ADDICTED TO THE DRUG WAR

FRONTLINE'S two-part documentary Drug Wars, which airs on PBS on
Monday and Tuesday, October 9 and 10, concludes with the U. S.
government poised for its biggest campaign yet to control the flow of
narcotics. The Clinton administration recently gave Colombia
a1.3-billion to send police and soldiers into guerrilla-controlled
territory to eradicate coca plants cultivated by peasant farmers. The
history of U. S. drug-war efforts-the subject of this instructive and
often compelling four-hour report-foretells the tragedy that will soon
unfold.

The documentary's central theme is the intensification of the drug war
during the past three decades and its continued failure to reduce the
flow of drugs-especially cocaine-from Latin America to the United
States. Starting with President Nixon's escalation of the war in the
early 1970's,the report uses film footage and interviews with key
participants to mark some of the milestones of drug trafficking and
drug-war policy. In addition to talks with law-enforcement agents,
political officials, and drug traffickers, there are exclusive
interviews with the men who led the infamous Medellin cartel.

The filmmakers examine Nixon as the first president to launch a major
federal drug-treatment program-methadone for heroin addicts-and the
first to give the enforcement of drug laws a high priority. They look
at President Carter's failed attempt to decriminalize marijuana, at
the crack epidemic of the mid-1980's and the accompanying publicity,
at the sharp increase in law-enforcement financing that followed, and
at the stiffening of penalties for drug offenses during President
Reagan's second term. But the documentary's main focus is on the drug
war abroad in the 1980's and 1990's, particularly in Colombia and Mexico.

The historic failure of those efforts is driven home as the report
documents instance after instance-drawing in part on testimony from
Drug Enforcement Administration and other law-enforcement officials-to
explain the goals, tactics, and outcomes of the operations. As the
narrative unfolds, each success at seizing drugs, breaking up
Colombian cartels, and arresting Mexican drug lords fails to raise the
price or lower the supply of drugs in the United States. In fact,
although unstated in the program,the price of heroin and cocaine has
fallen substantially since 1970, even as law-enforcement efforts have
escalated.

One D.E.A. agent, Bill Alden, remembers the glee at the agency's
headquarters after the great drug bust of March 10, 1984, when a major
cocaine-processing complex, Tranquilandia, was destroyed in the
Colombian jungle. "We thought . . . we would see probably a drop in
purity an increase in price, because we affected availability ...
Wrong-there was no impact. There was absolutely no-- 22,000 pounds,
12, almost 12 tons of cocaine seized-no impact on the market at all."

By the end of the documentary, some of the strongest arguments for
shifting priorities to treatment, education, and prevention come from
the very same law enforcers who designed and directed the drug war.
Would putting 90 percent of the drug-war budget (currently
$18.5-billion) into treatment work? asks Jack Lawn, a former D.E.A.
chief. "We won't know unless we try it," he says. "But 20 years of
doing it the other way certainly has not worked."

If the drug war has failed, is it because the government has not tried
hard enough? Or is the strategy inherently unworkable? Drug Wars does
not systematically explore that critical question. Some officials
interviewed suggest that the failure is due to a lack of political
will, or to interagency rivalries, or to the willingness of the U. S.
government to subordinate America's drug control to other national
interests. The United States has, for instance, turned a blind eye to
corruption in Mexico in order to promote rrNA and free trade, and
ignored drug smuggling by the American-supported contras in Nicaragua
in the interest of overthrowing the Sandinista government.

Other evidence in the documentary suggests that even if U. S. agencies
worked hand in hand, and no national priorities ever trumped control
of narcotics, the drug war would still fail miserably Robert Stutman,
former head of the D.E.A.'S New York office, tells of a study done by
the agency's Intelligence Division 20 years ago. Profits on illegal
drugs were so high, he says, that the "average drug-- trafficking
organization, meaning from Medellin to the streets of New York, .. .
could afford to lose 90 percent of its product and still be
profitable. ... That is a hell of a business. . .. Even if you are
wildly successful (interdicting drug traffic, you are not going to
stop drug trafficking in the United States."

In one of the best segments of Drag Wars, Guillermo Gonzalez
Calderoni, former commander of the Mexican federal police, details the
systemic corruption of Mexico's law-enforcement agencies, with
low-paid officers in all ranks bribing their superiors for jobs in
which illicit drug money is available. Such a detailed public
admission by an insider is rare. Later, dramatic footage from U. S.
Customs shows a Mexican military unit, paid by the traffickers to
protect a planeload of cocaine, ambushing and killing Mexican federal
police officers chasing the plane. The implicit conclusion: With
corruption so widespread, a law-enforcement solution is impossible.

ONE OF THE SHOW'S most convincing illustrations of law enforcement's
limited effectiveness is the well-edited sequence narrated by a former
drug trafficker, Steve. He guides the viewer step by step through his
own operation: purchasing cocaine in Colombia, arranging shipment by
plane or boat to Tijuana, and bringing the drugs across the border
hidden among the thousands of vehicles that cross into the United
States each day. "I used to send 12 cars at a time. . . . I figured,
as long as six cars-50 percent-got through, I was making a good profit
" Steve distributes the cocaine in Los Angeles, ships it by truck,
courier, or FedEx to retail markets around the country, and finally
smuggles the dollars back into Mexico, where he easily launders them
in Mexican banks.

