WE'RE FIGHTING A LOSING WAR ON DRUGS; IT'S TIME TO RETHINK POLICY

It's hard to watch Steven Soderbergh's excellent new movie, Traffic, and
not conclude that America's relentless war on drugs is being waged on our
own families, on ourselves.

And we're losing. The harder we fight to keep illegal drugs off our streets
and out of our children, the more we fail.

Donald Rumsfeld, the new secretary of defense, said much the same thing
during his Senate confirmation hearing, suggesting a better strategy would
be for America to focus the nearly $75 billion a year it spends to battle
drugs on curbing demand, rather than stopping supply.

Although this newspaper hasn't taken a position, a growing number of
conservatives from Rumsfeld to William F. Buckley Jr. to the Cato Institute
have concluded that attacking demand is the only sensible approach. The
drug war is a failure, what former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke aptly
called "our domestic Vietnam," a hopelessly unwinnable fight, and yet one
we find impossible to surrender.

It has not achieved a drug-free society, but rather has jammed our prisons
with petty dope dealers and users; turned our cities into combat zones, and
led to drastic increases in homicides and property crime.

Meanwhile, in the name of eradicating drug use, we've passively surrendered
the civil liberties we're supposed to cherish. About 80 percent of American
companies now require mandatory drug tests for employees. You can be tested
without cause, and fired or denied a job for what you do at home. Imagine
the Framers' reaction to the idea of homes and cars being seized and sold
by the government without conviction of a crime.

Only about one-third of the drug budget goes to treatment, while the rest
goes to combat trafficking. It's time to reverse that ratio. A 1994 study
by the RAND Corp. found treatment is seven times more effective than law
enforcement; 10 times more effective than efforts to intercept drugs, and
23 times more effective than fighting drugs at their source.

But not all drug abusers want treatment, and not all users need treatment.
Of the 70 million Americans who have tried marijuana, only about 5 million
continue to use it regularly, or have gone on to other drugs. Treatment
will have little impact on the occasional, recreational drug user.

Nor will moralistic crusades like "Just Say No." Today's young people are
better educated about drugs than any previous generation, and yet many
still choose to use them.

A more realistic approach would be decriminalization of certain drug use,
starting with marijuana. Follow that with a very serious national
discussion on how to remove the criminal networks from the production and
distribution of drugs.

That doesn't mean creating a federal pharmacy for junkies, but recognizing
that drug abuse is a public health problem and not a crime problem.

Obviously, the down side to ending the drug war is an increase in drug use.
How great that increase would be is debateable; users don't seem to have
much trouble getting their dope today.

In the closing scene of Traffic, the hero relaxes on a baseball diamond
built in his Mexican town with money squeezed from federal drug agents. His
dream: freeing his home from the clutches of drug traffickers and making it
again a place where children can play without fear.

The best hope of realizing that dream is to declare a long overdue truce in
the drug war.