OUR OFF-BALANCE DRUG WAR

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, 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 teenagers admitting to
having been drunk at some time is rising. 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. 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. In 1999, Rep. Anne M. Northup (R-Ky.)--who received $121,418
from the alcohol industry from 1996 to 2000--led a successful
congressional effort to defeat a similar Roybal-Allard bill. Even as
alcohol was killing 6.5 times more young Americans than all illicit
drugs combined.

Adults today send a strange mix of messages to kids, permitting
seductive TV advertising, for instance, that promotes the virtues of
mood-altering prescription drugs like Xanax, Ritalin and Prozac, while
funding school-based seminars in which police officers tell students
to "just say no to drugs." And if impressionable youths end up turning
to the wrong drugs, we lock them up. This must be confusing for young
Americans--Noelle, Jenna and Barbara included.