DRUG WAR WON WHEN DEMAND CEASES

I won't be surprised, if by the time you read this, Andres Pastrana will
have explained away much of what he told The New York Times on Tuesday.

After all, the Colombian president was just hours away from welcoming the
American president, who was on his way with $1.3 billion in Colombian aid
largely anti-drug aid in his pocket.

But the gist of what Pastrana said seems beyond dispute: There's not much
use putting economic and military pressure on drug-producing countries like
his unless the drug-using countries like the United States take care of
their problem.

"Colombia can put a stop to drugs here at some point," Pastrana told the
Times' Clifford Krauss in Cartagena, "but if the demand continues, somebody
else somewhere else in the world is going to produce them." He said he'd
already heard reports of possible plantings in Africa. "What we are talking
about is the most lucrative business in the world unless the recent spike
in oil prices has made it the second-most-lucrative business in the world."

One reason it is so lucrative, of course, is that rich Europeans and
especially Americans have money to spend on it. Another is that our
attempts to disrupt the market here our ill-named war on drugs makes heroin
and cocaine artificially scarce, thus keeping up the prices.

Pastrana, whether by inadvertence, apolitical candor or devious design,
blurted out the truth: The only sure way America can solve its drug problem
is by reducing demand. The only irreplaceable player in the drug-racket
chain from peasant producer and armed exporter to middleman, money
launderer, distributor, street pusher and user is the last one. Take away
the user, and the whole thing collapses.

How to do that is, of course, the question. The answers are more likely to
include some combination of punishment for casual users and treatment for
addicts than the things we've been focusing on in recent years: mandatory
sentences and pressure on countries where the stuff is produced.

The first has caused our prisons to overflow with nonviolent offenders, and
the second has produced more political instability than measurable
benefits. Indeed, the aid package Clinton delivered to Colombia this week
is, at least in part, an attempt to immunize the Colombian government
against massively armed drug traffickers who have the money to subvert
government officials and the muscle to intimidate those they can't buy.

Much of the aid package is to be used to strengthen the Colombian
military's drug eradication efforts. But isn't it likely that, before long,
more and more of the money will be used to strengthen the military against
the drug gangsters and less and less of it to eradicate drugs? After all,
enlisting other governments in a military assault against our problem tends
to destabilize those governments, giving them a claim on more American aid
to prevent or reverse the destabilization.

I don't know how firmly Pastrana will stick to his candor; after all he is
trying to sell his $7.5 billion Plan Columbia (of which the current U.S.
aid package is a part) as his home-grown solution to drug trafficking,
armed thuggery and economic hard times.

But we in the United States ought to understand the truth of what he said
the other day. If we keep producing millions of drug users and addicts,
someone in Latin America, the Golden Triangle or domestic laboratories will
be there to supply them.

If we can find a way to reduce that demand through sanction, education and
treatment we won't need to pressure foreign governments into restricting
supply.

And don't tell me it can't be done. We've done it with cigarettes.
Shouldn't we at least try it with drugs?