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.