PUSHING BAD DRUG POLICY

The White House choice of John Walters to become the new national drug czar
is troubling in view of how badly out of step he appears to be with most
social and criminal experts on the issues of race, drug use and punishment.

Walters, who used to be chief of staff for drug czar William Bennett in
1989, is widely considered to be an incarceration hard-liner who still
harbors views that reflect a failed drug war that is nearly two decades old.

His recent comments on the matter are particularly disturbing.

It's "a great urban myth," Walters said in March, that "we are imprisoning
too many people for illegally possessing drugs, (that) sentences are too
long and too harsh, and the criminal justice system is unjustly punishing
young black men."

A coalition of civil rights and public health experts were right to bristle
at such comments which go against the reality that do show serious flaws
and inequities in the sentencing of drug offenders.

Walters apparently finds nothing wrong in a policy that mandates harsher
prison time for crack cocaine abusers -- disproportionately African
Americans - - than for powder cocaine abusers. He disregards the fact that
while whites and blacks use drugs at roughly equal rates, black men are
imprisoned for drug offenses 13.4 times more often than white men. In some
states the disparity is even more dramatic.

The narrowly focused, punish-the-users approach has lost credibility over
the past 20 years, as shown in California by the passage of Proposition 36,
which mandates treatment instead of jail for most nonviolent drug offenders.