REFOCUS THE DRUG WAR:

Use Among Teens Isn't The Best Measure Of Success Or Failure

A week from 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.

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" - as 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 criterion that keeps popping up year after year: the
number of Americans, especially teenagers, who confess to a pollster
that they used one drug or another in the last week, or month, or
year. On this basis, 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 12
years.

But there's another way to view the last 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, these novelties 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 violations involving
the drug laws. 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 teenagers 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 real 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, we need to make priorities.

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 a week from 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 on common sense, science, public health and human
rights.

Ethan A. Nadelmann is executive director of The Lindesmith Center / Drug
Drug Policy Foundation http://www.drugpolicy.org/