TEMPERING THE WAR

America's "War On Drugs" Did Not Start In A Vacuum.

It did not even start as a campaign against drugs, but as a holy crusade
against saloons and alcoholic drink.

More than 100 years ago, the death of a mother became a rallying cry for the
temperance movement. This woman, whose name is lost to posterity, came to
harm not because alcohol was illegal, but because it was plentiful. She was
not caught up in any cross fire between Al Capone and Eliot Ness. She was
caught up in alcoholism. Her memory was kept alive by an Ohio preacher named
Howard Hyde Russell, who became an early leader in the turn-of-the-century
temperance movement.

In his memoirs, Russell related the incident that galvanized him into
action:

"One of the Sunday-school boys was crying at my door and asked me to come.

"It's my mother," he sobbed. "She died with pneumonia. Only sick three days.
Three of us left .... Father, little sister, and myself."

I took the street address ... and [found] the father intoxicated ... and
there were three or four neighbor women with liquor upon their breath. Then
I asked the boy, "Do you know what caused your mother's death? It was the
drink. Are you ever going to drink, my boy?" I asked him.

"I'll never touch it," and the boy clenched his little hand as he said it.

I then made a solemn promise also: "I promise to go out to my brothers and
sisters of the churches, regardless of their name and creed, and I will
appeal to them to join their hearts and hands in a movement to destroy this
murderous curse."

The outcome was the founding, in 1893, of the Ohio Anti- Saloon League. Two
years later, the group went national, and Russell was chosen superintendent.
This organization joined with others, including the Woman's Christian
Temperance Union and the Prohibition Party, in lobbying Congress and the
state legislatures to ban the manufacture and sale of alcohol.

Perhaps because these groups were dominated by women or clergymen, their
fliers and literature tended to feature not images of female drinkers, but
images of men whiling away their time and money in saloons while their
children, wretched, lonely, or despairing, suffered at home or on the
street.

Prohibition was repealed in 1933, 13 years after it began. But Herbert
Hoover's description of it as "an experiment noble and far-reaching" still
has resonance today.

It was during Prohibition that the government embraced a hard-hitting law
enforcement model for dealing with illegal substances. And although alcohol
was ultimately legalized again with the repeal of the 18th Amendment,
narcotics were not. And so today, the nation still operates in Prohibition's
shadow.

On the first day of the new school year, roughly 500,000 American children
will head out the door without being seen off by their parents because their
mothers or fathers-or both-are serving time in prison on drug charges.

Also that day, 142 Americans will die of drug overdoses or other causes
related to their abuse of illegal drugs.

And if it is a typical day, another 1,500 will be arrested and charged with
selling or possessing narcotics. Roughly $110 million in taxpayer money will
be spent-on just that one day-to incarcerate those defendants or to arrest
others, to treat drug addicts, and to try to prevent young people from
abusing drugs.

According to the estimates of the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy, American consumers will spend another $100 million to
purchase cocaine, as they do every day of the year.

Those are fearful costs for society, and those on every side of the drug
debate desperately want to lower them. There is, however, no real consensus
on how to do so. And a nation divided so widely on so much else-spanning
cultural, geographical, demographic, and political lines-appears to be
moving, fittingly enough, in two directions at once.

On the one hand, a New Temperance movement has brought "mandatory minimums"
to federal sentencing for illegal drugs and "zero-tolerance" policies to
public schools and federal housing projects. The movement has introduced
drug testing to the workplace, while raising the minimum drinking age to 21
and lowering the drinking-and-driving blood alcohol limit to a strict new
level, .08 percent.

The mandatory minimums, coupled with other law-and-order legislation, such
as "three strikes and you're out" and "truth in sentencing," have resulted
in a higher percentage of Americans being placed behind bars than at any
time in U.S. history.

Of the estimated 2 million Americans in prisons and jails, as many as
460,000 are there for drug offenses.

Sue Rusche, executive director of National Families in Action, the nation's
pre-eminent anti-drug activist group, makes no apologies for those numbers.

