With that said, I think the terminology of the whole debate needs to be redefined because the words are so loaded. I like to think of my stance as being anti-prohibition.

If you think about it, legal drugs -- like prescription pills -- are extremely dangerous as well. Look at what the pharmaceutical companies have unleashed on us in terms of painkillers like Vioxx, which we now find may cause heart attacks, and drug-pusher pharmaceutical brass knew as much when it was unleashed. Why isn't that kind of “legal drug pushing” considered criminal when it causes death?

I look at the drug war on two levels -- without getting into too many complexities.

First there are the drugs, which in any form can be good or bad. Moonshine can kill you faster than beer, but both include alcohol to a degree or more. Indigenous people have used peyote for centuries in the quest for self-discovery and spiritual enlightenment; it is a product of nature. LSD, on the other hand, is synthesized and can be deadly in the wrong combination. So we are really talking about formulas. Nature's formula is always better in my mind. In any event, I do not believe drug possession or use should be criminal.

As far as the potent man-made formulas – like crack, smack and meth – well that certainly is an example of the devil being in the details if I ever saw it. People determined to partake of those formulas will find a way, regardless of whether we have prohibition or not. History is the best evidence of that. So I say, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t – and at least if prohibition was eliminated, we would know better where the devil is and what he’s up to.

I’ve lost friends, smart people, to the needle. I don’t take it lightly. But they died in the full throes of prohibition, so how should I be comforted by the fact that prohibition is the only path? I’ll steal a line from the gun nuts: Drugs don’t kill people; people kill people. At least if prohibition was ended, and we had a large supply of clean needles readily available for users, we might be able to reduce the spread of AIDS. Because I know firsthand that when addicts can’t find their needle, they’ll use whatever needle is available – even intelligent people fully aware of the risks who can otherwise manage their heroin cravings.

The other factor is the money. That's where the real evil usually sneaks in. That's where I think we do need oversight. None of the suppliers would be in the business if there were not money to be made. We all know that the money trail in the drug market is global in nature and includes black market and corporate white-collar players.

Shit, I remember tracking a trail of some $9 million from a bank in Mexico just across the border that was transferred by armored car across the bridge to a small bank in Roma, Texas -- which only had some $600,000 in foreign deposits at the time that $9 million went into its coffers. From the Roma bank it was wired to a major corporate bank in NYC, and then the trail vanished.

That’s how dirty money travels through the system, like a mouse through the belly of a snake. And everyone along the way digests their cut -- so no one asks too many questions, in either the black market or the corporate market.

If we really wanted to attack the evil side of the drug trade, we'd shut down those money pipelines. But under prohibition, that will never happen. Law enforcement isn't given the resources or directives to really crunch the money laundering system that props up the greed in the drug trade.

Now, and this I am still working out, if we were to end prohibition with respect to the use and possession of all drugs, with a "buyer beware" awareness to such a system and strong addiction services, and we completely (or as near possible) shut down the money laundering end of the trade, what would happen?

First, I believe drug-sale transactions under such a system would suddenly be forced into the light of day. If you decided to sell dope, the money trail would be very traceable. So if you were moving bad product, pushing this stuff on kids (like the cigarette companies do now), or monopolizing the trade through violent means, you could and would be shut down – if we truly meant business. It would be the violence and greed that would be the crime, not the drugs.

Of course, this would require a massive re-alignment of our prison-industrial complex. Law enforcement would be going after the real abusers in the drug war, the criminal hearts who have no regard for life, and they would be busting them on charges of murder, extortion, money laundering, etc. If you really could zero in on the greed that drives the evil side of the drug trade, or at least make malevolent suppliers and enablers -- the big players, banks and rich businessman, which is all they are -- truly the targets, the production of drugs could very well be decentralized, localized and governed by community norms, as opposed to the militarized national system of enforcement we now have under prohibition that has ruined so many lives.

If you as a local farmer want to plant a crop, harvest it and sell it, with everyone, including law enforcement, tracking every dime you put into it and earn from it, so be it. The money trail is the target of scrutiny, not the crop. But by the same token, if a community decides it does not want certain suppliers making its products available in the community -- whether that is greedy Joe or the huge corporations that would undoubtedly spring up to cash in on the trade -- they can make that decision. Homegrown and nothing else could be the law of town. Suppliers who break that law (not users) pay the price. But it's a commerce crime, not a drug crime.

And such a system would automatically drive down prices, because it takes the cost of risk (which creates scarcity) out of the supply chain. That would further drive greedy suppliers to other more “lucrative” trades – such as selling excess government military weapons. (But that’s another black market for another day – one that the drug prohibition forces seem to tolerate hypocritically.)

Low-cost drugs? That has to be bad, right – at least if you’re a prohibitionist? Well, government will surely fix that problem in the market with taxes. That will create even more incentive for folks to grow their own – assuming the government can be kept out of our homes. And if you don’t want to do drugs, well, you can simply say, “No to drugs,” just like you say "no" to whiskey, or cigarettes or Vioxx.

I just don’t buy the argument that if prohibition was ended, all of our kids would suddenly start doing more drugs. Certainly, I don't want my teenagers smoking crack, but the way things are now, if they had a mind too, they could find it on just about any street corner in the barrio or inner city. I've been in these places. Here's a line based on one of my experiences:

But I learned a lot about the city from Morgan. He showed me the economy of poverty, the drug houses that sold coke, smack, and crack by the pound every night; the kitchen tables covered with thousands of dollars in $10 and $20 bills; the 12-year-old kids who stood guard at the doors of the drug houses, holding shotguns as big as they were.

Tell me, how could a system where illicit money is criminalized and drug prohibition ended be any worse than what we have now?

This line of logic is not perfect, lot of bugs to work out, and clearly there would still be losers, gamers and abuse in an anti-prohibition environment, but it may be a fair tradeoff on the current system, where there clearly are a lot of losers as well -- only they tend to be poor folks instead of the fat cats benefiting from the current system.

Like I said, I'm still working this over in my mind. I think most of us agree on the goal, but the terms, the words we use, maybe they need to be rethought, so that we get at the roots, not just the leaves, of this weed, of this so-called war on drugs.