Da New York: il testo che segue è un articolo apparso sul Washington Post il 1 aprile 1985 a firma di William F. Buckley Jr.

William F. Buckley Jr. è giornalista, editorialista, fondatore di The National Review, considerato il più autorevole porta parola dell'ala conservatrice dell'intellighentia di destra degli Stati Uniti. In questo articolo Buckley spiega perchè, dopo essersi schierato in passato per la linea proibizionista almeno per quanto riguarda l'eroina, abbia cambiato opinione

W.F.BUCKLEY Jr. : LEGALIZE DOPE

We are with reason angry at the Mexican officials who ho-hummed their way through an investigation of the torture and killing of a U.S drug agent. It is true that a few years ago the government of Mexico cooperated in a program designed to spray the marijuana crop, but it proved temporary. Somewhat like wage and price controls.

If for a season the marijuana crop from Mexico declines, then marijuana from elsewhere -Hawaii for instance- will increase. If there is less marijuana being smoked today than 10 years ago, it is a reflection not of law enforcement but of creeping social perception. It has gradually transpired that the stuff is more harmful than originally thought, and a culture that spends billions of dollars on health foods is taking a longer, critical look at marijuana.

We read about cocaine. In a vivid image, someone recently said that the big radars along the 2,000-mile border between Mexico and the United States begin, night after night, to track what looks like a swarm of locusts headed our way. Private planes, carrying coke to the American market.

So we bag a large number of them today, and they show up on the television news: that plane over there was carrying $ 10 million (or was it $ 100 million?) worth of coke, hurray for the Drug Enforcement Agency. But the the sober evaluation comes through. Last year -a splendid year for drug apprehension- resulted in interdicting, oh, maybe 10percent, 20 percent of the stuff coming in. And of course the measure of success in the drug business, like that in the business of robbing banks, is, what are your chances of getting through? Answer:terrific. The adds will always be high, when you consider that the amount of coke you can stuff into a single pocket of a man's jacket can fetch £ 200,000 and that the cost of the stuff where picked up can be as loww as $ 1,000. A profit of 2,000 percent (modest in the business) is a powerful engine to try to stop in a free society.

So what are we going to do about it? My resourceful brother William Safire has a hot bundle of ideas aimed at catching the people who launder the profits from drugs. These ideas include changing the color of our currency, so that the boys with big sackfuls of green under their mattresses willbe forced to bring them out, revealing their scarlet letters.

Maybe we should breed 50 million drug-trained dogs to sniff at everyone gettinf off a boat or an airplane: what a great idea!

No, we are face to face with the rawest dream of them all, which is that the problem would not exist, except that in the United States there is a market for the stuff, and that the stuff is priced very high.

If we cannot effectively prevent its insinuating its way into the country, what it is that we can prevent? The answer, of course, is the price. The one thing that could be done overnight is to legalize the stuff. EXIT CRIME, AND THE PROFITS FROM VICE.

It is hardly a novel suggestion to legalize dope. Shrewd observers of the scene have recommended it for years. I am on the record as having opposed it in the matter of heroin. The accumulated evidence draws me away from my own opposition, on the purely empirical grounds that what we have now is a drug problem plus a crime problem plus a problem of a huge export of capital to the dope-producing countries.

Congress should study the dramatic alternative, which is legalization followed by a dramatic educational effort in which the services of all civic-minded. and some less than civic-minded, resources are mobilized

Ours is a free society in which thousands of people kill themselves with tobacco and booze. Some will do so with coke and heroin. But we should count in the lives saved by having the deadly stuff available at the same price as rat poison.