She says that the incarceration figure, embraced by the legalization
community, is exaggerated, because it includes arrestees in local jails,
many of whom will be released quickly or never charged.

The number of Americans in federal and state prison for drug offenses is
under 300,000, Rusche says. The "vast majority" of those serving time, she
adds, were dealing-not merely using-drugs, and thus were causing great
damage to society. "Those who say the true harm being done is the number of
people being incarcerated are relaying a false message. Drugs themselves
hurt people," Rusche says. "Addictive drugs change the brain and change
behavior in ways that cause great harm. More than half of those arrested for
violent crimes are high on drugs or alcohol at the time.... This is the kind
of harm the (legalization advocates) don't like to talk about."

Nevertheless, those who advocate a softer line have also had recent
successes.

In four states-Arizona, California, Colorado, and Nevada-the burgeoning and
well-funded legalization movement has underwritten successful efforts to
pass ballot-box questions allowing for the use of "medical" marijuana.

One of those states, California, followed up on this success by last year
passing Proposition 36, requiring the state's criminal justice system to
offer defendants charged with nonviolent drug possession a place in a
treatment program instead of prison. Under this law, hundreds of California
addicts-actor Robert Downey Jr. among them-have already been diverted into
medical, instead of penal, facilities.

This spring, a tragedy in Peru gave powerful ammunition to the drug war's
critics, some of whom believe that the current approach is doing more harm
than the drugs themselves. As proof, they point to the April 20 incident, in
which a Peruvian military jet, acting in concert with U.S. drug control
agents, downed a Cessna, killing Baptist missionary Veronica Bowers and her
daughter, in the mistaken belief that they were smuggling drugs.

One didn't have to be a proponent of drug legalization to see that
shoot-down as a metaphor for the drug war: The incompetence south of the
border and the arrogance north of the border collided to produce the
tragedy.

"We shouldn't be surprised that this occurred," says Bill Masters, the
libertarian-leaning sheriff from Telluride, Colo., who has written a book
critical of the enforcement approach to drugs. "Mad as hell, maybe, but not
surprised. After all, we are in a war, a war on drugs. And during times of
war, innocent people get in the way."

Collateral Damage

Until an unrepentant Timothy McVeigh stigmatized the phrase, the deaths of
innocents in combat were known in military parlance as "collateral damage."
The downing of the Baptists' plane was a spectacular example, but many
liberals-and not a few conservatives-insist that the collateral damage from
the drug war piles up every day in the nation's prisons, jails, morgues, and
hospitals, as well as in the inner-city housing projects that on some days
seem bereft of young men-men who've gone off to prison or died in gun
battles over their precious drug turf.

The litany of human suffering, whether it be a mother and child cut down in
the skies over Peru, or a family sundered by drug violence in Anacostia-or
Fairfax-has led Washington, and the 50 states, to again question, as they do
periodically, how much collateral damage is too much.

"I've been a lawman 34 years. I think our national drug strategy, that has
spanned both Democratic and Republican Administrations, has been a total
failure," proclaims Norm Stamper, a former police chief in Seattle. "If I
were king for a day and was going to learn from history, I would, in fact,
decriminalize drug possession."

Similar sentiments, although still a minority, have oozed out all over this
summer.

Peter Schrag, writing in the liberal magazine The American Prospect, called
the drug legalization movement the "sagebrush rebellion of the Left."
Actually, such doubts are being voiced all across the political spectrum.

In politics, libertarian Republican Gov. Gary E. Johnson of New Mexico has
picked up the legalization torch carried for years by liberal Kurt Schmoke,
a Democrat and former mayor of Baltimore. In the media, the respected,
market-conservative Economist of London renewed its call for legalization, a
call made two decades ago by the staunchly conservative National Review,
while left-leaning Rolling Stone magazine carried brief essays or interviews
from Stamper and 34 other prominent leaders in politics and the arts-almost
all of whom want drug treatment emphasized over criminal prosecutions.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., has been joined by a
Republican House member from his delegation named Jim Ramstad in trying to
divert some of the federal money going to interdiction in Colombia to drug
treatment at home. "Our priorities have been misplaced as a nation, when
we're spending only 16 percent of our funding on treatment," says Ramstad,
himself a recovering alcoholic. "That's not working!"

