Controlling Drugs

It was every parent's nightmare. In a middle-class town in Prince William County, a killer gunned down 21-year-old Daniel Petrole Jr., a player for top travel soccer teams, a popular graduate of Centreville High School and the son of a one time Secret Service agent. Danny Petrole was killed by an associate in a drug ring that sold millions of dollars' worth of marijuana and MDMA -- or Ecstasy.

There have been many stories about drug killings in urban areas, where often victims are poor and usually African-American -- murders that rate a paragraph or two in the Washington Post's inside pages. But these kids weren't like that.

The members of the drug ring were from affulent Virginia suburbs, former Little Leaguers who built their empire peddling drugs to suburban high-school students. They hung out in the VIP room of the DC nightclub Bohemian Caverns, vacationed in Hawaii, and spent thousands on weekend parties. The murder was over a $65,000 drug debt. After the March 2001 killing, police announced investigations into the group's Ecstasy suppliers. Little has been uncovered.

Although virtually all surveys show that cocaine, heroin, and crack are as widely used by whites as by minorities, Ecstasy is portrayed as the hot drug among suburban teens. Politicians have responded to parents' fears by enacting harsh laws with the goal of jailing traffickers.

In May 2000, senators Joseph Biden, Bob Graham, and Chuck Grassley introduced the Ecstasy Anti-Proliferation Act of 2000 "to combat Ecstasy trafficking, distribution, and abuse in the United States." Such measures are popular with many voters.

It's a routine that gets replayed all to often -- the announcement of a crisis, a policy to stifle it, followed months later by reports that the crisis has grown worse and tougher measures are in order.

Where does it end? Former US drug czar William Bennett once said he would support beheading drug dealers. Questioning current drug laws is like throwing a blood-soaked rag into a shark tank. For members of Congress, uttering a phrase suggesting any weakening of drug laws is a ticket to political oblivion.

Increasingly, though, police, judges, and conservative politicians and citizens have begun to weigh in, sometimes comparing drug-enforcement laws to the nation's experiment with alcohol prohibition.

"The myth that people have is that punitive laws will keep kids from being exposed to these drugs," says Joseph D. McNamara, a veteran of the New York City Police Department and now a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "They do the opposite."

David Boaz, of the libertarian Cato Institute in DC, agrees: "I don't think there's any question as to whether it increases the marketing to kids." In an illegal market, drug suppliers will go wherever they can find buyers -- often to middle and high schools.

Boaz, McNamara, and other critics usually cite our experience with drugs that have been around a long time -- heroin, cocaine, marijuana. Despite decades of well-publicized arrests and drug seizures, these substances are as available as ever.

Almost nine out of ten high-school seniors say marijuana is "fairly easy" or "very easy" to get, according to Monitoring the Future, a government-funded research organization. About half of high-school students will use illicit drugs before graduating.

Economist Milton Friedman argues that current drug policies actually increase addiction and crime by relegating the manufacture and distribution of drugs to hardened criminals, in the same way Prohibition led to the likes of Al Capone.

In many ways, Ecstasy offers a window into how our drug laws affect the market for illegal substances. The world of Ecstasy is a microcosm from which to look at the basic questions debated by drug-law advocates and critics: How have laws governing one drug changed its manufacture, use, and distribution?