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weed yet another unintended consequence of the war on drugs. The researchers couldn't square this fact in their minds so they went to Amsterdam and spoke with The Netherlands' drug czar, who happens to be the Minister of Health, because in Amsterdam they treat drug use as a health problem rather than as a crime problem. When the Minister was asked, "How can this be ?" he answered very sensibly, "Well, I think what we have done in Holland, is we have managed to make pot boring. ,34 Young people are not likely to act out by doing things they believe are boring. Children in the Netherlands know that when they reach the age of 18 they can go in a coffee shop and get all the marijuana they want. What this means is they don't start using drugs at the tender age of fourteen, which is the entry -level age for drug use in the United States. If they wait those four very formative years from 14 to 18 to decide if they are going to use drugs, far fewer will ever choose to use an illicit drug. In the fact, as the Minister pointed out, the per capita use of soft drugs, marijuana and hashish in The Netherlands is half the per capita use in the United States. Since they separate soft drug purchases allowing them to be bought in coffee shops, users don't have to buy their marijuana from criminal dealers who would rather sell them hard drugs. The result is the per capita use of hard drugs, heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, etc. is one -forth what is in the U.S. Another plus is that their homicide rate is also only one -fourth the per capita rate of the United States. And they really manage to accomplish all this on the cheap, spending less that one -sixth the per capita spending of the United States for drug- related law enforcement. Comparing Important Drug and Violence Indicators in the US and the Netherlands Social Indicator I Years I USA Netherlands Lifetime prevalence of marijuana use (ages 12 +) 2001 1 36.9% ' 17.0% '" Past month prevalence of marijuana use (ages 12 +) 2001 1 5.4% ' 3.0% 4 Lifetime prevalence of heroin use (ages 12 +) 2001 1 1.4% ' 0.4% ' Incarceration Rate per 100,000 population 2002 704 s 100 4 Per capita spending on drug- related law enforcement 1 1998 1 $379 s $223 5 Homicide rate per 100,000 population 1999-2001 average 5.56 6 1.52 6 Source Drug War Facts, Victoria, BC, Canada: Common Sense for Drug Policy, 2004, p. 144, Multiple sources 1 through 6.35 So what would the outcomes of drug legalization entail? The first outcome would be that we wouldn't have to arrest 1.9 million every year for nonviolent drug offenses. Not arresting those 1.9 million people would be very monetarily important to every person in this country because each year our local, state, and federal government spends 69 Billion dollars to interdict drugs at our boarders and beyond 36; to arrested the dealers and users of the 90% of those drugs that penetrate that sieve at the border; to prosecute those arrested; and to warehouse those convicted of nonviolent drug violations many for the rest of their lives to the tune of $25,000 per person, per year ' 38 nationally. And around $35,000 each in my home state of Massachusetts. If drugs were legal, we could also alleviate some of the more egregious forms of institutionalized racism within our legal system. For those of you who don't believe this is the case let me suggest the problem is so bad that in order to find more racist policies one would have to return to the centuries of slavery in the United States. I understand that is a pretty harsh statement but I believe the statistics bear out its veracity. 11