WAR ON DRUGS

A New Measure To Define Success Or Failure

Today, the Shadow Convention in Philadelphia will focus on one issue we
know won't be discussed at the Republican and Democratic conventions: the
nation's failed drug war.

In fact, if we're lucky, the presidential candidates will say as little as
possible about drugs during this year's campaign. And if they do say
anything, we can predict what it will be: lots of talk about getting
tougher on drugs, and on the countries where drugs are produced, and on the
people who buy and sell them, and perhaps a little lip service to the need
for more "treatment" -- so long as it's tough.

My feeling is: give us a break! We've been hearing this talk for decades,
yet most illegal drugs are cheaper and more available than they've been in
decades, if not ever. Marijuana, LSD and heroin, cocaine and then crack
cocaine, now methamphetamine, Ecstasy and the "date rape" drugs -- one
after another, with more to come. They say there are two things you can
count on in life: death and taxes. Let me add two more: that human beings
will use drugs, and that politicians will promise to get tough on them.

Most drug warriors don't try too hard to define success or failure in the
drug war. Better to keep one's options open. If drug seizures are up, pile
'em up and call a press conference. If drug production in Bolivia or Peru
is down this year, declare victory (and forget that production's soaring in
Colombia). If drug arrests are up, that must be good -- after all, the law
is the law. If they're down, that must be good too. Maybe fewer people are
using drugs -- or maybe not? It's all a political shell game, with lookouts
watching warily for any rational thinkers who might spill the beans.

But there is one criteria that keeps popping up year after year. It's the
number of Americans, especially teen-agers, who confess to a pollster that
they used one drug or another in the last week, or month, or year.

It is on this basis that drug warriors often point to the 1980s as a time
in which the drug war really worked. The number of illicit drug users
peaked around 1980, then fell more than 50 percent over the next two years.

During the 1996 presidential campaign, Republican challenger Bob Dole made
much of the recent rise in teen-agers' use of illicit drugs, contrasting it
with the sharp drop during the Reagan and Bush administrations. President
Clinton's response was tepid, in part because he accepted the notion that
teen drug use is the principal measure of drug policy's success or failure;
at best, he could point out that the level was still barely half what it
had been in 1980. Now GOP candidate George W. Bush is trying out the same
line of attack on his Democratic challenger, Al Gore, who responds every
bit as tepidly as his current boss did.

But there's another way to view the past two decades of drug policy.
Consider that in 1980, no one had ever heard of the cheap, smokable form of
cocaine called crack, or drug-related HIV infection or AIDS. By the 1990s,
both had reached epidemic proportions in American cities.

In 1980, the federal budget for drug control was about $1 billion, and
state and local budgets were perhaps two or three times that. Now the
federal drug control budget has ballooned to almost $20 billion, two-thirds
of it for law enforcement agencies, and state and local expenditures on
drug enforcement are even greater.

On any day in 1980, approximately 50,000 people were behind bars for
violating a drug law. Now the number is approaching 500,000. That's more
than Europe (with a bigger population than the United States) incarcerates
for everything.

What's needed today is a new bottom line for evaluating the success or
failure of our drug policies -- one that focuses on reducing the death,
disease, crime and suffering associated with both drugs and our
prohibitionist policies.

Sure it's interesting, and not unimportant, to know whether the number of
teen-agers smoking marijuana went up or down last year. But what's more
important is whether drug-related deaths went up or down; whether overdose
fatalities went up or down; whether new HIV and hepatitis infections went
up or down; whether new incarcerations of nonviolent drug offenders went up
or down; whether we spent more or less money on prisons instead of
education.

Let me state the proposition even more bluntly: if marijuana or Ecstasy use
goes up next year, but overdose deaths drop, new HIV infections drop, and
the number of nonviolent drug offenders incarcerated drop -- that's
progress. And if marijuana or Ecstasy use go down next year, but total
drug-related death, disease, crime and suffering go up -- that's failure.
Of course we'd prefer that all of these dropped, but given a choice, there
are priorities and there is a bottom line.

There are now millions of Americans with a mother or father, brother or
sister, or son or, daughter behind bars on a drug charge. Millions more
have lost family members to drug-related HIV/AIDS, or an overdose, or drug
(i.e., prohibition) related violence, or been arrested for marijuana
possession, or had their property seized by overzealous police agencies, or
otherwise been victimized by the drug war.

When the Shadow Convention (at the Annenberg Center) focuses on drug policy
today, it will be to give voice to these Americans. And to impress on our
political leadership the need for a new bottom line -- one based upon
common sense, science, public health and human rights.