INNOVATIVE PROGRAMS TO SLOW ABUSE MAY BE OUR BEST CHANCE IN DRUG WAR

BALTIMORE--When it comes to the struggle against drugs, Americans
have become addicted to despair. The searing movie "Traffic" portrays
the flow of drugs into America as virtually a force of nature, as
irreversible as gravity or the tides. In a national poll last month,
three-fourths of those surveyed said the nation was losing the drug
war.

Yet the share of Americans who use illegal drugs is half today what
it was in 1979--just 1 in 14 now, compared with 1 in 7 then. That
hardly means the problem is solved; since the early 1990s, the
numbers have been drifting back up ominously, especially among young
people. But it does suggest that--like crime, welfare dependency or
teen pregnancy--the level of drug abuse can be affected by changes in
public policy and social attitudes. "I don't see an end in sight,"
says Maryland District Judge Jamey H. Weitzman, whose work in
Baltimore's innovative drug court puts her on the front lines. "But
what I do see are creative opportunities for solutions."

By necessity, this weathered city of charming row houses and barren
corners has been as aggressive as any in searching for such new
ideas. With a population of about 650,000, it has an estimated 60,000
drug addicts; heroin and cocaine are the drugs of choice.

Two important initiatives here are confronting the problem and
providing models for other troubled cities. One is the Baltimore drug
court that Weitzman helped establish in 1994 and still administers.
When Baltimore opened its drug court, fewer than a dozen were
operating nationwide; today nearly 600 are in place, with 456 more in
development.

Like many of the last decade's best social policy ideas, the drug
court works because it bridges an artificial divide, in this case the
gulf between the drug war's hawks and doves. The hawks emphasize
incarceration, the doves focus on treatment; the drug court blends
both. It provides drug offenders an alternative to prison and
guarantees them access to treatment, thus fulfilling the top
priorities of the doves. But it also nods toward the hawks by
subjecting participants to regular drug testing and imposing
sanctions on those who flunk. Weitzman says she hits the most
recalcitrant cases with "generally short bursts of jail to get their
attention--kind of like a timeout for a child."

Almost everywhere that they have been tried, the drug courts draw
strong reviews. But they are limited by the conditions of their own
success. Drug courts work largely because of the intense supervision
the participating judges provide, but that personal attention limits
the number of cases the program can handle. In Baltimore, even after
a recent expansion, the program this year is scheduled to supervise
only about 900 offenders. "Drug courts are wonderful," says Mark A.R.
Kleiman, a drug policy expert at UCLA. "But you can't do them in
scale."

Which is why Maryland has undertaken a second experiment inspired
primarily by Kleiman's work--an idea known as "coerced abstinence."
The coerced abstinence approach targets offenders on probation or
parole, a population usually overlooked in discussions about drugs
and crime. Yet federal studies show that those on probation and
parole consume about half of all the cocaine and heroin used in the
United States. That helps explain why about two-thirds of the 550,000
men and women released from state and federal prison each year are
rearrested within three years.

Kleiman's idea was straightforward and radical: Subject probationers
and parolees with a history of drug abuse to regular testing and an
escalating cycle of swiftly imposed punishments (including jail time)
for those who test dirty or duck the exams. Maryland's Break the
Cycle program--championed by Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (a
daughter of Robert F. Kennedy and the front-runner in the state's
2002 gubernatorial race)--constitutes the most ambitious effort to
implement the idea.

It's been an undeniably rocky road. The program handles a much larger
population than the drug courts--about 9,000 people at a time--and it
has strained under the load. Initially, the state failed to even
analyze many of the urine samples it collected. And even when samples
showed a relapse, probation officers, overwhelmed by large caseloads,
rarely imposed sanctions--in 1999, fewer than 4% of participants who
tested positive for drugs were penalized. The initiative may have
reached its nadir last fall when a participant with 72 unsanctioned
probation violations allegedly shot a state trooper.

Slowly, though, the program is stabilizing. Townsend says delays in
processing drug tests have been sharply reduced. An academic
evaluation in February found that the program now sanctions about 20%
of the participants who test positive for drugs. That's still an
anemic number, but even that glancing deterrence seems to be having
an effect: The study found that the share of participants who test
positive for drugs dropped in half--from one-fourth to
one-eighth--after 16 tests. Participants also were less likely than
other ex-offenders to be arrested within six months of leaving jail,
the same study showed.

The program's critics have a case: Its absurdly low sanction rates
invite defiance. It needs more money, more probation officers and a
greater commitment from the courts to swiftly punish those who flout
the rules. Yet the assault on Break the Cycle still misses the larger
point.

Before the program, hardly anyone on parole or probation in Maryland
was tested (much less sanctioned) for drug use. Virtually any
participant that Break the Cycle discourages from drugs and crime is
one more than the old system reached. This means that, despite its
flaws, the program still is better than what most states do to
suppress drug use among ex-offenders--which is typically next to
nothing. "Maryland is doing about a third of what it ought to be
doing to control drug abuse by probationers--but that's about 20
times what anybody else is doing," Kleiman says.

What Break the Cycle's mixed record actually demonstrates is the
futility of awaiting a sudden breakthrough in the battle against
drugs. In this war, there is no V-2 rocket or atom bomb. It may be
that the best we can hope for is to slow the tide of drug abuse, with
creative but imperfect initiatives like those in Maryland. Accepting
frustration as the inevitable twin of progress may be the only way to
lift the fog of despair that blocks new thinking in the unending drug
war.