DRUG WAR KEY MAY LIE IN PAST

Veteran observer of failing struggle finds Nixon's strategy to treat
addicts worked.

Journalist Michael Massing has devoted a decade to investigating the
U.S. war on drugs. He has talked with peasants in remote coca-growing
regions of Colombia. He has combed through dusty boxes of federal
archives. He has documented the heroic struggle of treatment workers
at a drop-in center in Spanish Harlem. He has watched a heroin addict
shoot up in a New York City tenement.

And this is his conclusion:

Richard Nixon was right.

Now there's a sentence you don't see every day. But Massing argues in
"The Fix," his fascinating and unforgiving account of U.S. drug
policy, that the Nixon administration's approach in the early 1970s
resulted in less crime, fewer overdose deaths and fewer drug-related
visits to hospital emergency rooms.

Not only would the Nixon plan work today, Massing believes, but it
also would cost less.

Interested? Here's the catch: Nixon's drug-fighting strategy included
treatment for every hardcore drug addict who wanted it. Massing
believes the country could - and should - offer the same today.

Still interested?

"I've learned that the 'c' word - compassion - is a real red flag for
people," Massing says. "I'm stressing that this is a much more
effective and promising approach."

With "The Fix," recently published by Simon and Schuster, Massing
presents a meticulously researched, fact-filled account of U.S. drug
policy since the Nixon years. Although the country now spends more
than $17 billion a year to fight drugs, and prison populations and
costs are soaring, there still remain an estimated 4 million hard-core
abusers of cocaine and heroin.

Something's not working.

"It would be hard to think of an area of U.S. social policy that has
failed more completely than the war on drugs," Massing writes in the
book's opening sentence. The answer, he writes later, is a "new
public-health approach to the nation's drug problem, one based not on
the punitive powers of the law but on the healing powers of medicine."

Massing, 46, is a 1970 graduate of Polytechnic Institute in Baltimore,
Md. Although he now lives in New York, he didn't have to look far from
his former home to find the person most responsible for crafting the
Nixon administration's successful drug-fighting strategy.

Jerome Jaffe, 65, who lives in Towson, Md., was the nation's first
drug czar. A psychopharmacologist, Jaffe had created a network of
treatment programs in Illinois when he was picked by Nixon in 1971 to
run the newly created Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention.

"I wanted treatment to be so available that people could not say they
committed crimes because they couldn't get treatment," says Jaffe, who
is a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University and a professor of
psychiatry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

As Massing's book indicates, it certainly wasn't sympathy for drug
addicts that led Nixon's advisers to Jaffe. A heroin epidemic at
home, combined with media reports of increasing drug addiction among
U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, produced well-founded White House worries of

a political problem before the 1972 election. Nixon hoped Jaffe would
help solve it.

To Massing, this is yet another example of the Nixon paradox. The
anti-communist president who went to China also was the law-and-order
champion who did more to help addicts than any president since.

To Jaffe, "Nixon was the ultimate pragmatist. He certainly had strong
feelings about drugs. He felt that they corroded the fabric of
society. How do you deal with that? One way is to get supply under
control. I think he came to realize that you have to deal with the
demand side as well."

"The Fix" is much more than a public policy analysis. Massing also
tells the gripping stories of Raphael Flores, the obsessively dedicated
worker at Hot Line Cares, a walk-in center in Spanish Harlem where addicts
could walk in off the street and get
help, and Yvonne Hamilton, a cocaine and crack addict.

Massing's work in Spanish Harlem - he spent four years there - showed
him the similarity between what Jaffe was doing in Chicago 30 years
ago and what workers such as Flores were trying to do today.

Both believed help needed to be available as soon as addicts requested
it. Otherwise, they may never be seen again. And both discovered that
different addicts require different methods of treatment. Some
require structure. Heroin addicts might require methadone, a synthetic
narcotic that allows some to lead productive lives. Some addicts
reject formal programs. And some don't get better the first time. Or
the second. Or the third.

Massing says the research is clear: Treatment is the most cost
effective method of reducing drug addiction. He cites a 1994 Rand
Corp. study that showed treatment is seven times more cost effective
than arresting people, 10 times more effective than keeping drugs from
entering the country and 23 times more effective than attacking drugs
at their source.

With Jaffe as drug czar, thousands of addicts sought treatment in
1972. The amount of time they were forced to wait for a bed decreased
dramatically. And so did crime. FBI figures in 1972 showed that crime
rates dropped in 94 of 154 U.S. cities with a population of more than
100,000. Nationally, the crime rate decreased for the first time in
17 years.

Although Jaffe says other factors likely contributed to the lower
crime rate, he notes that 90,000 people entered treatment programs
when he was in charge. "An awful lot of people stopped behaving the
way they did."

Despite the successes, the Jaffe method was an easy target. Methadone
treatment always has been controversial, and no politician has ever
won an election by advocating more treatment for addicts. Mandatory
prison sentences for drug offenders have proven more popular among
voters than reducing the wait for a hospital bed. The Reagan
administration eventually cut the treatment budget by 25 percent.

Massing says an estimated 1.7 million people, nearly half of the
nation's hard-core addicts, couldn't get help today even if they
wanted it because of a lack of treatment beds. If Congress did
nothing more than balance the money spent on supply and demand (law
enforcement VS. treatment), those addicts could get treatment, he says.

But Massing says it will take another president with strong law-,
and-order credentials - "I hate to say it, a Nixonlike figure" - who
can shift the emphasis from law enforcement to treatment.

The answer, Massing says, is neither drug legalization nor
throw-away-the-key sentencing.

"This policy has been a disaster in political and human terms," he
says. "We're seeing hundreds of thousands of people locked away. I
would like to see a more humane policy."