TREATING ADDICTS IS THE BEST WAY TO PUT DEALERS OUT OF BUSINESS

Suppose your son or daughter became addicted to crack cocaine. Suppose he or
she committed some nonviolent crime to support the habit. Suppose he or she
was arrested.

At this point you may suppose that the police would notify you. It doesn't
always happen that way. Sometimes cops, using prison sentences as a threat,
will force a nonviolent first offender to become a confidential informant.

In one case, a 19-year-old girl was wired, given $85 to buy crack and
instructed to go to a crack house and smoke the dope with a man the cops
suspected of murder, and try to get him to talk about it. She failed, and
the cops charged her with the original offense.

Her father, one of those World War II veterans not so easily intimidated by
bureaucrats and politicians, was outraged. "Just what was plan B?" he
inquired of the cops. "What would you have done if this guy had discovered
the wire and killed my daughter? I'll tell you what you would have done. You
would have called her mother and me, and you would have said you found our
daughter's body, and it appears to be drug-related. And you would never have
admitted her murder was your fault."

Outrage has led to a crusade to persuade the Florida Legislature to pass a
law that would prohibit police officers from using addicts who are
first-time, nonviolent offenders as confidential informants. He also wants a
law that would send first-time, nonviolent offenders who are addicts or
mentally ill into a treatment program rather than a prison.

Harold P. Koenig's logic is irrefutable. But logic and common sense don't
always work in politics. Law-enforcement types are opposed to his sensible
ideas, but they are wrong, and he is right.

This so-called war on drugs, now more than 40 years and uncounted billions
of dollars old, is a flat failure. There are more drugs available now than
there were before. And, as everyone knows, the only answer is to cut the
demand. You do that by treating addicts, not stacking them up in prisons.

Addiction to a chemical substance is an illness. Mental illness is a medical
problem, not a law-enforcement problem. Koenig, though well past retirement
age, went unarmed to several drug dealers in his county and asked them, "Who
are your customers?" He got virtually the same reply from all of them.
Seventy-five percent are addicts released from prison or jail; 15 percent
are addicts who haven't yet been caught.

"So there is 90 percent of their market, and if, by mandatory treatment, you
could cure 75 percent, you'd put these guys out of business," Koenig said.
"That's a much better approach that interdicting supply, which is an obvious
failure."

Koenig is going to need a lot of help if he is going to overcome the
resistance of the law-enforcement bureaucracy that gets millions of dollars
to "fight the war on drugs." But his approach makes sense. Doing the same
old same old does not.

Koenig has formed an organization he calls H.E.A.R.T -- help early addicts
receive treatment. You can contact him at 341 Lanternback Island Dr.,
Satellite Beach, Fla. 32937. The phone number is 321-773-0298.

Don't be misled. Koenig hates drugs and drug dealers. He just has sense
enough to realize that treating the addicts is a better way to put them out
of business.

As for forbidding cops from using nonviolent first offenders as undercover
informants, common decency demands that. It's one thing to force a career
criminal to be an informant. It's quite another to put a sick, but often
naive, young person into a position of danger.