TAKE ANOTHER LOOK AT DRUG WAR'S COST

A new study on the impact of substance abuse - Florida alone spends $214.70
per person in public funding, in one way or another, on the consequences of
alcohol, drug and tobacco use - prompts mixed feelings.

It's hard to challenge the basic assumption behind the study: that the
three substances in question exact a profound toll on society. But the
study, by Columbia University's National Center on Addiction and Substance
Abuse, tries to make too much of a case.

For one thing, a significant chunk of the public funding spent on substance
abuse goes for prosecuting and incarcerating those who use or traffic in
drugs. Of the $81.3 billion that all state governments spent on substance
abuse's ill effects in 1998, fully $30.7 billion was consumed by prisons,
juvenile justice and court costs. While some of that figure represents the
cost of cracking down on drunken driving, clearly a lot of the same pool of
money is a projection of the drug war.

In other words, to an extent, the government is spending tax dollars on a
concern of its own creation. If it hadn't criminalized the use of some
mood-altering substances by consenting adults - even as other mood-altering
substances, such as alcohol, remain perfectly legal - the public wouldn't
have to shoulder the enormous cost of busting and jailing those involved in
drugs.

The drug war aside, there's a more philosophical reason to second-guess the
study's findings. The study makes such sweeping connections between
substance abuse and social woes that, using the same logic, all sorts of
activities could be blamed for the same kinds of wide-ranging ills.

For example, to estimate substance abuse's costs to public education,
research-ers considered the expenses caused by all abusers. That includes
mothers who drink while pregnant and have children with fetal alcohol
syndrome, thereby raising the costs of special education, or students who
use drugs, leading to drug testing and drug-related violence that, in turn,
might require more spending on security. And so forth.

OK, but what about driving? Don't cars foul the air, causing respiratory
ailments, drawing down health care resources? That's to say nothing of the
ripple effects of car accidents - on survivors, on health care, on
insurance premiums, which all of us pay. Or what about eating fatty foods -
and the attendant cost in cardiovascular care? Don't such activities
warrant comparable concern?

Which isn't to dismiss the troubling social impact of substance abuse.

But the hazard in trying to nickel-and-dime every side-effect of something
like substance abuse is that such an approach too often winds up as a
premise for more government intervention, whether through restrictive laws
- - a failure, as the drug war shows - or through more subsidies, such as
tax-funded treatment programs.

With freedom comes responsibility: Each must confront his own addictions
without leaning on taxpayers, and without being leaned on by the law.