IF WE'RE IN A DRUG WAR, WE CERTAINLY ARE LOSING

Then-Huntsville Police Chief Compton Owens was the first law enforcement
official I heard disavow the phrase "war on drugs."

"We (police) don't make war on our own folks," he told me in October 1999.

Perhaps others have since joined Owens in decrying the phrase - not for the
enlightened reason Owens gave, but because if this is a "war," it's one
we're losing. Compare it to the invasion of Iraq: We've landed on the
peninsula, but we don't have the arms, the personnel or a good plan on how
to march on Baghdad.

Item: Last week two Jackson County people were charged with having cocaine.
Arresting officers said they just got lucky. The proliferation of
do-it-yourself methamphetamine laboratories has drug task forces stretched
beyond their limits. The agents, an officer told a TV reporter, don't have
the manpower to go after dealers in other drugs.

Item: Deborah Soule and the Partnership for a Drug Free Community are
holding a workshop today from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. at the SAIC Conference
Facility, 6725 Odyssey Drive, to tell local merchants how they can try to
stem the meth tide by watching for people who purchase large quantities of
sinus and cold medication, lye, matches and Coleman fuel.

Good luck, Deborah, because the same article quotes a local drug task force
member as saying the sales and service of meth dealers in this area -
despite a great deal of work by a great many people - are "not slowing down
at all."

Item: Check out last week's edition of Time magazine. An article shows how
the prescription anti-pain drug OxyContin has become the scourge of rural
Tazewell, Va. If you think the drug problem doesn't have social and
economic components, as well as imposing tremendous financial hardship on
taxpayers to try to make their communities safe again, this article should
change your mind.

Item: Alabama's prisons are in such a mess that experts estimate it will
take about $1 billion more than we have to spend to fix them. Official
statistics show that 43 percent of the folks in our overcrowded prisons are
serving drug sentences. Some of those sentences are longer than those
imposed on sexual predators.

Our conventional wisdom says strict enforcement and harsh punishment will
root out drug abuse and the crimes and wasted lives it fosters. The
evidence before us, though, shows us the conventional wisdom is hogwash.
For example, folks like to talk about Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz.,
the self-styled "toughest sheriff" in the nation as the answer to crime
problems. What they don't say, though, is that, according to independent
investigators, Arpaio's clearance record when it comes to crime isn't that hot.

No, this is an issue that - as much as many of us want to deny it - can't
be solved by law enforcement alone. But the kind of intervention and social
reforms that might help are expensive. And they demand that we really mean
it when we call the agency the "Department of Corrections." It can't just
be the "Department of Punishment."

Of course, we can keep going the way we're going and the drug problem is
going to maintain its grip, if not escalate.

Or to put it in military terms, we can keep fighting what is the equivalent
of World War I - a ghastly, heartbreaking, interminable debacle that
virtually wiped out a generation because of blunders, miscalculations and a
lack of good sense.

It's up to us. But, first, we must face the issue. Right now, we're just
hoping it will go away.