UNDERMINING THE WAR AGAINST ILLEGAL DRUGS

The president in the new film has appointed a new drug czar - a judge of
the Ohio Supreme Court. Before the judge takes office, he goes to Mexico,
and the American border. He sees the hideous brutality by Mexican
officers, themselves part of drug gangs. He sees American anti-drug agents
risk their lives and often lose them.

As the president prepares his first press conference speech at the White
House, he finds out his daughter Caroline, a wholesome looking teen-ager,
is a junkie. She is so captured by narcotics that she prostitutes herself
for them.

At his first White House press conference, the president begins to read his
prepared speech, about the importance of the war on drugs to save the 68
million American children who have been targeted by the narcotic kings. He
cannot go on. He puts down his speech, turns to leave the room and his
career and says: "I can't do this. If there is a war on drugs, then our
own families have become the enemy. How can you make war on your own family?"

That's it - that's the message the film "Traffic" delivers toward the end,
where messages are put to be remembered. It is also a message peddled by
Americans who have created a national network of organizations devoted to
fighting the drug war and making more narcotics more available to more
Americans, without legal penalty. They use nicey-nicey phrases like drug
reform or harm reduction because they know the public would reject any
honest move toward their goal - outright legalization.

But supporters of the drug war, like myself, did not think any such
destructive movement would become accepted among people who consider
themselves informed and intelligent, including journalists - wrong. With
propaganda funds from a few truly rich Americans, they have persuaded more
and more columnists and editorial writers. They have won state plebiscites
that use tricky, concealing language to make more narcotics available for
"medicinal" purposes. Particularly generous are the financier George Soros,
Ohio insurance executive Peter Lewis and the founder of the for-profit
University of Phoenix, John Sperling.

They and their organizations hack away at the very foundation of the
struggle against drugs: the combination of law enforcement, interdiction
and therapy. The money they put into their hatred for the drug war, out of
whatever cradle trauma, could make help to addicts impossible by destroying
the law enforcement essential to therapy.

I went back to anti-drug experts I have trusted and learned from for years.
All of them have contributed more to therapy for addicts in any week than
the money bags of the war against the drug war and their propagandists have
in their combined lifetimes.

I asked them - am I missing something, behind the times, about the
importance of the union of therapy, law enforcement and interdiction?

Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal is probably the most important therapist in the
country, the creator of Phoenix House, the national group of therapeutic
communities where addicts often have to work a year or more ridding their
minds, bodies and behavior of drugs. He said: "Ninety percent of the
people who need treatment do not seek it out themselves. They have to be
coerced, by a wife, an employer, probation officer, a court, the police.
Very few addicts wake up in the morning and say, 'I am destroying my life.
I am out of control. I need help.' "

Dr. Herbert Kleber of Columbia University,who is considered by supporters
and enemies of the anti-drug struggle as one of the country's top experts,
said: "The opposition to interdiction does not include me. It is part of
the essential three. It would be wrong to fight and fight against drugs
and leave the sources of drugs untouched even if they cannot be controlled
fully."

Is addition a disease or a matter of behavior? Dr. Kleber said, "It is a
disease that erodes but does not erase ability to make choices, as diabetes
gives the patient the choice between eating chocolate bars and refusing them."

According to Sue Rusche, director of National Families in Action, both of
which add up to a university of knowledge on narcotics and an army fighting
them: "Addicts rarely enter treatment voluntarily. . . . We must not
repeat the mistake made when we deinstitutionalized mental health hospitals
. . . and produced a homeless population of untreated mentally ill people."

Richard A. Brown, Queens district attorney, said: "The major reason in the
drop of crime around the city, including murders, is the breakup of gangs
and putting away of criminals, who created the open-air markets and public
housing drug bazaars, for a long time."

Those are their messages, for Hollywood families to think about, and
President Bush when he gets around to his delayed duty of appointing a
strong drug czar, maybe.

A.M. Rosenthal, the former executive editor of the New York Times, is a
nationally syndicated columnist.