Frank K. Martin, a prominent defense lawyer from Columbus, Ga., who has
represented many defendants in drug cases but who also served as his city's
mayor for four years, echoes that view. "I don't know what the answer is,
but I do know this: The money and effort we've spent on this has not
produced the result we had hoped for-which is lowering drug use in society,"
Martin says. "What the police told me [as mayor], and what they tell me now,
is that as soon as you send [a dealer] to jail, someone else takes their
place. The reason they do it is the money."

Those who want to de-emphasize law enforcement and interdiction make several
other points. Consider five of them:

1 Financial burden to taxpayers. Currently, the Bush Administration's budget
request for drug control efforts-contained in 50-odd programs and
agencies-totals $19.2 billion for fiscal 2002. The states, which
collectively have 21 percent of their prison population locked up for drug
offenses, spend an equivalent amount. (In federal prison, that figure is
approaching 60 percent.)

2 Additional street crime because drugs are illegal. Thousands of Americans
are incarcerated each year because they steal or commit other crimes to
finance their addictions. According to Justice Department surveys of
inmates, this cohort comprises some 14 percent of those in prison on nondrug
offenses.

3 Painful side effects of wholesale incarceration. This includes losses of
productivity to the economy, unrealized tax revenues to the Treasury, and,
most poignantly, the hundreds of thousands of young children being raised by
relatives, many of them on public assistance, instead of by their own
parents. No government agency even keeps track of such children, something
President Bush has sought to address. His current budget earmarks $67
million for this purpose. "I propose to encourage mentoring programs for
children of prisoners," Bush says, "as well as programs that, when possible,
help to mend broken families." Inmate support groups laud Bush for this
proposal, but believe the best thing government could do for those kids
would be to lock up fewer of their parents.

4 Dealers' power over the market. Drug traffickers are not taxed. County
health inspectors do not inspect their manufacturing plants. The Food and
Drug Administration puts no government seal of approval on bottles of
Ecstasy to ensure that consumers are getting the real thing. "The current
strategy is one in which the type, price, purity, and potency of illicit
drugs, as well as the participants in the business, are largely determined
by drug dealers," observes Ethan A. Nadelmann, executive director of the
Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation, an organization that favors
legalizing marijuana and easing up on prosecutions for other drugs.

5 Increased health risks of drugs. Legalization advocates believe that a
government more concerned about the health of addicts than about putting
their suppliers behind bars could save thousands of lives each year. Needle
exchanges, for instance, could sharply curb the spread of infectious
diseases, including hepatitis and HIV, among the population using
intravenous drugs.

The Government Responds

The calls for decriminalization and legalization frustrate and irritate
those leading the government's fight against drugs. First of all, top
federal officials haven't claimed in the past 20 years, if ever, that
America can arrest its way out of this problem. They point out, quite
correctly, that an emphasis on "demand reduction" has been a growing part of
the federal anti- drug effort for at least two decades. Second, it is simply
inaccurate to suggest-as the critically acclaimed movie Traffic recently
did-that the top minds combating drug use are bereft of ideas on what to do
next.

In truth, there is a flurry of activity this year, ranging from the drug
czar's office in Washington to the labs at the National Institute on Drug
Abuse in Bethesda, Md., to the jungles of southern Colombia. Anti-narcotics
officials believe that all these efforts will ultimately pay dividends.

At the 17th Street offices of the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy, officials point with cautious optimism to studies showing
that the number of heroin addicts in this country has stabilized at around
900,000-and say that number should drop even lower because of new methadone
protocols.

These officials also point to other studies showing that the number of
chronic cocaine users has fallen from a peak of 3.8 million in 1988 to
around 3.3 million in 2000 and the number of "occasional" users has dropped
from 6 million to about 2 million.

