I said, "you live in a stupid country with stupid laws."

Before long Barbra will be beaten or raped or found dead: count on it. Another victory in the great American drug war.

Drugs are bad. But easily the worst thing about them is-they're illegal and (hence) they cost too much. A black addict father with three children, say, doesn't go bankrupt or take up chain-snatching because of heroin or cocaine. It is the grim financial hemorrhage that demoralizes an addict. In this sense our anti-drug stance has callously discriminated against poor people. If I were liberal, I could make an appealing case for legalization and government support. Rich folk in capitalist America can afford the cost of addiction, I'd say. Liberal Me might even propose Drug Stamps. Addicts, remember, are made desperate and dangerous because the substance they crave is illegal, unavailable, and expensive.

Addiction of that sort can deplete a culture. Not only has the user been maimed by his chemical dependency, he also is made to feel outlaw and inferior-instead of ill. We guarantee our addict population (people who are victims, really) a felon status by compelling it to purchase illicit material every single day. That doesn't build character. If drugs were legal, maybe the dude who mugged my son at knife-point last October would never have left home. I put forward this heretical proposition: drug addicts might function well enough (not as pilot or bus driver, obviously), and contribute something to our culture in the way of work done and children loved, if their drugs were available at cost or below. Barbra, I know, would have been better off. As for the long-term effects-I agree, they're significant, at least as significant as the long-term effects of cigarette smoking or alcohol. (Joe, almost fifty, has been on heroin since 1960, more than one-quarter century, with only heart inflammation to indicate it. That and complete financial destitution.) Societies which tolerate drug addiction may sound slack and unattractive. Let me instead call them societies which have considerably reduced murder, theft, and catastrophic public expense-while treating their addict segment with kindness, not hostility. That has a better sound.

And, anyhow, I don't think our antidrug laws are even constitutional. Let me frame a question that no one I know has yet been able to answer. In 1917 Congress sponsored the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting sale and transport of alcohol. It did so because there were still Wet" areas and, presumably, because anti-liquor legislation had questionable standing under the Constitution. We live under that same Constitution now. We are engaged in, call it by the right name, Drug Prohibition. How can Prohibition 1990 have secure legal standing without a similar amendment? I reckon that it doesn't.

Let us say I grow marijuana and sell my neighbor some (I haven't even crossed a state line)-what right can the Federal Government or Vermont or Boston have to arrest me, there being no demonstrable public danger? Recent Supreme Court rulings have adduced a right of privacy" for fellatio and such-not-don't tell me that reading can't be made to cover private commerce in pot or heroin. But, of course, Drug Prohibition has never been constitutional: the "mandate" derives from presumed consensus, not law. Yet that consensus has been shifting perceptibly toward legalization from about 1980 onward. This column is an instance of the shift. Drug Prohibition has been, in one sense, profoundly American-an example of our naive and well-meaning, but misapplied, hope that enough money or enough statist interference will redeem "evil." It has also been profoundly un-American: Drug Prohibition violates individual freedom (including the freedom to commit suicide) and the Jeffersonian pursuit principle. As a result much of America is ambivalent about it.

Drugs will be legal, in some form or another, by 2010 A.D. I am sure of it. What we miss now is leadership: one statesmanlike candidate, just one, who will run for state or local office on a legalization ticket-with, say, Michael Gazzaniga as his science advisor. That politician will certainly lose. But he will also stand in the American chronicle as a man who foresaw and fore ran events, who shortened the national misery. Moreover, he need not lose by all that much if his platform is NO MORE DEAD POLICEMEN rather than LEGALIZE this or that. Americans are exasperated by the Drug Prohibition body count. There has not been a more futile and spendthrift national effort since, well, Prohibition. From which, it is obvious, we learned nothing at all. We don't remember, for instance, that during Prohibition there were 22,000 illegal saloons open in Manhattan alone-far more than had existed before Prohibition.

NR has done much to confer seriousness on the legalization debate. And, understandably, I think: it is a conservative issue at base. (Though the 1965-mintage liberal can sympathize from his POV.) Drug commerce between one consenting adult and another is nobody else's business. And a free-market mechanism should obtain. Instead, our welfare socialist approach has given monopoly privilege to organized crime by default. Let Squibb and Pfizer manufacture crack: that would be cheaper, safer, and more humane. I think there is a tremendous potential constituency for legalization in America-but it is a constituency much intimidated by anti-drug passion and propaganda. Give us one candidate with vision and courage enough to challenge Drug Prohibition. I promise him or her at least a long footnote's worth of immortality.

Meanwhile the addict is persecuted. (Ernest van den Haag would've put Barbra in a POW camp.) Poheemen have their heads blown away. Castro and the mob get richer. Law-observing people are mugged and murdered as urban inner America slouches toward chaos. Enough: let us confess that Drug Prohibition has been a witless and pathetic misadventure. For God's sake, end it soon.