Why do Americans see the failings of New Deal liberalism on every
issue but drugs? Even as the Clinton administration is implementing
states-based welfare reform with its right hand, its left hand is
plotting expanded drug prevention and anti-gang efforts -- more big
government. California and Arizona's recent state-level mandates to
reform some obvious flaws in America's drug policy (prison crowding
and the withholding of medical marijuana) have drawn a stern federal
rebuke. Does Uncle Sam really know better?

Some years ago, Americans, optimistic about the War on Poverty,
cringed at the suggestion that the growing welfare bureaucracy might
actually be creating problems despite its sincere efforts to solve
them. There's a parallel here. Instead of expanding our notoriously
ineffective drug control bureaucracy, we'd do better to reform it
based on insights we've gained from welfare reform.

Eighty years of bureaucratic drug interventionism has resulted in more
social problems, not fewer. Per capita non-medical drug use in
19th-century America was about the same as today. But there was no
gang violence because the market was legal. Drugs of low potency were
popular; the druggist on Main Street had no need to concentrate the
drugs for compactness in smuggling. No big money changed hands.
Unhappily, some troubled souls became addicts. An imperfect but
undramatic situation prevailed.

Big government changed everything. Just as welfare failed to
eradicate poverty, criminalization failed to eradicate or even reduce
drug addiction in the long run. Whereas inter-generational dependency
is welfare's unintended consequence, drug prohibition has
unintentionally produced an omni-present black market in drugs.
Escalating criminalization and demonization pushed users into
unhealthy social margins, attracted thugs into ultra-lucrative
wholesaling, and lured poverty-stricken kids into profitable
retailing. It's addiction to money, not drugs, that's produced the
ugly inner-city drug scene of today and we have our drug prohibition
bureaucracy to thank. For, in trying to jail drug sellers, it
guarantees their fantastic profits.

The more welfarism tried to fight poverty with blanket entitlement,
the more it created dependency; the more prohibitionism tries to fight
addiction with blanket criminalization, the more it creates
black-market pathologies -- violence, corruption, property crime,
strong and tainted drugs equally available to kids and adults.
When New Deal liberalism heroically attempts to create a
"poverty-free," or "pollution-free," or "drug-free" society while
ignoring unintended consequences, it fails: bureaucracy multiplies,
promises fade, and the bills pile up. The federal drug control budget
(adjusted for inflation) rose from about $500 million in 1970 to about
$40 billion in 1992. Yet as the prohibition budget soared, drug
problems increased.

While criminalization spawned violent gangs, the self-serving
temptations of bureaucracy have degraded drug education.
Prohibitionism and drug education are not inseparable. Arguably, they
are at odds. The intolerant criminal-justice emphasis of prohibition
conflicts with the public-health approach to drug education, whose
truthful, detached, and empathic manner is more likely to succeed with
kids. Given the clear failure of the prohibition-minded approach,
drug education must be re-designed so it truly helps kids deal with
the complex interactions humans have always had with mood-altering
substances.

Indeed, bureaucratic wars cannot eradicate poverty or addiction. If
done properly, welfare reform will stem the tide of inter-generational
dependency without cruelly allowing poverty to expand. Constructive
drug reform would thwart black markets without permissively allowing
addiction to expand. But drug-abuse figures must no longer be the
sole criteria for successful drug control. The vast social toll of
prohibition's unintended consequences must be recognized and remedied.

Neither welfare reform nor drug policy reform entail pulling the plug
completely: with welfare, we must strip away the blanket entitlement
that fosters dependency while leaving a safety net for human need;
with drug control, we must strip away the blanket criminalization that
spurs black-marketeering while leaving a rational system of civil
regulation, treatment, and public-health-based education.

To thwart gangs, Clinton should begin dismantling the drug prohibition
system on which they thrive. To help kids, let's reform and
de-politicize drug education. Our children will be no better served
by drug prohibition as we know it than by welfare as we know it.

Paul Bischke is a writer, social worker, and Co-Director of the Drug
Policy Reform Group in St. Paul, Minnesota.