STUCK WITH THE ROCK

For All the Talk, All the Posturing and All the Hope, Drug Law Reform Fails
Once Again

So there they were again, Gov. George Pataki and Assembly Speaker Sheldon
Silver, bickering over their mutual failure to reform the Rockefeller Drug
Laws, and accusing one another of exploiting the standoff for political
purposes.

Is it possible that the two people who can't agree are actually both right?

Surely the consensus that drug law reform is all but dead once again makes
that a valid question. As the fall elections approach, what are voters to
think?

The opportunity for reform has been there for the past few legislative
sessions. Three decades of harsh, unfair and ineffective laws requiring
mandatory sentences for drug law violations weren't to be tolerated any
longer, not if you believed what was said in almost every political quarter.

Here's progress, Albany-style. Vowing to change those laws, in favor of
drug policies that actually worked, had become part of the mantra of state
politics -- just like passing the budget on time and enacting campaign
finance reform. The evidence was there, surely. More humane punishment for
those guilty of possessing even small amounts of narcotics was an
increasingly easy cause to support, and a considerably harder one to come
right out and oppose.

The laws themselves stayed on the books, of course. A different sort of
dialogue at the Capitol meant not a thing in the prisons across the state.

Only it gets worse. Advocates for drug law reform, at least the truly
committed ones, had sensed that this year, an election year, was their best
chance of all. Come next year, the urgency of what could easily be a
genuine budget crisis will leave little interest in drug law reform and
little time for it.

It's alarming to think this year might have marked the point when the
governor and the Legislature -- that mainly means the Assembly Democrats --
came closest to rewriting the drugs laws and subsequently retreated. As it
is, both tend to favor ending the life sentences for the highest level of
drug offenders. Both say drug treatment should be a more readily available
alternative to prison for nonviolent offenders.

So where's the deal that does that much?

Critics of Mr. Pataki's plan for reform say it still doesn't give enough
discretion back to judges. They say it would be too easy for prosecutors to
send offenders to jail rather than treatment. And they point out that the
governor's plan wouldn't apply to most offenders anyway, since low-level
offenders are left out of it.

None of those points are invalid. But neither should they stop reform
entirely, or be allowed to be what keep inmates serving brutally long
sentences. What good does it do for Mr. Silver and the Assembly Democrats
to have what's overall a better plan when that's all it remains? Real
leadership would mean taking what both sides agree on and pushing for
further reform.

For now, though, New Yorkers must brace themselves for a season of
political ads and campaign speeches in which the governor and legislators
alike rail against what they couldn't muster the will to fix. Could anyone
blame voters who held both sides responsible?