ILLEGAL DRUGS ARE DRIVING AMERICA CRAZY

I HAD A strange dream about alcohol and drugs recently, which is odd,
considering that I consume little of the former and none of the latter.

It seemed that drugs had been around for thousands of years. Smoking pot
had been mentioned as far back as the Odyssey and "turning on" was
widely accepted.

On the other hand, the intoxicating properties of alcohol had been
unknown to the human race until the 1950s when hippies, beatniks and
other ne'er-do-wells started consuming it. Up to then, alcohol had just
been another chemical.

In no time, "drinking," as it came to be called, spread through the
whole society and became a national plague. In cities, crime rates shot
upward as alcohol-addicted felons robbed and mugged to support their
two-pint-a-day habits.

Reaction of the nation's political establishment was swift. In New York,
under the leadership of Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, populist heir to the
Rockefeller billions, strict anti-alcohol laws were passed, mandating
long prison terms for possession of even a pint. Other states followed
the Rockefeller lead, and soon the nation's prisons were filling up with
thousands of drinkers.

Both the federal and state governments mounted major interdiction
policies. The federal government tried to eradicate grape vines, but
that proved futile. Attempts were made to seal the borders against
alcohol imports, but that, too, failed. The stuff just kept pouring in.
Alcohol was even discovered, disguised as Perrier Water, in chic
one-liter bottles shipped from Paris.

Economists pointed out that if interdiction was working, the street
price of alcohol would be rising. But this wasn't the case. After
peaking at $50 per pint, it was heading down. Meanwhile, carnage on the
roads continued. Police chiefs noted that drinking preceded an enormous
number of fights, manslaughters, stickups, wife-beatings, robberies and
burglaries. Something had to be done, but nothing was working.

At this point, I woke up in a sweat. It took me only a minute to realize
that I had everything backward. But my dream did leave me with some
questions.

We treat alcohol addiction as a medical and a public-education problem.
We have laws about where and to whom alcohol may be sold. But we don't
jail anyone just for the act of drinking or possessing alcohol.

Tobacco kills something like 1,000 Americans a day. We're fighting it
with education and policies like no-smoking sections in restaurants.
Physicians can prescribe medications to help you quit if you can't
manage it on your own. We know that we can't stamp out smoking entirely,
but we're reducing it somewhat.

When it comes to drugs, everything is different. We define it as a war.
Right now, we're holding more than 400,000 POWs just for possession. On
a per-capita basis, we put away as many people for drug possession as
many European nations do for all crimes combined.

A certain amount of drug-taking is attempted self-medication, though the
person doing it isn't likely to think of it that way. A kid from a
prosperous, well-educated family starts getting druggy, doing badly in
school and coming to the attention of the police. What happens?

His folks take him to the family doctor, who recommends that he see a
psychiatrist. He is diagnosed with, say, depression and gets a
prescription for Prozac or the like. More often than not, the outcome is
relatively happy - or at least good enough to keep him functioning.

A kid from lower down in the social order starts on the same path, but
he gets to see the judge instead of the psychiatrist. And with a little
bit of bad luck, he is on his way out of town for a few years. Wouldn't
viewing his situation in medical rather than criminal terms make more
sense?

Maybe we should be thinking about legalizing possession of some
substances under some circumstances, as is beginning to happen in a few
states. Maybe, in some cases, we should let physicians prescribe
narcotics as part of managing an addict's case, as was done for years in
Great Britain. I don't have any easy answers. But I do know that we need
to rethink the drug policy from the beginning, and not toss out any
reasonable suggestion too quickly.

A while ago I read a book by Mike Gray called "Drug Crazy." Despite the
title, it isn't about how drugs make you crazy. It's about how we have
let drugs make public policy crazy.

A graph in the back of the book shows the U.S. homicide rate from 1900
to 1995. The rate climbed steadily to a peak in 1933, and then dropped
off sharply. It didn't return to the 1933 level until the 1970s. What
happened in 1933? That's the year Prohibition was repealed.

There's a postscript to all this. This January, New York's conservative
Republican governor, George Pataki, asked the state legislature to
reconsider the Rockefeller drug laws. He suggested reductions in
mandatory minimum sentences and diverting some first-time drug offenders
from prison to treatment programs.

Maybe we are starting to get less "drug crazy."