SHIFT GEARS ON DRUGS

In six more days George W. Bush will become the 43rd president of the
United States.

He immediately will inherit a three-decade-old drug policy plus a dangerous
$1.3 billion anti-drug intervention in Colombia's civil war.

Bush should take advantage of the change in administrations to adopt a new
drug policy that concentrates on prevention, rehabilitation and education.
The "lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key" policy has been an absolute
failure since President Richard Nixon first launched the war on drugs in 1972.

Every new administration since Nixon's has feared to admit the obvious --
the war on drugs keeps locking up growing numbers of American citizens
without decreasing the supply of drugs or the cost of illegal drugs.

Outgoing White House drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey used all his knowledge
and expertise gained from an outstanding military career to continue the
war on drugs. It didn't work.

As long as Americans have an appetite for illegal drugs and money to buy
them, drugs find a way from the suppliers, such as those in Colombia, to
U.S. drug users.

Bush should be the first president since the supply-side policy began to
have the courage to admit that increasingly harsh drug laws and escalating
interdiction efforts have failed to stop or slow drug use. This approach
has filled U.S. prisons and jails at an incalculable cost of human
potential, not to mention the billions of dollars it costs taxpayers
annually to house citizens unproductively locked behind bars.

The effort to combat drug use with harsher laws, tougher enforcement and
long mandated prison sentences is a proven failure. Not only does it defy
common sense to perpetuate failure, it borders on stupidity to try to fix
failure by doing more of the same.

It's time for politicians to have the courage to form a new drug policy
that curbs drug use by turning off the demand for drugs.

Programs should be developed to educate young people about drugs in a way
that makes drugs undesirable.

The new administration and Congress need to abolish mandatory sentencing
for non-violent drug crimes. Mandatory sentencing has filled prisons to
overflowing with drug offenders. Judges need to be given the authority to
administer justice based on judicial judgment.

Drug policies need to focus on keeping citizens out of prison. The United
States has 2 million citizens in prison, by far the highest proportion of
the adult population of any nation on earth. Most of these prisoners are
behind bars due in some form to drug use.

Bush and the 107th Congress should shift course on the effort to combat
drug use with policies that emphasize prevention, education and rehabilitation.