TREATMENT GETS SHORT SHRIFT IN AMERICA'S WAR ON DRUGS

This editorial is excerpted from Sunday's Los Angeles Times.

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. The governor, 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 Noelle Bush 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.

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 -- recognizes, as he put it in one Rose Garden speech,
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." Fact is, heroin and cocaine are cheaper than ever, the annual
number of heroin overdoses has doubled since the early 1990s and the
percentage of teen-agers admitting to having been drunk at some time is rising.

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. Alcohol kills 6.5 times more young
Americans than all illicit drugs combined. Specifically, Bush should press
lawmakers to pass HR 1509, by Rep. Lucille Roybal- Allard, D-Los Angeles,
and two Republicans, that would add underage drinking to the federal
anti-drug campaign.

Adults send a strange mix of messages to kids. And if they turn to the
wrong drugs, we lock them up. This must be confusing for young Americans --
Noelle, Jenna and Barbara included.