TIME TO ADMIT WAR ON DRUGS IS A TOTAL BUST

His afternoons were for mowing the lawn or tinkering with the car. But
mornings were for coffee and blues.

Mornings were for sitting in his favorite room in the early sun, sipping
his cup and listening to hundreds of 45s gathered over 60-something years
of living. Mornings were for plain-spoken old songs about cheating women
and cheated men, for pain sermons and joy testimonies from Blind Lemon
Jefferson, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Snooky Pryor
and Big Mama Thornton.

Anyone who knew the old man knew how he loved those mornings.

Then his son stole his records and sold them to buy crack cocaine.

It was -- for me, at least -- an eye-opener. The day the son took from his
father something he knew to be precious and irreplaceable was the day I
understood -- as much as you can without feeling it yourself -- the power
of a drug craving.

More to the point, it was the moment my doubts about the war on drugs
hardened to a certainty: We're fighting on the wrong battlefield and our
weapons are inadequate.

Movie Is Making A Difference

If recent newspaper reports are to be believed, many members of Congress
appear to be coming to a similar moment of clarity, courtesy of the movie
"Traffic," which won four Academy Awards on Sunday.

The film tracks the intersecting lives of soldiers on both sides of the
war: the American drug czar, his cocaine-addicted daughter, the Mexican
cop, his U.S. counterparts and, of course, the dealers. The film's
unmistakable conclusion -- that the war has been an abysmal waste -- is
said to have had a profound impact on a number of U.S. lawmakers.

Patrick Leahy, a Democratic senator from Vermont, told a reporter that he
was struck by a moment when the movie's drug czar asks how it's possible to
fight a war on drugs when the "enemies" are drug users in our own families.
Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain said the film "caused me to rethink our
policies and priorities."

It's a rethinking that's as welcome as it is overdue. The war on drugs has
been obscenely expensive -- $18 billion a year, according to one report.
The mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines have triggered an explosion in
the prison population.

Yet the war has produced anything but a decisive victory. After years of
decline, drug use among people 12 to 17 is trending up. Small wonder a new
study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that an
increasing number of us consider the war on drugs a failure.

More Treatment, Less Punishment

For years, we've seen that failure reflected in the disruption of our
communities, the loss of mothers, brothers, sons.

We've been treating a sickness with a prison term. Emphasis has been on the
punishment of users and dealers, and it's time to admit that this by itself
will not work. Time to balance the stick of incarceration with the carrot
of drug treatment and addiction prevention.

I say this, thinking of an old man whose blues records were lost to crack
hunger.

I used to be a music critic, one of the benefits of which is a sizable
music library. So when I heard what happened, I recorded some tapes and
sent them to him. I'm told he sits in his room and sips his coffee,
listening to the blues as he did before. But I suspect his mornings will
never be the same.