NORCROSS BOY IS YET ANOTHER DRUG WAR POW

Eight months after he started a dangerous journey from Nigeria out of
desperate longing for his mother, 13-year-old Prince Nnaedozie
Umegbolu still has not been reunited with her. He remains incarcerated
in a juvenile facility in New York City.

Convicted last month on a charge of juvenile narcotics possession,
Prince awaits his sentence. If the family court judge has any
compassion, he will send the boy home to Norcross.

Prince ended up in this predicament because he was miserable after 2
1/2 years in Abuja, Nigeria's capital, where his mother, American-born
Alissa Walden, had sent him to live with his paternal grandparents.
But despite Prince's serious case of homesickness, his mother didn't
have the cash for an airplane ticket to bring him back home.

That left Prince vulnerable to Nigerian drug dealers, who promised him
a ticket home and $1,900 in cash if he acted as a courier. So,
apparently without his mother's knowledge, Prince swallowed 87 plastic
packets of heroin, some of which burst; by the time he landed in New
York, the boy was ill. After he was treated at a hospital, New York
authorities took him into custody, where he has remained since April.

The boy is no criminal, no drug kingpin. His case should have been
resolved long ago.

But Prince became a victim of the nation's overzealous war on drugs.
For decades, American law enforcement authorities have waged a
Prohibition-like campaign against illegal narcotics; that crusade has
fostered one of the world's highest rates of incarceration while
having no discernible effect on the flow of illegal drugs.

It's high time to admit the obvious: This isn't working. A different
approach is called for -- more drug treatment and more alternatives to
incarceration, such as strict supervision for repeat drug offenders
who have not committed violent crimes.

The fledgling movement to reshape the war on drugs is receiving help
from an unlikely source: the current economic downturn. Because many
states are facing budget crises, governors across the nation are
releasing prison inmates early.

Few states have the money to continue to incarcerate felons who pose
little threat to their communities. The cost of incarceration is
usually tens of thousands of dollars per inmate per year.

The same budget pressures have led some states to rewrite the stiff
laws they passed during the last two decades. In Michigan, for
example, the Legislature recently repealed its strict mandatory
minimum sentencing laws for drug-related crimes.

And the Kansas Sentencing Commission has recommended to its
Legislature that offenders convicted of simple drug possession, with
no record of violent crimes or drug trafficking, be sentenced to
treatment rather than to prison. The cost of drug treatment is
substantially less than the cost of incarceration.

A less punitive approach to drug offenders offers no panacea. As any
recovering alcoholic can tell you, some addicts fail treatment several
times before they are able to stay clean. And some petty offenders
will make no effort to get off drugs. But many will -- not only saving
taxpayers money but also rehabilitating some lives.

The case involving young Prince, meanwhile, is much more
straightforward. He has not gone so far astray that he cannot be
easily rehabilitated. He's just a kid who did something dumb because
he was homesick.

He doesn't deserve to spend his youth in a juvenile jail because the
nation got carried away with its war on drugs.