BEHIND CZARIST 'TRUTHS' - DECEPTION IS NO WAY TO WAGE DRUG WAR

The dogmatic heartlessness of the war on drugs was on flaming display
Monday in Flagler and Volusia counties as national drug "czar" John Walters
brought a message high on zero tolerance and dubious facts to a high school
and a drug treatment center. Walters' sophomoric claims and punishing
solutions illustrate exactly why a record 74 percent of Americans believe
the war on drugs is a failure and why claims like Walters' cannot be
trusted: They are irresponsibly blind to reality.

Walters' claims need a reality check on two particular counts. He belittled
the importance of medicinal marijuana, calling it a "lie." And he peddled a
lie of his own when he said that marijuana use is so "out of control" that
teenagers smoke it more than they drink alcohol.

Federal officials, including Walters and his predecessors in the office of
National Drug Control Policy, have spent millions of taxpayer dollars
lobbying against state initiatives to legalize marijuana for medical uses.
Yet voters in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Maine, Oregon
and Washington have approved medical marijuana initiatives, and Hawaii, in
June 2000, was the first state where the Legislature approved a bill
legalizing marijuana. The reason: Marijuana eases pain and nausea for
patients suffering from cancer or AIDS.

The government officially disagrees, because its dogmatic interpretation of
all drugs prevents it from seeing any difference between a puff of pot,
which has been proven to be less impairing than a shot of alcohol, and a
vial of crack or a snort of coke. Tens of thousands of cancer and AIDS
patients whose conditions could be eased through access to marijuana must
instead endure the punishing policies of federal officials. Like Walters'
claims, those policies have nothing to do with science or compassion but
with the false morality of ideologues hooked on their own smoke and mirrors.

Walters' claim about marijuana being a more serious problem than alcohol
among teens is an example. The Institute for Social Research at the
University of Michigan annually produces the most comprehensive survey of
drug and alcohol use among school age and college students. According to
the survey's latest numbers, students who drank alcohol at least once in
the past 30 days was more than double that of students who have used
marijuana (49 percent compared with 22 percent).

The numbers are not reassuring either way. But if progress is to be made
against adolescents' attraction to drugs and alcohol, honesty with the
numbers, with the nature and with the extent of the problem, should be the
government's first concern. Misusing the numbers only breeds mistrust. And
in the war on drugs, the right numbers have been the first casualty. The
misuse of scientific data and perspective has been the second. Crack
cocaine is not the same as marijuana, and marijuana is not the same as
alcohol or smokeless tobacco. Yet they are all treated as equally evil,
equally addictive, equally punishable.

More perspective and honesty would point to the fact that hard-drug usage
is isolated, that alcohol is indeed the biggest problem schools face daily,
and that smoking a joint or even having a drink, however stupid the act may
be for young adolescents, is not the "gateway" to addiction. And while
daily usage of marijuana among 12th graders is, at 5.8 percent, indeed
higher than daily use of alcohol, it does not reflect a teenage population
"out of control" by any measure. It is a concern. It is not an epidemic.

But for all his powerful credentials, even John Walters cannot stand up to
common sense, and he got a dose of that, too, when Flagler Palm Coast High
School student Gabe Clifton reminded him: "I personally think you are
overdramatizing the problem."