IN CITY'S STRAGEGY, PRIORITIES GO TO POT

Lenox Avenue and 141th Street is not so different from a thousand other
ragged corners in New York.

A Chinese-food place. An auto-parts store. Rumbling buses and honking
gypsy-cab horns. Folks hurrying off to the No. 3 train.

And if you look real closely, a heavyset guy in a FUBU T- shirt and baggy
khaki cargo pants is standing out of the sunlight, selling quarter bags of pot.

His name is Blue. Blue doesn't say anything to anybody passing by. He
doesn't have to. People who want to buy seem to understand he's selling.

And yesterday, less than 24 hours after the Drug Enforcement Administration
and the U.S. Customs Service announced their latest "major" marijuana bust-
16 felony charges! 12-month cross-country probe! Tractor-trailer loads of
high-grade pot headed straight for this very corner! Blue was still doing
business on this early June day.

"What you need?" he asked in a strong Jamaican accent when I got right up
in his face.

Despite all the big announcements, all the latest crackdowns, all the
millions of dollars spent, nobody fighting our so-called War on Drugs can
offer any hope at all.

If Blue gets arrested-and by the time you read this, he very well may
have-does anybody really think he won't be replaced in a hurry by some
other young man selling pot?

"Red?" "Green?" I don't know. But I do know this: It's long past time for
some fresh thought here.

And don't go looking for that in the Giuliani administration or the NYPD.
The single biggest police initiative in New York this year involves locking
up young people caught with small amounts of pot.

"Operation Condor," this high-priced, citywide effort is called. Operator
Condor has already put $ 39 million worth of overtime pay into the pockets
of New York City cops. So you won't hear the police unions complaining
about Operation Condor too much.

But look what this and similar efforts have achieved.

Forty thousand people, the vast majority of them young, have been arrested
on marijuana charges this past year. That's up from 4,000 in 1990, a
10-fold increase.

Eighty-five percent of the recent arrests were for simple possession. And
each one of these men and women-many of them never arrested before-were
searched, cuffed, printed, booked and left to languish with real criminals
in dirty cells for 12, 24, sometimes 48 hours before they even saw a judge.

All for smoking a joint on the sidewalk-or committing some similar
misdemeanor offense.

Is this a smart use of limited law-enforcement resources, a quarter-
century after the state Legislature decriminalized the possession of small
amounts of marijuana at home? Can anyone seriously argue that?

And look what else this great big crackdown seems to have achieved: a scary
increase in street violence connected to the marijuana trade.

Some of these reports may be hyped, but city police say the pot sellers are
shooting each other more and more in New York these days, the way the crack
posses and the heroin gangs once did.

Well, maybe.

But let's be clear here. No one can argue this violence is caused by
marijuana. The violence is caused by the laws that make the weed a crime.

"Rudy Giuliani has managed to take a drug that was never associated with
violent behavior and turn it into a crime-creating, violence-causing
substance," Ethan Nadelmann was saying yesterday. "That is some claim to fame."

Nadelmann, a former Princeton professor, runs the Lindesmith Center in
Manhattan, home to some of the freshest thinking anywhere on the issue of
drug policy.

Nadelmann's group, with financial backing from fearless financier George
Soros and others, has been focusing attention on the street-level
consequences of New York's marijuana crackdown. He doesn't mince words.

"Are marijuana dealers shooting each other up?" he asked. "There's certain
logic to that. It's an illegal business. A commodity that's more and more
valuable. There's no mechanism for resolving disputes nonviolently."

And stiffer penalties won't help any more than big busts do.

"There is absolutely no evidence that increasing penalties for dealing a
drug will reduce the violence associated with that, none whatsoever,"
Nadelmann said.

Yesterday, the federal Centers for Disease Control came out with a new
batch of numbers on high-school drug use. These numbers go up and down. Now
they're up again. Forty-seven percent of American high-school students
report they have tried marijuana at least once. Twenty-seven percent said
they "use" the drug.

"We may wish for a drug-free society," Ethan Nadelmann said. "But we should
not look this gift horse in the mouth. The fact that marijuana is the
subject of this illegality is a tremendous advantage to the health of New
York City"- compared to the usual alternatives.

"A substitution effect is going on here," he said. "It makes a huge
difference if the drug of choice in a community is crack cocaine or marijuana.

Let's not screw this up. Crime is down in New York for a lot of reasons.
One is that marijuana in some communities has replaced heroin and cocaine."

Just ask Blue.