'JUST SAY NO' LIKE TELLING DEPRESSED TO `HAVE A NICE DAY'

Prison Time For Drug Addicts Is No Way To Cure 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 it to us anyway.

Like former New York Yankee 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, Calif., hotel room after police were alerted by a tipster.

The arrest comes barely three months after he left California's Corcoran
State Prison, where Downey served a little more than a year of a 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.

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 movie deals. And after all that he still couldn't
kick the habit? What's wrong with him?

Similar questions are raised about Strawberry, who has colon cancer, and
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 center, prosecutors say, he smoked crack cocaine and took 10
anti-depressant 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, "Straw" and Downey speak for addicts everywhere. They
have a death wish, whether they realize it or not.

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, which began in earnest with President
Richard Nixon, the tactics shifted during the Ronald Reagan years from
treating drug use as a health problem to treating it 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 Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala into
backing away from a planned endorsement of needle-exchange programs.

But the voters are sending a different message. 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. Leading the
nation, California's drug-related incarcerations grew 25-fold since 1980,
according to a study that 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 every four American prison
inmates is being held on drug-related offenses, the institute reports. The
number of drug-related incarcerations has grown 11-fold since 1980, the
study found, while the number of violent offenders entering state prisons
has doubled and the number of non-violent prisoners has tripled.

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

On the Republican side, you have small-government drug reformers like
California's Rep. Tom Campbell, who has argued for more prison
drug-treatment programs and even experiments in supplying drugs to addicts
the way Zurich 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 dating back to
the 1960s when Republican Nelson Rockefeller was governor.

We have 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 gangster movies seldom show. Neither Downey nor Strawberry stuck a gun
under anyone's nose or snatched a gold chain from around 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 out on the
street without treating the conditions, psychological and otherwise, that
feed the addiction, the system only feeds the problems it is trying to prevent.