DRUG ABUSERS SENT TO JAIL FOR A SICKNESS

WE didn't need any more dramatic examples of how drug addiction should be
treated as a health issue, not just a criminal issue, but Robert Downey Jr.
has given one to us anyway.

Like Darryl Strawberry, Downey just can't seem to keep illegal drugs out of
his bloodstream or his body out of jail.

While most of the rest of the country was enjoying Thanksgiving weekend,
Downey was getting busted for possession of cocaine and methamphetamines in
his Palm Springs hotel room, after police were alerted by a tipster.

The arrest comes barely three months after he left Corcoran State Prison in
California, where he served little more than a year of an original
three-year sentence. That sentence came after years of drug-related
incidents, arrests and second chances that have provided late-night
comedians with more laughs than Elizabeth Taylor's marriages used to.

But the comedy masks our national astonishment: Downey had the money and
connections to get the best treatment possible. He also had a bright
future. He had just joined TV's "Ally McBeal" cast, received rave reviews
and signed to begin two new movie deals. And after all that, he still
couldn't kick the habit?

Similar questions are raised by Strawberry, the former baseball star and
current colon cancer patient, who was arrested Oct. 25 after walking away
from a residential drug treatment center in Florida. He had been under
house arrest there for 1999 charges of drug possession and soliciting a
prostitute. While AWOL from the treatment center, prosecutors say, he
smoked crack cocaine and took 10 antidepressant pills.

Do these men have a death wish? By their own accounts, yes.

"Life hasn't been worth living for me, that's the honest truth," news
accounts quoted Strawberry as saying in court. "I am not afraid of death."

It's "like I've got a shotgun in my mouth, with my finger on the trigger,
and I like the taste of the gun metal," Downey told a judge last year.

With those words, Strawberry and Downey speak for addicts everywhere. They
have a death wish, whether or not they realize it. The question for the
rest of us is, do we want to help them pull the trigger? Or can more of
these sad cases be saved?

That, it seems to me, is what happens when our national drug policy treats
non-violent drug offenders as criminals when they should be patients.

In our 30-plus-year-old war on drugs, tactics shifted during the Ronald
Reagan years from treating drugs as a health problem to treating them
almost exclusively as a criminal matter.

Personal responsibility became the byword. Instead of large-scale treatment
of cocaine addicts, there was a new policy of "Just Say No." That, as one
former drug official from the Jimmy Carter administration said, is like
telling someone who's clinically depressed to "have a nice day."

The war-on-crime approach continued with President Clinton, a centrist who
did not want to be seen as soft on drugs. His drug czar Barry McCaffrey
even pressured Donna Shalala, secretary of Health and Human Services, into
backing away from a planned endorsement of needle-exchange programs.

California voters recently approved an initiative to spend $60 million to
divert non-violent drug abusers in the state's prison system into treatment
programs. Drug-related incarcerations grew 25-fold since 1980 in
California, leading the nation, according to a study the Justice Policy
Institute released in July. Almost half of all drug offenders imprisoned in
California last year were imprisoned for simple possession, the institute
reported.

Other states should make similar moves. Non-violent drug offenders have
grown faster than just about any other category of criminals in our
nation's state prison population. Nearly one of four American prison
inmates is being held on drug-related offenses, the institute reports. The
number of violent offenders entering state prisons has doubled, and the
number of nonviolent prisoners has tripled.

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has proposed federal funding for states that
seek to divert nonviolent drug offenders into treatment instead of prison.

On the Republican side, you have small-government drug reformers like Rep.
Tom Campbell of California who has argued for more prison drug-treatment
programs and even experiments in supplying drugs to addicts the way Zurich,
Switzerland, tried with mixed success.

Michigan's Republican Gov. John Engler also has endorsed modifying his
state's mandatory sentencing for drug offenders to encourage more
treatment. New York's Republican Gov. George Pataki has talked about making
similar modifications in that state's get-tough drug laws.

We have a fought a war on drugs -- as Reagan used to say about Lyndon
Johnson's war on poverty -- and drugs have won. A major reason is our
failure to treat the conditions, psychological and otherwise, that lead
users to abuse the stuff in the first place.

As jailbirds go, Downey and Strawberry put a face on America's drug plague
that the movies seldom show. Neither Downey nor Strawberry has stuck a gun
under anyone's nose or snatched a gold chain from anyone's neck or busted
open a parking meter to get the change inside.

At its best, the criminal justice system has helped stop drug addicts from
killing themselves. But when it lets non-violent offenders back on the
street without treating the conditions, psychological and otherwise, that
feeds the addiction.

Clarence Page writes for Tribune Media Services.