From the State of Virginia emerges this week's dumbest drug war idea:

Some welfare applicants and beneficiaries would be required to pass a drug test and receive counseling to receive public assistance under a controversial bill being considered by the Virginia General Assembly.

Under the proposal, which has been approved by the Senate, people applying for or in the state's job-training program, which is required to receive welfare, would be questioned about substance abuse. Those thought to be abusing drugs could be required to take a drug test. [Washington Post]

I can just hear the chorus of self-righteous legislators insisting that we mustn't subsidize addiction with public funds.

But I have a few questions. Who's going to intervene when a mother of four gets a false positive and suddenly can't feed her family? Will there be monitoring to prevent racial disparities in who is subjected to testing? How will any of this address the far larger problem of alcohol abuse?

If our society is going to offer public assistance to those in need, we cannot afford to shape such programs around the blunt instrument of urinalysis. When it works, drug testing tells you whether someone has used drugs. It doesn't tell you if they need treatment or whether their welfare check is being put to legitimate use. When drug testing doesn't work, it falsely accuses innocent people and subjects them to undeserved sanctions and stigma.

Even when it hits its target, the program just creates more problems:

Limited resources for treatment present another challenge. The state has a waiting list of 800 to 1,000, depending on the type of substance abuse service. The average wait is several weeks. Adding people to the list will tax government programs further, critics say.

This is the exact program you have to attend in order to regain eligibility for public assistance, but you can't get into it because Virginia's too busy busting and drug testing people to pay for treatment. The whole thing is just a massive escalator to nowhere.

Whatever one thinks about government assistance, it should at least be clear that infecting existing programs with the blind and corrupt influence of the drug war will merely ruin more lives.

Vancouver's sixth homicide has been identified as the last member of a family crack cocaine business.Earl Seymour and three cousins used to run the crack in Vancouver's infamous Down Town East Side.Earl has been identified as the sixth homicide of the year and the sixth drug related killing of '08.Ken was killed in Glace Bay N.S.

Pete Guither calls our attention to this remarkable statement from drug policy academic Mark Kleiman:

But there are things we can do about drug policy that would reduce the number of people in prison, and the extent of drug abuse and drug related crime. Legalization isn't one of them because there's not public support for it. And if we acknowledge the fact that, from the point of view of the majority of the population it's a loser, um, then it's not as if we can talk them out of that, so I think the legalization debate is mostly a distraction from doing the real work of fixing our drug policies.

Kleiman has long positioned himself as somewhat of a centrist in the drug policy debate, finding fault on both sides of the fence and calling for reform while dismissing legalization as unrealistic and irresponsible. To that end, the above quote may be his most perplexing to date.

Along these same lines, I once attended a discussion of Peter Reuter and David Boyum's book An Analytic Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy, in which the authors admitted ignoring the legalization option in their analysis. Boyum claimed that there was no legitimate political support for ending the drug war and that he and Reuter had therefore confined themselves to recommendations that they thought were politically viable.

It is just depressing to witness academics confining the discussion of complex issues within the parameters of pre-existing public opinion. What's the point of possessing vast knowledge of any subject if one chooses to then limit themselves to the preferred policy prescriptions of all the people who don't know what the hell they're talking about?

Plainly, the whole don't-talk-about-drug-legalization argument as stated above has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of drug legalization. Taken at face value, these pleading solicitations for us to shut up carry with them the salient implication that if drug legalization were politically viable, then it would be a perfectly sensible thing to discuss.

Ironically, drug legalization could become politically viable overnight if not for the multitudes of influential people who continue to oppose it largely because it lacks political viability.