ADDICTS AND JAIL

ATLANTA - Sometime soon, Darryl Strawberry, the once-great baseball player,
could end up serving time.

His latest drug binge (he ran away from his court-ordered drug
rehabilitation program in March) could cost him, a three-time probation
violator, his freedom.

The same fate could await Robert Downey Jr., the talented actor whose
starring role in the hit TV show "Ally McBeal" could not restrain his
self-destructive tendencies.

He was arrested in California last week, apparently stoned. That came just
days before he was to appear in court for an alleged Thanksgiving drug
binge. Both arrests jeopardize his parole; he was released in August after
a one-year stint in a California prison on drug-related charges.

Strawberry and Downey have both wasted their talents, waylaid or destroyed
promising careers and abused their loved ones. But neither man is a menace
to society. Why put them behind bars? Why not a measured punishment that
fits the crime: continued court-ordered treatment, random drug testing,
electronic monitoring, and increased restrictions on their social and
professional lives?

It may be that no judge would feel sympathy for highly paid and pampered
stars who broke every rule, abused every amnesty and flouted the law.
Certainly, Strawberry and Downey deserve no special consideration because
they are celebrities. There should be no mercy granted to Darryl
Strawberry, baseball player, that would not be granted to Darryl Williams,
Wal-Mart clerk, no break given to Robert Downey Jr., actor, that would not
be given to Robert Wayne Dennis, plumber.

But the same question applies to self-destructive substance abusers of
every social station: Is society served by putting them in jail? Why does
our criminal justice system treat drug addicts the same way it treats car
thieves and bank robbers?

If you have ever watched a life waste away in the grip of addiction, you
know that narcotics are dangerous substances that rob the user first of
judgment, finally of humanity. Heroin, cocaine and a host of other illegal
substances can ruin lives, wreck families, breed crime and poison whole
communities.

Because those drugs are so dangerous, we have fought them with a variety of
aggressive and punitive measures, from interdiction abroad to incarceration
at home. Unfortunately, this "war on drugs" creates the same havoc it was
meant to prevent; it ruins lives, wrecks families and breeds crime. It is a
classic burn-the-village-to-save-it strategy.

Incarceration of drug addicts deprives them of drug treatment (little
treatment is available in most prisons) and isolates them from family support.

It takes up precious prison beds that ought to be reserved for genuine
societal threats: rapists, murderers and drug kingpins, for example.

Worse yet, this punitive strategy makes criminals out of thousands of
Americans who have done nothing worse than torture themselves and their
loved ones.

Interdiction, for its part, burns up billions of dollars that could be
spent instead on drug treatment, drug courts and prevention programs.
Attempts to dry up the drug supply also entangle the United States in
questionable relationships with foreign governments, such as the
U.S.-Peruvian agreement that led to the recent mistaken shooting-down of a
small airplane carrying American missionaries.

If this incarceration-interdiction strategy were working, its high costs
might make sense. But it's a miserable failure. Significant numbers of
Americans still use illegal drugs; even as the crack epidemic fades, heroin
and Ecstasy burst into popularity. Meanwhile, narcotics continue to flow
past our porous borders by the tons; pressure on the Peruvians just
increases the flow from Colombia or Brazil.

Alcoholics Anonymous, the classic model of substance-abuse treatment, says
the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting a different result. By that definition, our "war on drugs" is insane.