THE DELUSIONAL DRUG WAR

If America's war on drugs reminds Ethan Nadelmann of the war in Vietnam,
maybe it's because the latter has been much in the news, thanks to Bob
Kerrey's agonizing reappraisal of his behavior during that ill-fated conflict.

Or maybe it's because everything reminds Nadelmann of the war on drugs.
Nadelmann heads the Lindesmith Center, a New York-based drug policy
foundation funded by billionaire George Soros. A major part of Nadelmann's
mission is to debunk what he takes to be the myths behind our current drug
policy.

Still, the Vietnam analogy turns out to be an interesting point to start
thinking about the drug wars.

"Just as the who-lost-China question made it difficult to think rationally
about our China policy for so long, the fear of having to face the
who-lost-Vietnam question did the same thing about our Southeast Asia
policy," Nadelmann said during a recent phone conversation. "And in just
the same way, the fear that someone will have to answer the
who-lost-the-drug-war question keeps people from giving serious
consideration to alternative approaches to dealing with drugs.

"Just listen to the language. We must go on doing what we're doing because
the alternative is 'abandonment,' a 'surrender' that will 'open the
floodgates.' "

The enduring paradigm, he says, is that the only two things worth talking
about are reducing supply and reducing demand. That's been the paradigm
since the 1940s, he says, even though drug policy officials are inclined to
mention demand-reduction as a sort of conceptual breakthrough.

"The key point to make," says Nadelmann, "is, just as with Vietnam, there
is someplace else this debate can go -- and that is the basic notion of
harm reduction.

"I know I get accused of favoring legalization, which is not true. What I
advocate is that we recognize that this has never been a drug-free society
and never will be, so let's stop pretending. Let's even stop trying to get
closer to a drug-free society and instead just accept that drugs are here
to stay. Then we can focus on reducing the harm both of drug use and of
drug prohibition. An ideal strategy would reduce the negative consequences
of both."

That formulation recognizes what Americans find it so difficult to see:
that much of the harm we attribute to drugs -- including gang warfare,
police corruption and murder -- results not from the drugs themselves but
from our efforts to prohibit drugs.

"It took Bob McNamara 30 years to say Vietnam was a mistake," Nadelmann
said. "How long will it take us to recognize that the drug war is also a
mistake -- and, like Vietnam, a mistake that ultimately involves and
subverts other governments? I know a lot of organizations are opposed to
our intervention in places like Colombia and think we should just get out.
But I am not totally convinced that just withdrawing wouldn't result in the
'Cambodiazation' of Colombia, leaving it worse off, not better."

If Nadelmann sees so clearly the harm wrought by our national effort to
eliminate drug use, why don't the people in charge see it, too?

"That's one of the problems of the way we've been doing drug policy," he
told me. "You get a bunch of smart, thoughtful people who spend a few years
doing drug policy and come to comprehend the utter futility of the approach
and the political impossibility of an alternative strategy. Then they leave
the arena, to be replaced by a new set of people who have to start all over
again. It's like planned obsolescence of understanding."

In fact, he believes, the American people are ahead of their government.
People may not like legalization because they can't see what comes after
that, he said, but they do see that our present policy is a failure.
Attempts to interdict foreign supplies, like the efforts to jail Americans
into abstinence, are doing a good deal of harm. Nadelmann thinks public
support for present drug policy is eroding as surely as did support for the
Vietnam War a generation ago.

So does he expect there'll come a time when it will be as hard to find an
American who remembers supporting the drug war as it is to find one today
who remembers supporting Vietnam?

"There are only two such people left now," he says, "and President Bush
found both of them. One is attorney general, and the other will be drug czar."