LET'S HEAR STRAIGHT TALK ON DRUGS FROM BUSH

IN PHILADELPHIA this week, the Republicans gather and nobody dares put the
name George W. Bush next to the word "cocaine." In Baltimore this week, we
have a new report from the federal Drug Enforcement Administration telling
us the drug traffic is even worse than we imagined. In the midst of great
political celebration, could we not connect the furious young men who deal
crack cocaine on the streets of Baltimore, and go to prison, with the
privileged young men such as Bush, who now runs for president while ducking
questions about his own past?

This is a moment to change the course of a national destruction. It is a
year now since Bush, in the early days of his campaigning, last touched on
the drug issue. He was the only presidential candidate who refused to say
flatly that he had never used cocaine. In one interview, he talked about
being clean for the previous seven years, and in another, he said it was the
previous 25 years.

Beyond that, he drops roguish hints about his yesteryears, and wishes
everyone to find this boyish and forgivable, if not precisely presidential.
And he hopes no one will point out the obvious: The nation's so-called war
on drugs, now approximately three decades old, has imprisoned young people,
usually poor and black or Hispanic, by the hundreds of thousands, and has
given a pass to hundreds of thousands more young people, usually white and
well-to-do.

This is George W. Bush's chance to speak with real honesty - not just about
his own past, which is that of a thoughtless young man propped up by a
series of his daddy's pals - but about the loss of so many people who have
made mistakes but did not have the money, or the connections, to insulate
themselves from police suddenly kicking in the front door in the middle of
the night.

In Baltimore, we now have this DEA report that tells us what a failure the
last 30 years have been. The prisons are filled, but the drug trafficking
continues. The homicides continue, and the cops say that 80 percent of them
are drug-related. The new DEA report says, with great obviousness to
everyone, that we cannot arrest our way out of this - not now, and not for
years to come.

George W. Bush has been a tough guy on drugs. Lock them up, he says. We need
to know Bush's own involvement, whatever it might be, not only as a
measurement of his history, but of the nation's. He could tell us about the
role of money with words we have never heard. We know about those in the
grip of poverty who turn to narcotics out of anger and despair. What about
those with wealth, who turn to it in a spirit of privilege? What about the
system that protects those with money while imprisoning those who have none?

The police in America pay a lot more attention to the streets of West
Baltimore than they do to the campus at Yale.

The DEA report estimates that Baltimore is home to at least 60,000 drug
addicts. That is about one-tenth of the population. While the public schools
beg for money, we spend millions to build new prisons. Thirty years ago,
there were 200,000 people behind bars in America; today, there are 1.6
million (and another 2.3 million on probation or parole), with an estimated
80 percent of their crimes tied to some kind of substance abuse. The police
of Baltimore now put two officers into cars for the most basic reason - it
is less frightening that way to wade into dangerous areas.

The last mayor of Baltimore, Kurt L. Schmoke, once proposed a radical new
approach to drugs: treat it primarily as a health problem. But today, we
still have addicts hungry for a spot on available drug treatment programs.
George W. Bush, mindful of Texas politics, has gone for the prison door.

Why is it that such approaches seem perfectly reasonable when the defendants
are poor and have dark skin - but those with money and connections manage to
insulate themselves from penalty?

Bush is a product of his class, and his time - just as Bill Clinton is. We
want him to talk honestly about drugs, not in an attempt to demonize him -
any more than Clinton's comical marijuana excuse demonized him - but to give
us a sense of national perspective.

The 30-year war has not worked. It has succeeded in wrecking entire
communities, and the lives of people who live in those communities, while
others have gotten a pass. In ways that nobody else can, Bush could now talk
to us with great honesty - about America overwhelmingly penalizing desperate
inner city kids tearing up neighborhoods on their way to prison, while
overlooking privileged white boys on a lark through college.

That DEA report says Baltimore has the highest rate of emergency-room use
for heroin-related overdoses in the country. Ironically, Philadelphia is
second. George W. Bush is there this week. What a perfect place for the
country to begin a new, honest approach to drug traffic.