WHAT COULD DOLE AS PRESIDENT DO ABOUT DRUGS? FAIR QUESTION

MY LAST exposure to the American presidential contest, on the eve of my
isolation for two trans-Siberian weeks, focused on Bob Dole and the drug
question. President Clinton, by his standards, has been deafeningly mute on
the question because, indeed, he did reduce the anti-drug staff from 146 to
25, and he has not devoted much time to hectoring the country on the
dangers of drug use.

Even so, one sighs with despondency at the analytical futility of Dole's
call to mobilize to fight drugs. Not because drugs are less than what they
are, agents of the destruction of many of their users and all of their
abusers, and catalysts of family breakdowns and, of course, crime. But
because attempted correlations between money spent enforcing the drug laws
and the diminution in their use is a profitless enterprise.

But any attempt at precision in talking of the drug war really should begin
by distinguishing between marijuana and the hard stuff, notably cocaine and
heroin. I have previously noted that when in 1965 then-Rep. Edward Koch of
New York introduced a bill to set up a congressional commission to study
marijuana use and federal penalties, he found only a handful of fellow
legislators who would agree to co-sponsor the measure. Four or five years
later, everyone was willing to co-sponsor.

"They found out,"he told me,"that their own children had tried pot."

That was 25 years ago. Early this year, the 10 millionth American was
arrested on marijuana charges. That's a lot of people to arrest. One
wonders Is there another crime in the history of the United States for
which 10 million people have been arrested? How effective is the law?

I have a neighbor whose 15-year-old grows the stuff on the roof of her
house. What on earth would President Dole do to stop this kind of thing
from happening? Reactivate Alcatraz?

But they wouldn't fit there. Where would they fit? Eighty-five million
Americans have experimented with illegal drugs. Since the object of
criminal law is to detect and punish the wrongdoer, should we reason that
85 million of us should have spent time in jail?

An awful problem in presidential politics is precisely this temptation to
shrink from careful definition. An adviser to Dole, who is himself
wonderfully competent to define, would unquestionably urge the candidate
not to make distinctions on the grounds that voters think of marijuana as
an evil drug and therefore not fit for conciliatory discussion. All of
which means that any war on drugs that lists marijuana as among its targets
will be a war lost.

So, in fact, is the war against the hard drugs being lost, though that is a
complex study. But when one asks what a president can do about drugs, you
are asking two things.

The first is programmatic What kind of laws can the president recommend
that would have the effect of diminishing the use of drugs?

(Answer none.) The second is What kind of pressure is a president in a
position to generate?

To attempt even to answer that one requires us to ask Why do people take drugs?

Answers (1) Because they seek sensation. (2) Because they are undisciplined.

Kurt Cobain, the much-lionized rock figure who finally committed suicide
after losing the fight to heroin, had an instructive effect on his
followers. One would think that the death of an idol would cause his flock
to scorn and even hate the agent of death. But this doesn't happen any more
than the mortality of AIDS serves to reform all practitioners of unsafe sex.

You can struggle to find the self-abuser, try him, and sequester him in
prison, but in recommending this course of action confidently, you are
required to suppress any attention given to derivatives of anti-drug laws,
such as murders and theft and fear and closed city parks and mega-rich
criminals and peeping-Tom policemen and bugged telephones and more taxes
for more prisons.

What Dole can legitimately feel about any connection between the rise in
drug consumption and Bill Clinton is that Clinton is a thoroughbred
derivative of the Woodstock generation. A man gifted enough to earn a
Rhodes scholarship and to climb the legislative ladder from nothing to the
White House, but also a man entirely undisciplined in personal behavior.

It is never possible absolutely to document social correlations, but it is
intuitively persuasive to believe that a society encouraged in the hedonism
of Hollywood and Playboy and the welfare establishment, headed up by a
pretender to American leadership who is given to self-indulgence, isn't
devoting a lot of time to the practice of self-restraint.

A political difficulty here is that Bob Dole can't say that kind of thing.
In public.