OUR LONG, LOST WAR ON DRUGS

Sherrie Maresco died after snorting heroin in some lousy Davie house
trailer. She was barely 13. A seventh-grader. An honors student.

We don't need a Hollywood scriptwriter to suggest a funereal futility.

Nineteen years after Ronald Reagan announced a ``war on drugs'' that would
``do what is necessary to end the drug menace,'' every community in America
has plenty of corpses that can testify to the war's futility. No need of
dramatic cinematography.

After Sherrie's death Feb. 19, a Miramar cop noted, ``There are young
people that die of overdoses every day, but as far as our community goes,
this is the youngest one we have ever seen.''

``The youngest one we have ever seen.'' That shocked the community.

``There are young people that die of overdoses every day.'' That didn't.

The drug war has about a million Americans, mostly young, rotting in prison
- -- to no effect on the drug trade and the drug tragedies. But it's Traffic
that has our leaders suddenly buzzing about futility. A mere movie, graphic
and well-made though, with occasional descents into Hollywood melodrama,
has managed to define the dire reality of a long, lost battle.

OLD MODEL ARMY

Reagan modeled his war on drugs after the Miami Task Force on Crime and
Drugs, which was put together after South Florida's bloody cocaine gang
wars littered the area with machine-gunned bodies.

But the death toll still mounts, if not as blatantly as in 1981. Last week,
in Miami-Dade County, police discovered the bodies of three murdered
prostitutes, all of whom, police said, were in the trade for drugs or drug
money.

And getting the drugs remains the easy part of the equation. After 19 years
of doing ``what is necessary to end the drug menace,'' drugs are cheap,
plentiful and as easy to purchase as a quick drive to a ruined neighborhood.

The war consumes an estimated $70 billion a year in local and federal
money, keeps a million prisoners behind bars, many serving the long
mandatory sentences enacted as part of the great crackdown. Yet the supply
remains unabated, the price unaffected. Drug addicts still account for a
huge percentage of our property crime. Drug profits still corrupt and
cripple the governments of Mexico and Colombia. Inner-city American kids
still get sucked into the street trade. And kids like Sherrie Maresco snort
death.

CONSERVATIVE CRITICS

The obvious futility hasn't just been mouthed by a bunch of acid-fried
lefties. Conservative thinkers like William F. Buckley Jr. and Milton
Friedman have written about the madness of this money-sucking,
prison-filling war on human nature.

But Buckley and Friedman don't come with the glitter necessary to jolt a
celebrity culture. They ain't Hollywood. It took a fictional character
portrayed by movie star Michael Douglas to turn the heads of our
politicians. ``It had a very powerful effect,'' Sen. John McCain told an
interviewer. ``It caused me to rethink our policies and priorities.''

Nightline, the late-night ABC news magazine, has embarked on five-program
series examining the drug war. Interviews with judges and cops and drug
enforcement officials begin with the single question that has become more
important than a million prisoners or murdered junkies or Sherrie Maresco
dead on the floor in her blue jeans and red pullover: ``Have you seen the
movie?''