THE DRUG-WAR CONUNDRUM

A few minutes into the movie "Traffic," in a Washington, D.C.,
cocktail party scene, an amiable red-haired man offers some wisdom
about the nation's drug problem: "You'll never solve this on the
supply side."

The speaker is William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts. I
was taken aback by his comment - not because Weld was acting in a
movie but because I had never heard him reject a supply-side solution
to anything.

But if you've seen "Traffic," you know that Weld was merely
expressing the idea that is the movie's central theme: that the U.S.
war on drugs is a failure, and that it has failed mostly because the
supply can never be effectively cut off, no matter how much money and
blood go into the effort. Weld says it; so do the film's fictional
characters. There's Eddie Ruiz, the mid-level dealer who agrees to
become an informer after he is caught by federal agents. "It's an
unbeatable market force," he warns the agents.

There's also Caroline Wakefield, the 16-year-old addict whose father
happens to be the nation's newly chosen drug czar. "For someone my
age," Caroline says, "it's a lot easier to get drugs than alcohol."

And finally there's Steven Soderbergh, the movie's director. He
insists he didn't make the movie in order to change drug policy, but
he also thinks that the time is ripe for change, and that the movie
will help the process along. "I feel absolutely that it's in the air
right now," Soderbergh told a reporter recently, as "Traffic" neared
the $60 million box-office mark after just six weeks.

He's right about the timing. Strange things are happening in the
drug-policy realm that seemed politically impossible just a short
time ago. Nine states have now passed ballot measures legalizing the
use of marijuana for medical purposes. New York's Republican
governor, George Pataki, has proposed lightening up on the state's
draconian drug-sentencing laws. The recently departed national drug
czar, General Barry McCaffrey, urges that we stop calling the
anti-drug campaign a "war," suggesting the remark of the fictional
czar in "Traffic," played by Michael Douglas: "I don't know how you
wage war on your own family."

But more important than any of these is Proposition 36, which was
passed overwhelmingly by California voters in November. Proposition
36, which goes into effect this July, essentially abolishes prison
sentences for non-violent drug users. It authorizes $120 million to
be spent across the state on treatment programs. Some estimates are
that it may divert as many as 30,000 prisoners a year from the
state's correctional system. This new law has not received an
enormous amount of publicity, even within the state - California has
other problems to worry about these days - but it represents a major
experiment, sure to be repeated elsewhere in the country if it
appears to produce real results.

Is the war on drugs the abject failure that its many critics claim it
to be? I've never been sure. A while ago I sat down with a stack of
reports from the Drug Enforcement Administration to see if they
served up any truths glaring enough to be evident to an untrained
(and on this issue, pretty much agnostic) reader.

Actually, I did learn a few things pretty quickly. One is that it's
hard to make a plausible case that the war on drugs has done anything
to cut off the supply of cheap product on the streets of American
cities. The street price of heroin, according to DEA figures, is
barely one-fifth of what it was 20 years ago, and the potency of
what's available is several times greater. When the teenager in
"Traffic" says she can find drugs more easily than liquor, she is
almost certainly telling the truth. Former FBI director William
Webster, after hearing hours of testimony on drug traffic a couple of
years ago before his Commission on Federal Law Enforcement, reported
that he was "not aware of any evidence that the flow of narcotics
into the United States has been reduced."

That's not to say production hasn't been affected. We're taking out
huge chunks of productive capacity all over Latin America, as DEA
figures make clear. In 1998, U.S. agents seized 742 metric tons of
marijuana coming in from Mexico alone. That's compared with 102 tons
just seven years earlier. All told, the federal government now spends
about $18 billion a year on the drug war, and two-thirds of that
money goes to interdiction of supply. You can't say they aren't
finding stuff.

What you can say is that it hardly matters how much they find -
there's more coming in from somewhere else. Critics call this the
balloon effect: destroy the marijuana fields in Mexico, or the
cocaine crop in Bolivia, and Colombia picks up the slack. Clear the
opium poppies out of Afghanistan, and they sprout up overnight in
Pakistan. The end user never notices any difference - not even an
increase in price.

I don't know what this says to you. What it says to me is that we
aren't so much losing the war on drugs as we are fighting it on the
wrong front. For years the experts have been arguing back and forth
about whether the proper strategy is to go after supply or demand. I
look at the numbers and conclude the question is at least partially
settled. Weld and Soderbergh would seem to be right. Attacking supply
doesn't work.

