AMERICA WAVERS ON GET-TOUGH DRUG SENTENCES

LOS ANGELES - America's war on drugs is facing a new front line - and
it's not in Colombia or Mexico. It's here at home, in the hearts and
minds of an increasing number of Americans who think the "war" has
gone horribly wrong.

Across the cultural landscape, there are signs that Americans are
beginning to rethink the stiff drug-sentencing laws that have placed
hundreds of thousands of nonviolent offenders behind bars.

The evidence is found in voting booths, in Hollywood, and in a growing
number of living rooms across the US. The debate is fueled by, among
other things, movies such as Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic," now in
theaters, which disseminates a stinging indictment of the drug war. Or
by the real-life case of actor Robert Downey Jr., a struggling addict
whose rearrest on drug charges - despite having already served jail
time - seems to have elicited as much sympathy as outrage.

On the political front, voters last month approved five of seven
drug-reform initiatives, including California's Proposition 36, which
requires treatment instead of jail for nonviolent offenders.

While there's danger of overstating the change of heart, a deeper
national conversation does seem to be under way in households,
churches, and newspaper columns. Criticisms include charges that the
war on drugs is inefficient, unfairly administered, and has not curbed
the nation's appetite for drugs.

The Empathy Factor

Experts say the changes in attitudes are driven by a variety of
causes, ranging from impatience over the amount of money spent locking
up nonviolent offenders (while not getting them off drugs), to the
coming of age of baby boomers, who are said to be more empathetic
toward drug abusers, possibly because a greater share of them either
have used drugs themselves or known someone who has.

"This all comes out of a cultural context where [drug use] has become
more familiar, and where the demonizing rhetoric around it doesn't
really work for us," says the Rev. Scott Richardson, who has delivered
sermons about the unfairness of the war on drugs at the All Saints
Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Calif.

"People can look at someone like Robert Downey Jr. and realize that
this has more to do with an illness than it has to do with crime," he
says. "There is compassion for him."

The Rev. Mr. Richardson and other social observers say part of that
compassion stems from the fact that 12-step programs - with their view
of addiction as a health problem rather than a criminal one - have
become a familiar part of American life, along with therapy and psychology.

"The language of therapy and 12-step programs has become part of our
popular vernacular," says Jill Stein, a social psychologist who
teaches at the University of California at Los Angeles. "We didn't use
to talk this way about ourselves," she adds, characterizing the
recovery movement as one of the most important social movements of the
20th century.

Treatment vs. Jail

Advocates of drug-policy reform say reform doesn't mean excusing drug
addiction. More treatment programs, which help addicts face and
address the causes of their problem, are a fundamental necessity, they
say.

"It does people no good to be too tolerant of things that are going to
ruin their lives," says Morris Dickstein, a senior fellow at the
Center for Humanities at the City University of New York. "Being too
understanding, not drawing any lines, doesn't do people any good."

According to drug-reform advocates, studies that found treatment
programs are more effective and cheaper than prison have helped to
shift public attitudes. Of course, the debate over treatment vs. jail
is a longstanding one. If nothing else, the case of Robert Downey Jr.
- - who has experience with both approaches - illustrates why it is so
difficult for the public to commit permanently to one or the other.

Society today may also be less shocked by illegal drug use than it was
30 years ago, when drugs emerged as part of the countercultural
revolution of the 1960s. In fact, the Lindesmith Center Drug Policy
Foundation reports that 50 percent of Americans ages 20 to 50 admit to
having broken drug laws at least once.

Among those arguing for drug-policy reform are civil rights activists,
who say current laws are administered unfairly. Users of crack cocaine
- - who tend to come from poor, often minority, communities - are 100
times more likely to be punished than users of powder cocaine, who
tend to be more middle-class, they say.

Others say mandatory drug sentences make no sense in crowded prisons:
Overcrowding often leads to early release of prisoners, which
sometimes means that violent offenders, under no mandatory rules, are
more easily released than nonviolent drug offenders whose sentences
cannot be changed.

While reform advocates run the gamut - from Milton Friedman to Walter
Cronkite to Jesse Jackson - reform is not popular in law-enforcement
circles or among politicians, with a few exceptions. In California,
Gov. Gray Davis and almost every district attorney in the state
opposed Prop. 36, despite public support for it.

In the end, say activists, the public's changing views must find
organized expression before any real shift in drug policy can occur.
"We need pressure groups, community groups out there involved with
drug treatment," says political analyst Earl Ofari Hutchinson. "We
have to apply resources to this, because that is the way to curtail
drug use."