DRUG WAR A FAILURE

In our zeal to punish "sin," our drug war is a colossal failure yet we
go on tilting its windmills. Just how ruinous a failure is graphic in
the film "Traffic." The depicted corruption from the ghettos and
barrios to the highest echelons of government in the grab for quick
profit is but the tip of an iceberg menacing our democratic
foundations.

Yet less than a year ago, we launched another multibillion-dollar
campaign in Colombia, racheting the war up another notch. Our prisons
are filled with drug-related convictions, giving us the world's
highest incarceration rate at more than 2 million. Many privacy rights
have been sacrificed to the cause of eradication yet demand and supply
stay constant. The movie confronts the question of which is the
greater evil - the cops or the dealers, suppressors or suppliers.

As the author of a novel on the subject, I applaud the movie makers
and hope - as seems possible - it'll awaken us from our long sleep of
delusion and bring change. My book, "Search For the Dragon," handles
the subject satirically and with an even more definitive conclusion:
the drug war itself as the cause of the mystique and the sustaining
force for those engaged in the lucrative trade.

Where the movie depicts the evil in a series of subplots on both sides
of the U.S./Mexico border, the novel portrays it from the vantage of
adventuring young Americans caught up in a pot-smuggling caper in Colombia.

Either way, both the movie and the novel provide new views of the drug
war debacle: The cure is sometimes worse than the habit and, often,
the very cause of it.

Jack Lange

Florence