DRUG WAR RETREAT? THE PENTAGON'S DOUBLE-EDGED PLAN TO SCALE BACK

Blunt as always, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, was asked
during his Senate confirmation hearing what he thought about the military's
involvement in the war on drugs.

He'd once called it "nonsense," but his answer to senators was more
elaborate: "I am one who believes that the drug problem is probably
overwhelmingly a demand problem, and that it's going to find -- if the
demand persists, it's going to find ways to get what it wants."

Now Rumsfeld has plans to scale back the military's involvement in the war
on drugs a welcome and overdue switch from 14 years of warmongering and
wasteful spending.

The Pentagon is involved in 179 drug-related programs costing $1 billion a
year, more money than the Coast Guard, the Customs Service or the
Immigration and Naturalization Service get for their part in the drug fight.

Yet it remains a relatively small sum compared with the $19 billion the
federal government is spending on the drug war this year, and the
additional $20 billion state and local governments are spending.

Still, the Pentagon's switch is significant. It signals an awareness and a
willingness to end a program that hasn't met its objectives. America's drug
problem has been prosecuted rather than treated, to the detriment of the
addicts who are paying a punishing price for their addiction (a quarter of
the nation's 2 million inmates are serving drug-related charges) and the
taxpayers who have been paying the bills of such a vague and open-ended
crusade. Not even the federal government's welfare program cost $39 billion
when it was reformed in 1996. If the Pentagon is pointing the way to ending
the war on drugs as we know it, Congress should follow.

But the Pentagon isn't thinking reform.

It's thinking opportunity. It has never wanted to be involved in the war on
drugs.

It very much is involved in the so-called war on terrorism, a potentially
far richer and just as open-ended trove of federal funds.

The Pentagon isn't proposing to return the $1 billion it spends on fighting
drugs back to civilian uses, as it should especially in light of the record
$347 billion defense budget President Bush just signed.

As if it were scrimping for dollars, it is looking to shift the money to
other Pentagon programs, using the war on terrorism as an excuse.

Most of the military's involvement in drug interdiction is a matter of
intelligence gathering, eavesdropping, special operations missions and the
training of anti-drug police officers in foreign countries.

All of these activities dove-tail with anti-terrorism activities, which is
what the Pentagon wants to focus on.

Congress is resisting the Pentagon's designs for the wrong reasons.

Rather than welcoming the Pentagon's move as a chance to rethink the war on
drugs through the sort of "bottom-up review" so popular in government
programs these days, Congress is balking at any change at all including the
Pentagon's own shift.

Drug programs are popular in Congress. They're pork without the stigma.

No congressman is going to be criticized for awarding an organization in
his or her districts a generous grant to run an after-school basketball
league in the inner city anymore than congressmen have ever been criticized
for channeling billions to their districts to build job-rich prisons and
jails. When Congress ordered the Pentagon to do its part in the war on
drugs, beginning in 1988, it sharpened lawmakers' tough-on-crime image.

They're not about to give that up.

But as open-ended wars go, the one thing the war on drugs and the war on
terror have in common is a virtually unreachable objectives. Congress has
had 14 years to learn that drugs will never be eradicated. While it may
take 14 years to learn that terrorism is no less tractable, it may as well
join the Pentagon and beat a retreat on the war on drugs.

For the nation's sake, Congress shouldn't be addicted to more than one
futile war at a time.