National Voices: Editorial Excerpts From Around The Country

DIRECT FUNDING AT DRUG TREATMENT, PREVENTION

Last week police busted Noelle Bush, the 24-year-old daughter of Florida
Gov. Jeb Bush, for allegedly forging a prescription for the anti-anxiety
drug Xanax. The offense is a felony punishable by up to five years in
prison. Gov. Bush, realizing that punishment alone would be of little help,
paid $1,000 to bail out his daughter and probably will send her back to one
of the treatment centers she reportedly has been in before.

That's good. And what's good for a famous parent's daughter should be good
for America. In fact, the nation's $20-billion-a-year war against drugs
might stand a chance if the governor's brother, President Bush, would urge
Congress to correct the imbalance in anti-drug funding, which directs only
four cents of every dollar to prevention and treatment. The remaining 96
cents go to what former Health Secretary Joseph A. Califano Jr., now a drug
abuse expert at Columbia University, calls "shoveling up the wreckage of
substance abuse and addiction in hospitals, welfare agencies, foster care
programs and prisons."

President Bush --- whose daughters Jenna and Barbara both have been charged
with underage drinking and who himself was arrested in 1976 for driving
while intoxicated --- has impressed Califano and other drug policy experts.
Bush recognizes that "the most effective way to reduce the supply of drugs
in America is to reduce the demand for drugs in America."

Oddly, though, the president's newly appointed drug czar, John P. Walters,
has historically favored punishment over treatment. Last year, he called
the notion that drug sentences are too long one of "the great urban myths
of our time." The United States may be winning battles abroad, but it's
losing the domestic war on drug abuse, and the backward thinking of key
strategists such as Walters is one reason why.

Bush and Congress need to correct the imbalances that result in so little
federal money for treatment. Legislators should also reverse an outrageous
law passed in 1998 that bars federal drug czars from spending even a penny
on ads that mention the most commonly abused drug of all, alcohol.