WAR-WEARY AMERICANS NOT SO SURE CURRENT DRUG POLICIES WINNING THE WAR

It's our longest war.

And it's probably our most expensive, although accurate figures aren't
available on the actual number of victims or the cost of collateral damage.

The war on drugs has all the earmarks of a quagmire, the combat taking
place in Colombia with U.S. tax dollars, weapons and troops having all the
earmarks of a quagmire within a quagmire.

And after more than 30 years, Americans seem to be worn out by it.

That's the conclusion drawn by those who recently polled U.S. adults to
find out their attitudes about the drug war and whether they thought it was
winnable.

Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the
People & the Press said that "demand is so high we will never stop drug
use," and the same percentage said that this country is on the losing end
of the war against drugs, according to a report on the survey published
recently in The Washington Post and written by Richard Morin.

The survey authors compared the results from this most recent poll with
results from a similar poll conducted about 10 years ago, and the
differences in public opinion are profound.

Ten years ago, Americans still wanted to get tough on everyone involved in
the drug trade - the users, the sellers and the suppliers.

Ten years later, after a record boom in the prison industry fueled by the
get-tough policies adopted on drugs, we're not so sure that public-policy
measures will succeed. Perhaps we've learned from the failure of the
get-tough, throw-money-at-it approach that's been taken by every
administration since the late '60s.

In fact, according to the poll, Americans today aren't ready to put much
faith in public policies to deal with the problem anyway.

About 80 percent of those polled blamed peer pressure and bad parents for
drug use among teens, a recognition that you can pass all the laws in the
world and build all the prisons money can buy but laws won't work until and
unless they have universal support.

When offered solutions by the pollsters, those surveyed weren't sure what
to do about the problem at this juncture. They're wary of the Colombian
coca crackdown. They're unsure government programs work. And they're not
even certain any more that illegal drugs constitute a major problem. The
number who say it's the No. 1 problem facing the country is down
drastically from a decade ago, at the height of the crack epidemic.

The obvious question from a public-policy standpoint is, Where do we go
from here?

The new administration in Washington claims not to be as poll-driven as the
previous one, which is not necessarily a bad thing. However, this poll has
results that represent a significant shift in public opinion, a shift not
obviously swayed one way or the other by a structured campaign from any
side. So these results ought to get some attention in the halls of a
government that still treats the drug war as if it were the most pressing
issue facing the nation.

Perhaps it truly is time to look for solutions other than the ones that
have been tried and that have failed. A changing of the guard provides a
good opportunity to reassess our priorities and review how we're doing.

Meanwhile, although Americans may be disillusioned by our inability to deal
effectively with the supply and demand for drugs we cannot stop paying
attention to how our elected and appointed officials deal with those
issues, because that's our money they're spending and it's the lives of our
loved ones that are at risk.

War-weary or not, we have a stake in how the war is conducted.