WAR ON DRUGS OR POLITICS AS USUAL?

A monumental policy failure is about to be enshrined by the Bush
administration, which has looked at the federal government's wasteful
and counterproductive "war on drugs" and opted for more of the same.
Mr. Bush's choice of cookie-cutter law-and-order conservatives John
Walters to head the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy and Arkansas Representative Asa Hutchinson to lead the Drug
Enforcement Administration show that the president is less interested
in successfully combating harmful drug use than in hewing to an
ideology and punishing the weak and unlucky.

Representative Hutchinson and Mr. Walters, a former deputy to drug
czar William Bennett in the first Bush administration, are both true
believers in attacking supply rather than reducing drug demand. Mr.
Walters, in fact, has criticized drug treatment as "this ineffectual
policy -- the latest manifestation of liberals' commitment to a
'therapeutic state' in which government serves as the agent of
personal rehabilitation."

On the contrary, it is international interdiction efforts that are
ineffective. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been poured down
the rat hole of projects meant to stamp out cocaine, heroin and
marijuana before they reach U.S. borders, all to no avail. Drug
availability on U.S. streets is as ample as ever. Corruption in
drug-producing countries is epidemic.

Some of the most brutal military organizations in the Western
hemisphere, as in Peru, are sustained by U.S. anti-drug funds.
Colombia, wracked by guerrilla war, has turned into one of the
hell-holes of creation. Much of its population is trying to get out.
Disrupted in one region, producers easily shift their operations to
another. Interdiction efforts leave dictators and armament
manufacturers smiling, but otherwise they are all but meaningless.

Treatment of addicts, on the other hand, frequently succeeds --
certainly far more often than incarceration, the solution of choice
of the Bush administration. Almost two thirds of the $19 billion the
federal government spends on the drug war goes to interdiction and
enforcement. Mr. Bush has asked Congress for a small increase for
treatment, but way too little; only half the addicts who seek
treatment are able to find it, and under the Bush plan that would not
change significantly.

The Republican Party, which fumes over government waste, ought to be
steaming over drug-war expenses. A RAND Corporation study concluded
that treatment reduces national drug consumption eight times as much
as imprisonment -- which, minus treatment, tends to create and harden
criminals -- even though prisons are more expensive. In New York
State, it costs $32,000 a year to house a prisoner; a drug-treatment
resident costs just $20,000.

The Bush appointments fly in the face of a healthy national trend
based on years of learning. By a huge majority, California voters
passed a referendum question last November mandating treatment
instead of prison for nonviolent drug offenders. Six other states,
including New York and Connecticut, are trying similar approaches.
Understanding is growing that drug addiction itself is a medical and
social problem, not a matter of criminality. The Bush administration
apparently considers this view soft-headed, but it is its own drug
policy that is demonstrably feeble and empty.