IN THE WAR ON DRUGS, TROUBLE ON THE HOME FRONT

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. Colombia produces 90 percent of the
cocaine used in the United States.

- - A new biography of President Nixon says he reacted to public
antipathy by dosing himself with Dilantin, a mood-altering drug. The
author said Nixon's connection for 1,000-capsule bottles of the drug
was not a doctor, but a friend who was president of the Dreyfus Fund.

- - Rep. Tom Campbell, R-Calif., said he doesn't 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 doesn't 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.

"Tell me that half the users of marijuana in the United States of
America are Hispanic! I don't think so."

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?