Given such overwhelming evidence that America's drug-war strategies
are failing, why do we persist? The documentary hints at some answers.
During the rapid expansion of the drug war in the mid-1980's, the news
media hyped the growing crack problem as a national crisis.
Politicians, anxious to prove how tough they were, approved large
budget increases and "mandatory sentences . . . unprecedented in their
severity." Members of Congress, says Eric Sterling, then a
Congressional aide, "were jockeying for position in front of the Tv
camera about what they were doing about the drug crisis."

Political ambition helps explain the persistence of failing drug
policies, but the documentary doesn't explicitly mention the role of
partisan politic. In the late 1970's, conservative Republicans seized
the drug war as part of a larger moral agenda in an effort to create a
populist base against the Democrats The Democrats, in turn, tried to
grab the drug issue back as a way to prove their tough-- on-crime bona
fides. Evidence and rational argument were irrelevant, as both sides
competed to turn evidence of failure into arguments for escalation.

One of the most subtle and important explanations for our failure to
change course is the politics of stigmatization, which the filmmakers
mention briefly. Film clips show President Bush's first drug czar,
William Bennett, arguing that people who use drugs are culpable,
responsible for their behavior, and should be punished. In the next
clip, Dr. Jerome Jaffe, Nixon's drug czar, explains that branding drug
users as immoral may persuade people to behave differently, but also
makes them seem "perhaps a little unworthy of an investment in treatment."

IN FACT, Jaffe's first attempts to persuade Nixon to back methadone
treatment failed until the president was told by advisers that
thousands of soldiers returning from Vietnam had become addicted to
heroin. "I think it's .. . been easy to stigmatize and marginalize the
heroin users in the inner cities . . . to make it possible to treat
them primarily as law-enforcement problems," Jaffe explains. "It's a
lot harder to do that with people that you've sent as part of the
military to fight your battles on foreign soil, and to say that
they're not worthy of special attention."

But even Nixon's short-lived emphasis on methadone treatment was
packaged as a crime-fighting tool, not a health measure, implying that
the only justification for treating the addict-criminal was to keep
him or her off the street. The fact that treatment programs since then
have always been stepsisters to the punitive drug war, and always
packaged as crimefighting tools, has ensured the continued
stigmatization of people with drug problems-and fueled public support
for escalating punishment, not treatment efforts.

The consequences of such failed yet unchanging punitive policies are
tragic not only for those left without care, but also for hundreds of
thousands of people with drug problems who go to prison for crimes
often committed to support their habits. "Today there are nearly two
million people in U.S. jails, . . . a doubling since 1994," the
documentary says. "The U. S. now matches Russia in having the highest
incarceration rate in the world. Well over half the prisoners are in
on drug charges, and two-thirds are minorities-50 percent black, 17
percent Hispanic. . . . Mandatory minimums. . . have resulted in
sentences for drug convictions that are often longer than for murder
and rape."

The damage left in the wake of the escalating drug war goes beyond our
borders to the Latin American countries that we enlist to fight the
war on their own turf The current spectacular expansion of U.S. aid to
Colombia will soon provide another chapter in the story told by Drug
Wars In Colombia, antigovernment guerrillas have moved into the drug
business, taxing the peasant growers of coca and the drug traffickers
who operate in the guerrillas' zones of control. The U.S. aid program
(backed by several hundred advisers) will soon involve us in a major
counterinsurgency war, as we encourage the Colombian military and
police to push into guerrilla-controlled coca-growing regions.

THE DOCUMENTARY quotes without comment the highly misleading label
that Gen. Barry McCaffrey the current drug czar, uses to describe the
guerrillas: "narco insurgents." He wrongly pictures them as fighting
only for drug dollars, not for ideology He overlooks the fact that the
guerrillas have been fighting for more than four decades, in a civil
war over political power and reform, not economic gain. The
documentary also fails to mention that the military we are aiding has
itself long been involved in protecting drug traffickers, and that the
so-called paramilitary forces-right-wing militias often armed,
trained, and protected by the military-are as deeply involved in
taxing drug growers as the guerrillas are.

Mathea Falco, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics
matters in the Carter administration, argues that "we're deluding
ourselves that we're going to have any impact on our own drug problem"
by making war in Colombia. She's right. Even if the U. S.-backed war
defoliates every acre of coca leaf, burns every laboratory, and
destroys every last gram of Colombian cocaine, it will have won a
hollow victory. As long as demand persists in the United States, the
drug business will simply move elsewhere, as it always does. But the
people of Colombia will live with deepening violence and escalating
civil war as a result. It is they who will pay the price for the
foolhardiness of our public officials.

Unwilling to face the lessons of our own history, and lacking courage
to "just say no" to a failed policy U.S. politicians are too paralyzed
to face the truth: Drug abuse and addiction are primarily a health
problem, instead of a crime problem, and they must be tackled here at
home.