WALTER'S DRUG PHILOSOPHY PRESERVES URBAN MYTHS

WASHINGTON - President Bush, if the reports are to be believed, has
settled on John P. Walters to replace Gen. Barry McCaffrey as head of
the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

At one level, the nomination would be no surprise. It fits the pattern
that has the president turning to retreads from his father's
administration to fill key positions. Walters was deputy to drug
"czar" William Bennett under the previous Bush administration.

At another level, though, it is a peculiar choice. Walters, almost
alone among those who've spent serious professional time and attention
on drug abuse in America, harbors not the slightest misgiving over the
fact that we've been crowding our prisons with nonviolent drug offenders.

Indeed, he thinks we'd be better off if we got off our soft-headed
treatment kick and jailed more drug offenders. And while we're at it,
he wrote in the March 5 issue of The Weekly Standard, we'd do well to
abandon three of "the great urban myths of our time":

* That we are locking up too many people for possession.

* That we are locking drug offenders up for excessively long sentences.

* That "the system is unjustly punishing young black men."

These are myths? Officials across the country are rethinking the
mandatory minimum sentences that have fed the prison population
explosion. Listen to President Bush himself in a January interview on
CNN: "I think a lot of people are coming to the realization that maybe
long minimum sentences for the first-time users may not be the best
way to occupy jail space and/or heal people from their disease."

In that interview, Bush also said we ought to be moving to eliminate
the disparities in sentencing for crack and powder cocaine.

Not Walters, who is on record against re-examining the sentencing
disparities and for mandatory minimums.

As for the peculiar impact of drug enforcement on young black men (and
increasingly on young black women as well):

"Crime, after all, is not evenly distributed throughout the society.
It is common knowledge that the suburbs are safer than the inner city,
though we are not supposed to mention it."

That, of course, is sleight of hand. The relative unsafety of the
inner cities might reasonably account for higher incarceration rates
for violence.

But it was drug arrests that were being discussed, and most of the
experts on these matters say the drug use rates are roughly equal for
blacks and whites. But according to Ethan Nadelmann of the Lindesmith
Center, blacks are arrested for drug offenses at six times the rate
for whites, which might explain why they are disproportionately
subject to mandatory minimums - and disproportionately behind bars.

Perhaps Walters is doing a similar bit of legerdemain when he denies
that get-tough drug laws are needlessly crowding our prisons.
"Throughout the 1980s and 1990s," he wrote in The Weekly Standard,
"violent crimes vastly outpaced drug offenses as the cause of the
prison population's rapid growth."

Jason Ziedenberg of the Justice Policy Institute cites numbers from
the Bureau of Justice Statistics that lead to a different conclusion.
"Every year since 1989," he says, "the number of people sent to state
prisons for drug offenses has exceeded the number sent to state
prisons for violent offenses. In 1980, about 10,000 people went to
state prisons for drug offenses. By 1988-89, the number was up to
about 60,000."

Ziedenberg adds that in 1970, the majority of inmates were serving
time for violent offenses. By 2000, the majority of those in all
prisons and jails were nonviolent offenders.

But the statistics are almost a distraction. The real issue is policy,
not numbers. Walters seems really to believe that we can incarcerate
our way out of our drug problem - even while many other equally
hard-nosed observers are coming to believe that it makes more sense to
treat drug abuse as a public health problem than as a criminal justice
problem.

"I started in this area in the Education Department, writing
prevention stuff on drugs with Bill Bennett," Walters told a session
of the Senate Judiciary Committee four years ago. "But the more I look
at this, even since I left government, this is a supply problem. ...
Drugs are so attractive to people that some people will give up
everything in their life to consume them."

If that's the problem, how can anyone believe that the threat of jail
time is the solution?