OUR INEFFECTIVE, MISDIRECTED CIVIL WAR ON DRUGS

In the movie "Traffic," Mexico is depicted in broad sepia tones as
that dark place where corruption flows unimpeded and where an honest
cop is about as rare as moderation in a crack house.

Ordinarily, I'd have a big problem with that. I don't here.

You see, Steven Soderbergh's cinematic treatise on the futility of the
drug war takes an equally brutal view of the demand side of the
equation. We see how a nuclear family living in cozy affluence can be
deconstructed in the time it takes to freebase heroin. We see that the
monkey on our back is not drugs but the addictive need to get tough on
an issue that demands far more finesse than a wiretap, a SWAT team and
a border blockade.

These depictions are caricatures in search of the greater good:
bringing home to the public the utter waste of our national drug policy.

Soon on President Bush's agenda will be the appointment of a drug
czar. Before he does that, however, he, his Cabinet and the drug
czar-designee should see "Traffic."

After they do, one natural conclusion could be to either do away with
the office or transform it to deal solely with the demand side in a
country in which drug use has been decriminalized.

And this conclusion, of course, could be where Soderbergh wanted us to
go, though there is plenty of wiggle room for other
interpretations.

Nonetheless, his film gets us there less with manipulation than with
an artistic rendition of what most of us recognize as reality: We're
not making an appreciable dent in supply or demand, are not likely to
no matter how much money and whiz-bang gadgets we give law
enforcement, and that we are, in any case, waging war against
ourselves. This is essentially a civil war.

No?

We jail about 450,000 people every year in the United States for
nonviolent drug offenses. (For comparison purposes, at the start of
the Civil War, the Confederate Congress called for the recruitment of
400,000 men).

One in five inmates in state prison are there for drug offenses.
Two-thirds of those in federal prison are there because of drugs.

We spend $40 billion yearly on the drug war.

But, you know, if this were truly a war, we'd be up before the War
Crimes Tribunal at The Hague in no time. African-Americans represent
about 17 percent of cocaine users, but 88 percent of those arrested
for its use, mostly for crack cocaine.

Arizona was ahead of the curve in realizing the relative
ineffectiveness of imprisoning drug users. In 1996, voters approved an
initiative that said that treatment and not imprisonment would be the
emphasis for first-time drug offenders. The Arizona Supreme Court in
1999 affirmed this, saying that county jail time counted as
imprisonment.

California voters in November passed a measure that mandated treatment
instead of imprisonment for nonviolent drug offenders.

So-called drug courts are the rage in criminal courts everywhere. In
these, drug offenders go through treatment and education -- with jail
or prison time hanging over their heads to stymie recidivism.

These are good first steps, though still only baby steps unless
treatment programs across the board are funded commensurately.

Imagine that $40 billion a year going toward treatment here. Imagine
the $1.6 billion we are sending to Colombia to fight coca production
going toward treatment in the United States.

The money in Colombia is a particular waste in that the country is
fighting an honest-to-goodness civil war against guerrillas who want
to topple the government. These guerrillas just happen to be funded by
the drug lords, as are the paramilitary squads on the other side.

In any case, even if the effort is successful in eradicating
cultivation and production, it will just move to another country.

In one scene in "Traffic," the drug czar, played by Michael Douglas,
asks officers how much money they will need to fight the war.

The answer was: More.

In this kind of war, the answer will always be "more," and it will
never be enough.