A DRUG WAR'S SIDE EFFECTS

For those who see the persistent influx of illicit drugs as one of
America's most urgent problems, crying out for answers (that's most of us,
surely), an event last Monday in New York could hardly have been more
disheartening.

In January, Laurie Hiett, wife of the U.S. Army colonel who formerly
commanded the military's drug-fighting operation in Colombia, pleaded
guilty to laundering drug-pusher money. Now her husband, a 24-year veteran,
has pleaded guilty to getting in on the illegal scheme.

Thus, this question: If people at or near the top of this international war
on drugs - the ones with some of the best salaries and most clout and
longest career investments - can be thus corrupted, what does it suggest
about those much farther down the chain? If people whom common sense would
see as the least vulnerable yield to temptation, what must the risks be
like for those most susceptible to such pressures?

True, by all testimony, Col. James Hiett didn't set out to be part of a
drug-running operation. That was a role his wife took on her own. But after
she had shipped $700,000 worth of drugs to New York and received $25,000 in
cash as payment, he was told about the smuggling aspect by Army
investigators. This put him in a position no one could envy: a choice of
loyalty to his country and the law, or loyalty to his wife. He chose the
wife - and, not incidentally, chose himself as well.

He opted not to tell authorities what he knew. Instead, he tried to
disperse and conceal the cash as best he knew how, paying bills with some
of it and depositing the rest in their bank accounts. Now, he faces fines
of up to $250,000 plus as much as three years in prison.

For years, critics of such foreign anti-drug operations have said America
is trying to close the wrong end of the pipeline - that if it can't work
effectively to curtail demand at home, it will never shut off the flow on
this end. They add that the increased risks created will bump up the
stateside street price, in turn spawning more and bigger crime as addicts
steal to feed their habits.

It would be a simplistic approach to a highly complex problem to say that
the Hiett incident "proves" that this argument is correct. But it lends it
added credibility. Anything that resulted in less money flowing south would
necessarily put something of a crimp in the illicit traffic. The growers
and processors and shippers aren't in it for their health.

The difficulty lies in finding the best ways to effect such changes.
Education and public-awareness programs are results-getters, up to a point.
But when it comes to securing congressional appropriations, these don't
have the cachet of a "war" on drugs, especially one with an international
military component - even if that war is one that often looks unfightable,
not to say unwinnable.

Another approach, however unappetizing to most Americans, is one that has
been tried in England and elsewhere: Simply legalize the most commonly
abused drugs, register those addicts who will admit to being hooked, and
provide them with doses of known strength at small cost. With the profit
motive all but eliminated, related criminal activity could reasonably be
expected to go down.

Aside from societal revulsion for such a solution, though, this approach is
not without difficulties of its own. The foremost concern is that if much
of the stigma of drug abuse is pared away, that increases the risk that
people will get involved with drugs who otherwise wouldn't.

It's a dilemma. If the solutions were easy, they would have been put in
place long ago. But the lamentable yet instructive story of James and
Laurie Hiett, which is still unfolding, suggests a need for two things: a
top-to-bottom investigation of the operation he used to run, and a
redoubled and refinanced push for inroads against the demand side of the
equation. What we're doing now certainly appears to work poorly. If it
works at all.