They cite breakthroughs, as documented in National Institutes of Health
studies, on understanding how cocaine cravings manifest themselves over
time-the first step in developing an elusive medication to assist cocaine
addicts in breaking their habits. The same office is helping underwrite a
$185 million ad campaign that operates on two prevention tracks, one aimed
at kids, the other at parents. Both tracks draw from the most up-to-date
social science on what works in drug education and what doesn't work.

In the same vein, D.A.R.E., the anti-drug program pioneered in schools by
the Los Angeles Police Department, is currently revamping and modernizing
its entire curriculum. With the assistance of a generous grant from the
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and with help from social scientists at NIH
and the University of Akron, in Ohio, D.A.R.E. is mothballing its outmoded
"Just Say No" approach. Instead, D.A.R.E. will test the efficacy of its new
message in a huge, five-year-old controlled experiment that is the most
ambitious study of drug education ever undertaken.

Even the take-no-prisoners U.S. drug interdiction efforts so out of style
among academics and journalists are the source of some optimism in the drug
czar's office. Officials there say that U.S. drug agents now seize some 200
metric tons of cocaine annually on the high seas, at ports around the world,
or at the border. "It is not as easy to move drugs around as you might
think," says Robert Brown, acting head of the drug office's supply reduction
unit. "There are a finite number of places that are beyond government
control that have sufficient labor and materials [to produce cocaine].
That's why we've got to help the Colombians extend their sovereign control
over the rest of their country."

In an interview with four National Journal reporters, Dr. Donald R. Vereen,
deputy director of that office, added: "It's very easy to throw up your
hands, but this is a very complicated issue that defies a single solution.
I've talked to these [legalization] people.They leave out whole dimensions
of the problem. Where's the evidence [that legalization] will lessen the
problem? What's it based on? Where's the data?"

Drug control officials, whether they are traditional law- and-order types or
New Temperance advocates such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, are circling
back to the logic of Prohibition, which sought to keep alcohol out of
people's hands. In so doing, they may be on more solid historical ground
than is generally known.

Implicit in everything said by proponents of legalization is this underlying
proposition: The drug war does more harm to society than do the drugs
themselves. Prohibition was a failure, they say; so is the war on drugs.
This is a tempting proposition, because if it is true, the path government
must take becomes clearer. The problem is that, despite all the current
human carnage, this is a hard case to make. Addictive drugs, including
alcohol, ruin people's health, destroy lives, and kill, even without the
added complication of being illegal. And if users could obtain drugs more
easily, at less risk, for less money, and without stigma, the most basic
principles of economics and human behavior suggest that drug use would rise
by a lot.

This, really, is the lesson of Prohibition. Sure, it was a failure in some
ways. It helped finance an already entrenched crime underworld. It bred
cynicism among the electorate, which figured that the well connected could
get good booze anytime they wanted. It made lawbreakers out of millions of
otherwise law- abiding Americans, and it antagonized millions of other
would-be social drinkers who didn't break the law but who missed having wine
with dinner, or a beer with their ball game, or a brandy at bedtime.

But about two decades ago, a new crop of historians began looking more
critically at Prohibition-and began to notice things. One was that organized
crime was already well established in America by 1920, without any help from
Prohibition. Another was that Prohibition almost certainly lowered the
consumption of alcohol significantly. Thus, in one basic way, Prohibition
was a success. Its purpose had been to lessen drinking-and that's exactly
what it did.

"Alcohol consumption dropped during Prohibition dramatically," said history
professor K. Austin Kerr, an Ohio State University expert on Prohibition.
"In the early years, it dropped by as much as 50 percent, perhaps more.
Later in the 1920s, consumption increased, but it was still much lower than
before Prohibition. In fact, per capita consumption of the drinking-age
population did not return to pre-Prohibition levels until the 1970s. It took
a long time for markets to recover."

This is not a small point. If consumption of alcohol decreased, so did an
array of diseases and pathologies, ranging from cirrhosis of the liver to
traffic deaths caused by drunken driving. "The advocates of the legalization
of drugs are too simplistic when they say, 'Prohibition did not work.'
Prohibition was a political and cultural failure, but prohibition in fact
reduced the consumption of alcoholic beverages dramatically," Kerr says.
"There is lots of evidence [that Prohibition] resulted in less spousal
abuse, lower hospital admission rates for alcohol-related diseases, and all
the rest of it."

