COSTLY DRUG WAR GOING NOWHERE

American drug policy is on automatic pilot and heading nowhere. Despite
overwhelming evidence that the expenditure of billions of dollars has
failed to significantly curb the drug problem in the United States, the
same repudiated tactics are turned to year after year because, it seems,
the idea of dramatic new thinking is unacceptable to our leaders.

No rational discourse, no poll showing the bulk of the American people
hunger for change, seems to embolden any politician to try to seize the
controls and head in a positive direction.

Meanwhile, the number of innocent victims of the drug war adds up, from
tourist Kate Kaniff, who last week was awarded $129,750 for the humiliating
strip-search she suffered at O'Hare Airport, to Baptist missionary Veronica
Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity, killed last spring in a plane
shot down by the Peruvian air force under the direction of the CIA.

And for every name mentioned in the media, thousands of others unnamed
suffer from America's heavy-handed swatting at drug abuse, such as the
1,300 African-American women who filed a class-action lawsuit claiming they
were subjected to similar degrading strip-searches at O'Hare.

The blame doesn't lie entirely with politicians. To call the public stance
on drugs schizophrenic is to be charitable. On one hand, record numbers of
schoolchildren are tranquilized, Ritalin-ated and Prozac- ified, a ritual
so embedded that laws nationwide are being passed to keep school districts
from compelling parents to dope their kids. On the other, the proven
benefits of medical marijuana to a wide range of sick and desperate people
are vigorously ignored.

Glance at any aspect of the drug war, and you see reflected back a
disturbing picture. For instance, the federal mandatory minimum sentences
are draconian and unjust, tying the hands of judges and forcing them to
incarcerate first-time, nonviolent offenders for decades at a pop.

All this might be barely tolerable if the country were drug-free, but the
fact is that drugs are more available than ever--cheap and on every street
corner and schoolyard, it seems.

"War" is an apt metaphor for our drug efforts, and we would be even more
accurate if we thought of it as our "Vietnam War on Drugs"--an endless,
failed expenditure of lives and money that our leaders seem powerless to stop.

We need to rethink our public policy. We need to come up with something
that doesn't merely pack the prisons while failing to address the root
cause of demand: drug addiction, a medical crisis that should be treated as
the health problem it is, and not something that will be solved by sending
in the Marines. We need to find a cure that isn't worse than the illness.

Decision a winner

The nightmare mishandling of last November's presidential election should
never be repeated in a single precinct in America. Thus kudos to Cook
County Circuit Court Judge Julia M. Nowicki for her permanent injunction
allowing the use of voting machines that tell voters whether they've marked
their ballots properly. The right to vote is sacrosanct in this country,
and anything to make the process more transparent and error-free is to be
applauded.