DRUG WAR FOUGHT ON WRONG FIELD WITH INADEQUATE WEAPONS

His afternoons were for mowing the lawn or tinkering on the car. But
mornings were for coffee and blues.

Mornings were for sitting in his favorite room in the early sun, sipping
his cup and listening to hundreds of 45s gathered over 60-something years
of living. Mornings were for plain-spoken old songs about cheating women
and cheated men, for pain sermons and joy testimonies from Blind Lemon
Jefferson and T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson, Snooky
Pryor and Big Mama Thornton.

Anyone who knew the old man knew how he loved those mornings. Then his son
stole his records and sold them to buy crack cocaine.

It was -- for me, at least -- an eye-opener. I have a friend who has spent
years strung out on one drug or another. I've driven down streets where
11-year-olds jump out at your car trying to sell you a packet of get-high
or a stick of no-pain. But the day the son took from his father something
he knew to be precious and irreplaceable was the day I finally understood
- -- as much as you can without feeling it yourself -- the power of a drug
craving.

It was the moment my doubts about the war on drugs hardened to a certainty:
We're fighting on the wrong battlefield, and our weapons are inadequate.

If newspaper reports are to be believed, many members of Congress appear to
be coming to a similar moment of clarity, courtesy of the movie Traffic.
The gritty film tracks the intersecting lives of a handful of soldiers on
both sides of the war: the American drug czar, his cocaine-addicted
daughter, the Mexican cop, his U.S. counterparts and, of course, the
dealers. The film's unmistakable conclusion -- that the war has been an
abysmal waste -- is said to have had a profound impact on influential U.S.
lawmakers.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said he was struck by a moment when the movie's
drug czar asks how it's possible to fight a war on drugs when the "enemies"
are drug users in our own families. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the
film "caused me to rethink our policies and priorities."

It's a rethinking that's as welcome as it is overdue. The war on drugs has
been very expensive. One report puts the price tag at $18 billion a year.
But that's not where the real cost lies. The mandatory minimum sentencing
guidelines at the core of the war have triggered an explosion in the prison
population.

But the war has produced anything but a decisive victory. Indeed, after
years of decline, drug use among young people ages 12 to 17 is actually
trending up. Small wonder a new study by the Pew Research Center for the
People & the Press finds that an increasing number of us consider the war
on drugs a failure.

For years, we've seen that failure reflected in the disruption of our
communities, the loss of mothers, brothers and sons. Our senators,
apparently, are seeing it for the first time through the expedient of a
Hollywood film.

We've been treating a sickness with a prison term. Emphasis has been on the
punishment of users and dealers, and it's time to admit that this by itself
will not work. Time to balance the stick of incarceration with the carrot
of more resources allocated toward drug treatment and addiction prevention.

I say this thinking of an old man whose blues records were lost to crack
hunger.

Luckily for him, I used to be a music critic, one of the benefits of which
is a sizable music library. So when I heard what happened, I recorded some
tapes and sent them to him as a gift. I'm told that he sits in his room now
and sips his coffee, listening to the blues as ever he did before.

But I suspect his mornings will still never be quite the same.