Thus, the Prohibition movement brought America two realities, not one. It
helped fuel a harsh enforcement culture, as well as a violent bootlegging
one-and both have, as their logical legacy, today's drug war, including the
April tragedy over the Amazon River. At the same time, Prohibition lowered
the rate of drinking, and in the process, diminished all of the harmful
behaviors associated with alcohol abuse.

Do No Harm

According to those who treat drug addicts, the movie Traffic, for all its
critically acclaimed nuance, glossed over a very important point.

In the film, the drug czar's daughter is doing just peachy-making straight
A's, starring on her high school sports teams, cheerfully doing volunteer
work-except that she has this one little problem: She's addicted to heroin.
Hollywood itself has had some visible examples in the past year of actors
and producers who do brilliant work while negotiating the needs of a drug
habit. But those in treatment say that is not typical.

This has never been made public, but back in the 1980s, a well-known federal
anti-narcotics official was caught in the exact same nightmare that Michael
Douglas's character faces in Traffic. He discovered his only child was a
drug addict. "It doesn't usually happen like it did with that kid in the
movie," this official said last week. "That's the rare exception. These
drugs tend to hurt you. Usually, you become dysfunctional." After this drug
control official's 14-year-old was enrolled in an intensive 12-step
residential program, he volunteered to speak to other parents whose children
were recently enrolled in the program. "I'd do the new-parent rap, and
describe what my kid had gone through, what their kids were going to go
through, what was ahead for them. And at the end of it, I'd say, 'Oh, by the
way, I'm DEA.' Half of 'em would pass out-from relief. They thought if it
happened to me, it could happen to anyone."

Drugs do indeed inflict harm. And the need to reduce the demand for drugs is
something agreed on by all sides in the debate over drug control policy.
Many other areas of agreement can be found. Decriminalization advocates, for
example, concede that if drug use were to spike dramatically in the event
drugs were legalized, the benefits of legalization would be undermined- and
that the nation's 16,000 annual overdose deaths would probably increase. On
the other hand, it was White House deputy drug czar Vereen who used the
phrase harm reduction to describe an optimum U.S. goal for its policy toward
drugs.

Drug war critics use harm reduction to describe a set of proposed policies
ranging from designated, government-financed needle exchanges to informal
agreements in which local police forces assure young users that if they rush
overdose victims to the hospital or call an ambulance, they won't be charged
with a crime.

"If the police policy is to arrest everyone there, what is the chance they
will call the police?" says legalization proponent Nadelmann. "Cities that
have done this have cut drug overdose deaths in half. That's what we mean by
harm reduction."

In the absence of such a new approach, the various actors in the drug drama
are sometimes forced to play roles they don't always believe in-with sad
results. Certainly that was the case for the two CIA-contract pilots in the
cockpit of their Citation surveillance jet on the morning of April 20. As
the two men, who have not been identified by the government but are referred
to as "Bob" and "Tony" on the tape, try to converse with the Peruvian pilot
in the fighter plane and their respective air-control towers, the language
barrier, the obvious anxiety of the Peruvians, and the fact that they are
talking over one another all convey a sense of confusion-and impending
disaster.

"This is bullshit," Bob remarks to Tony in the Citation jet. He is starting
to doubt that the Cessna is a drug plane.

A few minutes later, he adds softly, "I think we're making a big mistake."

"I agree with you," Tony replies.

But as they sit in their cockpit, these American narcotics agents do not
change their course; nor do the Peruvians. They, and their nations, are
swept up in something that they suspect isn't working, but that they don't
know how to stop. After the Cessna is down, but before he knows American
missionaries are inside, Bob mutters a single word.

"God," he says.

In many drug treatment programs, that word is used as a solution. But on
this day it was used, as it often is in the drug wars, as an oath and a
lament-and a prayer.