US DRUG WAR TAKES TOO MANY PRISONERS

It is a conflict that has taken more American prisoners than Vietnam, Korea
and both world wars combined.

The fighting continues, and there is no end in sight.

It is the celebrated "war on drugs" and it is beginning to buckle under its
own concept of success.

The aim of this politically motivated campaign on the battlegrounds of
America's decayed urban fringe was to put the drug kingpins behind bars.
The effect has been to fill prisons to overflowing with small-time
offenders doing big-time sentences.

Now a new breed of conscientious objector is massing in the streets,
demanding a softening of the country's savage sentencing laws and an
increased focus on drug rehabilitation.

The front line of this new resistance is not dope-smoking hippies and
cocaine-snorting celebrities. Far from it. It is people like billionaire
financier George Soros, who has spent about $US30 million ($A54 million) in
the past six years promoting drug law reform.

"Our strategy is to change the nation's drug policies from ones driven by
fear, ignorance, prejudice and profit, to ones governed by common sense,
science and concerns for public health and human rights," said Ethan
Nadelmann, Mr Soros' right-hand man on drugs and a former Princeton
University professor.

Slowly, evidence is emerging that the anti-war message is beginning to take
hold. This week in New York, Governor George Pataki announced a review of
the state's Rockefeller-era drug laws, which carry a minimum of 15 years in
prison and a maximum of life for offences such as street dealing.

At the recent federal elections, Californians supported a Soros Foundation
proposition that will shift 20,000 drug offenders out of state prisons and
into treatment centres. Legislators estimate the move will save $200 million.

A few weeks ago, a New Mexico state advisory committee recommended
decriminalising the possession of marijuana and doing away with mandatory
minimum sentences for non-violent drug offences.

In Massachusetts, the state legislature is debating a bill to reduce
mandatory minimum sentences for first-time drug offenders, and Michigan
recently threw out laws requiring mandatory life sentences for first-time
cocaine and heroin offenders. Piece by piece, the big artillery in the war
on drugs is being replaced with more moderate sentencing guidelines and a
gradual shift to diversionary programs that treat drug addicts as patients
rather than prisoners.

"The impetus for drug law reform in New York and across the nation has
never been stronger," the acting director of the White House Office of
National Drug Control Policy, Edward Jurith, said this week.

"We cannot simply arrest our way out of the problem of drug abuse and
drug-related crime."

The devolution of drug policy is a slow process and one that has
considerable ground to cover.

The war on drugs officially began under Richard Nixon in 1972. By the time
Ronald Reagan's "Just Say No" administration took control in 1980, the
budget for fighting drugs had reached the unthinkable level of $1billion a
year. At that time, about 50,000 Americans were behind bars for drug offences.

Last year, the annual cost of fighting this losing battle had soared to $18
billion and the prison population of non-violent drug offenders had reached
400,000. All the while, the availability and use of illicit drugs has grown
inexorably, and so has the number of new prisons being built to cope with
the burgeoning inmate population.

With sentencing discretion effectively taken out of the judiciary's hands,
America's prison population has soared inexorably to above two million
people, or about a quarter of the world's entire inmate population.