By: Mansfield B. Frazier

The road to victory for the U.S. in Afghanistan is as clear as it is complicated. Nonetheless, we can achieve victory where other superpowers have failed if we’re willing to make one very tough, audacious decision: Decriminalize heroin.

Neither wars nor insurgencies can be prosecuted if the aggressors lack the financial wherewithal, and the Taliban is financing its war against American interests chiefly in one way: Through the poppy — heroin sales. Deprive our enemies of the income from illicit narcotics sales and we deprive them of the means to kill our young men and women … it’s really that simple. They eventually would run out of weaponry.  You can’t buy bombs and bullets on credit.

And recently there have been reports out of Afghanistan that the Taliban is targeting our troops with its easy to obtain, mind-numbing, and courage-building heroin. For young men — and increasingly young women — in a faraway place, soldiering under extreme and dangerous conditions, the temptation for a respite from the pressures of war can become too strong to resist. 

Vietnam, where 25 percent of our soldiers came home junkies should have “learned” us — but obviously it didn’t. We still have too many armchair patriots far too willing to ship our young men and women around the globe and put them in harm’s way on the filmiest of excuses.      

What we don’t have in this country is leadership willing to stand up and make hard choices when the evidence is clear. The hard, complicated part for our elected officials is summoning up the courage to surmount their own moralistic (and some would say idiotic) views on drugs, usage and treatment.

Here, we have fought an un-winnable 40-years “War on Drugs” that has resulted in nothing more than desperately overcrowded prisons and drive-by killings … in America’s inner-cities as well on the streets of drug-supplying countries. The illegal aspect of drugs (which sustains their artificially high prices) allows them to remain the most morally corrupting and destructive influence on the face of the earth.

The stark reality is, we are allowing our enemy to beat us with our own unchecked and untreated appetite for narcotics. For years experts have repeatedly informed us that the only way to win the War on Drugs is to reduced demand via providing more treatment, yet we continue to simplistically focus more on the supply side — to no avail. If our efforts at controlling supply had been successful over the years, the price of a kilo of drugs (be it heroin or cocaine) would have risen. Instead, they have fallen. Yet the U. S. Drug Enforcement Administration continues to bully a timid Congress to keep funding the unworkable. This federal agency is not about to try to put itself out of business. 

It’s past time for us to really “control” controlled substances by decimalizing, taxing and dispensing them via health clinics.  Other countries have successfully done so for years without ill-effect. Look at the success England has experienced.

Our current effort at control is a mockery, and flies in the face of the laws of free enterprise. To wit:  Illicit drugs are the purest form of capitalism in the world; they respect no rules, no laws nor national boundaries, and respond only to one universal law: supply and demand.

Decriminalize drugs. If the experiment fails, we will still have crippled the Taliban’s ability and effectiveness to kill our young men and women … perhaps permanently. The key word is “audacious” Mr. President.