KEY TO WAR ON DRUGS IN W'S HAND

I listened hard to the President the other night but heard
nothing about drugs - and drug policy used to be a staple of major
presidential speeches as one Chief after another swore he had The Answer.

But George W. Bush said nothing about the scourge; nothing about the
millions of lives ruined because pushers find a ready market for their
poison; nothing about the nation's prisons, swollen to the breaking
point because draconian laws mandate long sentences for users as well
as sellers.

Make no mistake: The problem hasn't gone away. The number of hard-core
cocaine users has held steady at about 3.5 million over the past
decade, and the number of hard-core heroin users has actually gone up
to 980,000 from 600,000 in the early 1990s.

The President knows all this - both from his time as governor of Texas
and because he isn't stupid. In fact, Bush spoke at length about the
drug problem during his recent trip to Mexico, and again Tuesday when
he met with Colombia's president at the White House shortly before his
first speech to a joint session of Congress.

Bush knows why the plague continues. After his meeting with Mexico's
Vicente Fox, the President rightly said the demand for illegal
substances is "the main reason why drugs are shipped" to America.

So Bush gets it, at least in theory. But he still hasn't appointed a
drug czar - and more importantly, he still hasn't said what he'll want
that person to do with the job.

Bush could urge an even greater effort at interdiction, which would be
the wrong prescription, or he could acknowledge what every expert in
the field - and he himself - knows full well: A treatment regime
worthy of the term is the only serious way to fight drug addiction.

Today, the annual federal drug-fighting budget is $19.2 billion. Most
of that money is foolishly targeted at eradicating drug production at
its source, a policy that has failed largely because most of the
governments of the producing nations have proved powerless to stop the
druglords who effectively control their countries.

Bill Clinton understood all this, too - but never acted on his
insight.

Before his election in 1992, Clinton told me, "a drug policy that
doesn't have treatment at its core is ridiculous. What we're doing now
can't work. The drug-runners always find a way to get their stuff in
[to the U.S.] because the profits are worth the risk."

Clinton, who hiked the anti-drug budget by about 50% over eight years,
promised to "invert the funding ratio. I'll spend much, much more on
treatment and much less for things like interdiction." But he didn't.

What happened? Politics.

Law enforcement officers also know that treatment is the best policy,
but that hasn't stopped them from lobbying successfully for ever more
sophisticated drug-fighting toys - which, needless to say, they love
to use.

So even though every dollar spent on treatment saves three dollars in
the cost to society from drug use and the crime it spawns, spending
wisely has never been a priority.

But the real political problem is simpler: Elected politicians fearful
of being tagged as soft on crime outdo one another in their support
for the get-tough programs that don't work.

"When you run for office," Richard Nixon once said, "it's easy to
gold-plate your crimefighting credentials by giving in to the call for
more law enforcement resources in the drug war. You know better, but
you do it."

No one doubted Nixon's toughness, which is perhaps why he was the
first President to propose a concerted emphasis on treatment. His
successors failed to sustain that effort - and we'll soon see if Bush
views himself as tough enough to act on the truth.

If Nixon were alive, he would likely argue that Bush is well suited to
do just that. In words too profane to publish, Nixon would probably
say Bush executed enough criminals in Texas to inoculate himself from
charges that he's soft on crime.

So maybe, if we're lucky, Bush will roam the White House one night,
pause before Nixon's portrait and heed that advice.