THINK AGAIN: "Drugs," by Ethan Nadelmann, Foreign Policy, September-October 2007, p. 24.

I have to admit, this is my second mailed issue of FP (I got a subscription this summer) and I'm wondering if I'll renew. It's certainly more interesting than Foreign Affairs, but it also comes off as rather light, to the point where I don't find myself clipping anything.

This issue's polling of "100 top foreign policy" experts re: Iraq and the war on terror was especially unimpressive, to my surprise. I just found myself completely uninterested in the conglomerate opinion of a load of former government officials and establishment academics. In some instances it was surprising and in too many others it just came off as goofy (like 90%-plus saying America is in more danger now than prior to 9/11, an opinion and polling statistic I couldn't care less about since it's mostly an indictment of Bush's policies than some objective judgment). I mean, it basically reduced the field to the equivalent of a toothpaste commercial: "nine out of ten foreign policy experts say . . ."). Again, I was just bored by it all.

The one thing that's consistently good in FP is the "Think Again" column. It's a cool format and it's always provocative. This time is no different.

The arguments offered here about rethinking our "war on drugs" are very solid. We have all these tough laws and what do we end up with: 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prison population, and drug-use rates worse than all those lax European states. Amazing!

The basic comparison to Prohibition is a good one: zero tolerance is just a bankrupt approach, given human nature.

Worst, America has managed to export our tough-approach rule set around the world. As the author puts it, "Rarely has one nation so successfully promoted its own failed policies to the rest of the world."

The killer bit: 40% of our nation's 1.8 million drug arrests each year are for tiny amounts of pot. We thus lock up more people each year for drug violations (roughly 500,000) than Europe locks up for all crimes.

In short, it's a failed policy that retards our relationship with states to our south and it should go. We should medicalize the problem instead of criminalizing it. We've done great things with alcohol abuse and smoking in the last 20 years, so why not be more ambitious with drugs?