PUBLIC LOSING ITS STOMACH FOR DRUG WAR

Support Grows In U.S. For Decriminalization

While the federal government continues to soldier on with its 30-year war
on drugs, the U.S. public has gone increasingly AWOL.

Popular support for the anti-drug campaign has eroded in recent years, and
opinion polls show that a growing number of residents believe the effort
has been ineffective.

At the same time, a number of states have taken steps to decriminalize drug
offenses -- sometimes in direct conflict with federal drug control policies.

Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of this shift in public opinion
came this fall, when California voters overwhelmingly supported Proposition
36, a measure that weeds out drug abusers from the courts and jails, and
channels them into less-expensive substance abuse treatment programs.

Despite strong opposition by almost every prosecutor and law enforcement
agency in the state, voters passed the controversial measure by a lopsided
2- to-1 ratio.

The vote came only two years after an equally large majority voted to
legalize the medical use of marijuana.

And at the same time Californians were passing Proposition 36, voters in
four other states -- Oregon, Colorado, Massachusetts and Nevada -- were
adopting their own measures aimed at decriminalizing drug offenses.

"Americans are tired of wasting billions of dollars on a drug war that is
not working, especially when clear pragmatic alternatives exist," said
Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Lindesmith Center, a foundation
based in New York that supports reform of the nation's drug control policies.

In all, 27 states have laws on the books recognizing marijuana as an
acceptable medical treatment for patients with certain types of illnesses.
In addition, within the past decade, 17 states have passed measures
intended to decriminalize various drug offenses.

The primary reason for the growing antagonism toward the drug war is a
recognition that the campaign has consumed a vast amount of governmental
resources but has produced few measurable results.

In the past 10 years, the federal government has spent $112 billion on
anti-drug efforts, while state and local agencies have spent tens of
billions more. Nearly a million kilos of cocaine and crack have been seized
and almost 13 million people have been arrested.

Yet drugs remain as available as ever -- so much so that prices have
dropped dramatically. According to the Office of National Drug Control
Policy, a gram of 60 percent pure cocaine that cost $191.35 in 1986 went
for less than a quarter of that in 1998.

Despite the historically low price and ready availability, cocaine usage in
the U.S. population has dropped sharply from the 5.7 million estimated
users during the cocaine craze of the mid-1980s. Since 1992, the number of
users has remained relatively stable at about 1.5 million.

In addition, the violent crime wave associated with the initial appearance
of crack cocaine in the early 1980s has ebbed, and homicides -- which
reached an all-time high in 1993 -- also have dropped steadily since then.
In fact, last year saw the lowest homicide rate since the '60s.

Public awareness of those trends was reflected in the passage of
Proposition 36, says San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan, one
of the few law enforcement officers in California to endorse the measure.

"All of the votes in recent years to reduce the penalties for marijuana
usage, particularly in the Western states, all of that is part of the
shift," Hallinan said.

"There's no question that it's happening everywhere -- that people are
beginning to re-examine the war on drugs . . . . It seems to me that people
are increasingly convinced that drug addiction and drug abuse are primarily
a medical problem, not a law enforcement problem."

For much of the past 30 years -- and particularly during the crime spike of
the late 1980s and early '90s -- public opinion overwhelmingly supported
the get-tough approach to drugs. But in recent years the views of residents
have shifted significantly.

According to surveys by the National Opinion Research Center at the
University of Chicago, support for legalization of marijuana has nearly
doubled since 1990, even though two-thirds of those polled believe that it
should remain illegal. "Support (for legalization) went up in the '70s and
back down in the '80s," said Tom Smith, director of social survey for the
university. "But since 1990, it has been going up steadily - from 16 to 33
percent this year."

"When you see a doubling of support for anything in a decade, that
indicates a pretty substantial shift of public opinion about it."

Gallup polls show similar changes. In a 1995 survey, Americans ranked
illicit drugs as the No. 2 problem facing the country. In a similar Gallup
survey three years later, drugs had dropped to fourth place.

There has been a corresponding increase in the number of people who simply
believe that the drug war has been ineffective.