A WAR WORTH FIGHTING

In his Aug. 26 op-ed column, David S. Broder argues for a "reexamination"
of the war on drugs. Fair enough. But if the reexamination is to be done on
the premise that the past is a record of failure, then let's begin by
reexamining some facts.

The drug war, when it was being waged, worked. Between 1979 and 1992, drug
use in this country decreased 60 percent. The price of drugs increased and
their purity decreased. That is not a failure; that is the definition of
public policy success.

There has been recent quibbling over whether the decline was attributable
to public policy or a changing culture. I would submit that both were
involved. Effective interdiction and law enforcement played a role, as did
prevention and treatment. And much of the prevention effort -- such as the
powerful advertisements by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America -- was
aimed at making drugs less fashionable. Policy can affect the culture; the
realms are not entirely separate.

Very few people are imprisoned for simple possession of drugs. Broder
wonders how many people are imprisoned for simple possession of marijuana.
It is a fair question, and one to which I wish we had the answer. But since
those data are not available, Broder cites statistics that show state
prisons hold 236,800 drug offenders. He thus implies that many or most of
these are in jail for possession. That is emphatically not the case: Only
27 percent of drug offenders in state prisons are convicted of possession.
And it is only a fraction of this 27 percent who are imprisoned for
possession of marijuana. Overall, the vast majority of state drug offenders
are imprisoned for trafficking.

On the federal level, the number of people imprisoned for possession is
even smaller. According to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, only one percent of all federal drug convictions in 1999 were
for possession. More than half of those convicted of simple possession had
prior convictions. In fact, more than a quarter faced additional charges --
ranging from firearms to fraud or theft to assorted motor vehicle crimes.
And for those possession-only offenders, the average sentence was 15.8
months -- a far cry from the 74-month average for those convicted of
trafficking.

Moreover, it is very likely that many of those convicted of possession --
in both state and federal prisons -- have pleaded down from more serious
offenses. This is indicated by the recent Bureau of Justice Statistics
report, which pointed out that almost all possession convictions are the
result of guilty pleas (98.5 percent) and that there were more convictions
for possession than there were suspects for possession (1,038 convictions
vs. 785 suspects) in the period covered.

Many state initiatives are thinly veiled attempts to legalize drugs. Broder
himself knows this, for he once wrote about the Arizona initiative, which
had the effect of legalizing not only marijuana, but more than a hundred
other drugs -- "including," as Broder wrote, "LSD, heroin, and PCP." Broder
quoted Peter Sperling, one of the major financial backers of pro-drug
initiatives, as saying, "We want to medicalize all of [these drugs] -- and
not be namby-pamby." Peter Schrag, a journalist sympathetic to legalization
cited in Broder's piece, admitted that opponents of medical marijuana, for
example, are "probably . . . correct" in seeing this as the start of the
"slippery slope toward the decriminalization of other drugs."

Medicalization is a code word for legalization, something that Americans
fortunately still oppose in large, though slightly decreasing, numbers.
Efforts to treat drug use as simply a medical problem -- e.g., Proposition
36 in California last year -- are doomed to failure for two reasons. First,
they fail to take into account the role that law enforcement plays in
decreasing the amount of drugs on the street and providing a simple reason
for people -- especially children -- to refrain from using drugs. Second,
they undermine the idea of coercive treatment. Success in treatment is
often a function of longevity in treatment, and longevity of treatment is
often a function of whether one is coerced into entering -- and staying in
- -- treatment. If we remove criminal sanctions, we disarm ourselves of a key
weapon in fighting drug addiction.

I am not opposed to new ideas in the war on drugs; I am not opposed to a
"reexamination" by journalists such as David Broder. But in so doing let's
keep the above facts in mind. From 1979 to 1992, we made some real progress
in the effort against illegal drugs. We can do so again. Or things can get
worse, much worse -- and they will, if we heed the siren call of legalization.