Of course, that's not the official position of the U.S. government.
Just last summer, Congress approved $1.3 billion in new aid to
Colombia to help eradicate the cocaine crop. Among other things, this
money will pay for 63 new helicopter gunships to use against the drug
lords. Not many people realize it, but Colombia is now the
third-leading recipient of U.S. foreign aid, after Israel and Egypt.
On the evidence, that does not look like money well spent.

But if the failed war against supply suggests a quick verdict that
the entire anti-drug effort is a fiasco, other facts point in a
different direction. It's undeniable that there is less use of
illegal substances in this country now than before the war on drugs
began. In 1979, 25.4 million Americans reported that they were
current users - "current" meaning sometime within the previous 30
days. Last year, that number was 14.8 million. Among teenagers
between 12 and 17, the percentage of current users was 16.3 percent
in 1979. Now it's 10.9 percent. The DEA says there are 3.7 million
cocaine users in this country. That's disturbing. But in 1982 there
were 10.4 million.

Some of this, I realize, is just a function of demographics. Due to
the ebb and flow of the American birth rate, there are far fewer
people in the high-risk 18- to 25-year-old age cohort today than
there were 20 years ago. And it's true that use among teenagers,
after declining steadily into the mid-1990s, has started going back
up again. But even taking all this into account, it still seems
reasonable to suggest that, over the life of the anti-drug effort,
education and treatment programs have generated a significant
improvement. Demand control, unlike supply control, does not look
hopeless.

That's the point that the current crop of reformers keeps trying to
make. At the end of Traffic, Caroline Wakefield is enrolled in a
treatment program with her parents there to support her, vowing that
she will make it and showing every sign of a rapid return to
mainstream life. That scene is no accident. "Education and
treatment," director Soderbergh insists, "pay off like gangbusters."

But I'm a little skeptical. Let's say we accept the DEA figure of 3.7
million cocaine users. That group by its nature includes individuals
at all stages of the addiction cycle: new users just experimenting
with the drug; intense addicts with few goals other than finding
money to pay for their habit; and late-stage users looking
desperately for a way out. It's reasonable to suppose that better
treatment programs will capture a larger percentage of those at the
end of the road who are ready for help. But it's hard to see why they
would have much effect on the earlier-stage users who don't yet want
to be treated. This was a powerful argument when James Q. Wilson
first made it more than 20 years ago; I haven't heard anybody answer
it effectively.

Of course, there's another item lurking near the top of the
drug-reform agenda, and that's legalization (or at least
decriminalization) of marijuana. Two governors support this, several
big-city mayors have suggested it, and the number seems certain to
grow.

It's an idea that has to be taken seriously. The long-term effect of
marijuana on human health remains an unanswered question. But while
the issue is being debated, the government is spending billions of
dollars destroying crops and chasing down and prosecuting
distributors. Of the roughly 400,000 people in prison on drug-related
charges in the United States right now, a significant proportion got
there through their involvement in the marijuana trade.
Decriminalizing marijuana would also decriminalize tens of thousands
of non-violent offenders every year and save the entire criminal
justice system billions of dollars and untold grief.

Still, it's pretty clear that, in the current legal and social
environment, marijuana does lead to the use of more dangerous drugs.
Kids start out smoking marijuana, as Caroline Wakefield does in
"Traffic," and then escalate their use upward. Now this could be
mostly because marijuana is illegal. Repeal the prohibition, it can
be argued, and the "forbidden fruit" connection to cocaine and heroin
might vanish. Marijuana might turn out to have no more of a link to
hard drugs than beer does.

Then again, maybe that's not true. Maybe there's something in the
chemical composition of marijuana that would make it a pre-cursor to
hard-drug addiction for a substantial percentage of users, even if it
were as legal as Budweiser. We really don't know. It would be
comforting to have more data on this before we make any bold leaps
toward legalization.

Sometimes I think that marijuana could be the ideal subject for
public policy devolution. Legalize marijuana in one state, track the
use of cocaine and heroin in that state over five or 10 years, and
then use the data to make an informed decision about just how
dangerous a substance marijuana is.

The state that volunteered for this experiment would, in all
likelihood, be making a major contribution to the long-term social
health of the nation. I have to confess something, though: I'd just
as soon raise my family somewhere else.