SIGNS POINT TO TROUBLE FOR NATION'S DRUG WAR

The war on drugs is facing trouble at home -- the kind that helped bring an
end to the Vietnam War.

Consider these signs of turmoil on the home front, just in the last few weeks:

The Republican governor of New Mexico was quoted in The New York Times as
telling a group of voters: "We ought to legalize marijuana. We need to stop
getting tough with drugs."

The U.S. Supreme Court barred doctors from prescribing marijuana for people
with untreatable pain, in effect trying to overturn a 4-year-old California
law.

Quaker meetings in Trenton, the New Jersey capital, and three nearby cities
called on America to end its war on users of illegal drugs and use the
money instead for treatment, research and education about addiction.

President Clinton made a quick stop in Colombia a few days after releasing
$1.3 billion to help the embattled South American country fight rebels and
drug producers.

A new biography of President Nixon says he reacted to public antipathy by
dosing himself with Dilantin, a mood-altering drug.

Rep. Tom Campbell, said he does not endorse Switzerland's drug policy,
which lets doctors prescribe heroin for addicts. But "if a city wants to
try what was tried in Zurich, it should have the freedom."

A government drug analyst confided to a reporter that it was not being
called a "war" on drugs anymore, but a public health campaign.

Distinguished journalist Matthew Miller reported on what New Mexico Gov.
Gary Johnson told about 80 Albuquerque residents who had come to an
elementary school multipurpose room to hear him fulfill a promise:

"I made you all a pledge that I was going to put the issues that should be
on the front burner on the front burner, regardless of the consequences."

This is what he thought was a priority: "Half of what we spend on law
enforcement, half of what we spend on the courts and half of what we spend
on the prisons is drug-related. Our current policies on drugs are perhaps
the biggest problem that this country has."

He does not condone the fact that half of America's high school graduating
class this year had tried pot. But, he asks, do we really want our kids to
be branded criminals.

He told the mostly white audience that of the 1.5 million drug-related
arrests each year, "Half of those arrests are for marijuana, and half of
those arrested are Hispanics.

He ran the numbers commonly repeated by those who want either to
decriminalize illicit drugs or change the emphasis of the "war" from
punishment to treatment: Americans killed in a year by cigarettes, 450,000;
by alcohol, 150,000; by legal, prescribed drugs, 100,000; by cocaine and
heroin, 5,000; by marijuana, "few, if any."

Johnson's maverick ways haven't gone unnoticed inside the Washington
Beltway. When he first floated his ideas on drugs last summer, the White
House drug czar flew to New Mexico and unloaded a rage of big guns. Gen.
Barry McCaffrey apparently hadn't heard that it wasn't a war anymore.

The Supreme Court ruling affects California and seven other states that
have tried to find legal ways to get marijuana to those who are sick and in
pain. While not necessarily stopping the distribution to the sick
immediately, the ruling is a warning that the court may soon invalidate
every state's medical pot laws.

McCaffrey's Drug Enforcement Administration, right-wing members of Congress
and other advocates of strong, punishment-oriented drug laws argue that
states have no room for avoiding the federal antidrug laws.

According to the Schaffer Library, which specializes in drug policy
documents, the first antidrug law in the United States was driven by
racism, not concern for public health.

It was an 1875 San Francisco city ordinance that outlawed the smoking of opium.

"It was passed because of the fear that Chinese men were luring white women
to their ruin in opium dens," the library reports.

Cocaine wasn't made illegal until the early 1900s, but there's a familiar
ring to the rationale: "Cocaine was outlawed because of fears that
superhuman Negro cocaine fiends ... would take large amounts of cocaine
which would make them go on a violent sexual rampage and rape white women."

Irrational fears led to these laws. Is it possible that other irrational
fears are keeping these laws on the books -- and 450,000 Americans in jail
or prison?