OUR COUNTRY'S WAR ON DRUGS SHOULD BEGIN AT HOME BY CURBING USERS' DEMAND

WASHINGTON - 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 filled our prisons to overflowing 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 bow 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 - whether 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.
We've even managed it with teen pregnancy. Shouldn't we at least try
it with drugs?