MR WILLIAM BENNETT, newly appointed as President Bush's "drug tsar", once suggested that the campaign he now heads was a war that America is losing. He was right. The lost battles bring personal disaster to many Americans and menace civil peace in some of its big cities. Moreover, the defeat is a calamity for several poor countries, some virtually in thrall to drug barons. A United Nations conference last month threw its moral, but otherwise non-existent, weight behind the Americans in their fight against drugs. Yet even if the weight were there, the solution would still be missing.

The trouble in the present war against drugs is that the main weapon chiefly hurts its wielders. America's Prohibition of alcohol failed in 1919-33, while richly rewarding gangs of suppliers. When Prohibition ended, some of those bootleggers became law-abiding brewers and distillers. But the lesson of Prohibition enabled those mafiosi who had learnt it to grow much richer: prohibited drugs could yield even bigger profits than prohibited alcohol. Their cartels now control tax-exempt networks which multiply by thousands the value of simple raw materials, so profitably that they can suborn, intimidate or kill the servants of countries rich and poor.

Drug money helped to destroy Lebanon. It endangers post-Russian Afghanistan. The governments of Colombia and of Panama exist in its shadow. Americans, understandably, care more about crack in their schools and goons on their streets. Those problems spring from the same polluted well. The United States is by far the largest market for drugs. The market is efficient: supply has risen, competition (the goons) is intensifying, prices are falling, consumption rising. Prohibition fails because the reward for evading it is so big.

Seek control, not suppression

Men and (rather fewer) women have since the start of recorded time put enemies in their mouths to steal away their brains. Two main drugs are common in western societies: tobacco and alcohol. Wise rulers seek to limit the damage, not to ban them. Governments insist that the makers tell the public how bad for them the stuff is, restrict advertising, increase taxes, regulate sales. These policies work. Warned, people are getting wiser, smoking less, drinking more prudently. Most people who kill themselves with tobacco or booze do so knowing the risks; many more enjoy these drugs in moderation.

Eighteenth-century Britain was corrupted by cheap bad gin in its new big cities. The government then started controls on the quality of alcoholic drinks, licensing of outlets and taxation to divert demand to less harmful intoxicants. British drunkenness has since been a nuisance, not a scourge.

Today's three main illegal drugs are marijuana, cocaine and heroin. They are grouped together, and set apart from tobacco and alcohol, not because they are similar but because they are illegal. This makes them needlessly attractive to the rebellious young, and needlessly frightening to the law-abiding, who should be more scared of the gangsters who run the trade than of the drugs themselves.

Marijuana and its concentrated form, hashish, make you drowsy. They are intoxicating like alcohol, can damage the lungs like tobacco, and are less addictive than either, as tens of millions of Americans know from experience. By calling them illegal the United States wastes millions vainly trying to suppress the trade, and forgoes billions in taxes upon a crop that may now be second in value only to wheat.

Cocaine, which makes fools feel clever, has gone downmarket as it gets cheaper and its bad effects on the nose and heart become known. Like alcohol, it hooks some of those who try it, especially in the cheap-and-nasty adulterated form called crack. A sensible policy would tax it more stiffly, and restrict its sales outlets more tightly, than its main competitors, just as spirits are controlled and taxed more than beer.

Heroin is much more dangerous. It delights and obsesses many of those who try it, making them addicts. Present policy tempts them to pay for their supply either by mugging innocents or by becoming proselytising suppliers themselves. Heroin's victims need doctors, but the law puts them in the hands of gangsters; by calling them criminals it deters them from seeking treatment, so spreads the evil it was meant to contain.

Prohibition cruelly compounds the problems it was meant to solve. So end it. Legalise, control, discourage: those are the weapons for Mr Bennett's war.