FIGHT AGAINST DRUGS DEMONSTRATES BOOMERS' UNREALISTIC IDEAS, BELIEFS

"I think baby boomers ought to say (to their kids), `I've learned from
mistakes I may or may not have made and I'd like to share some wisdom,' "
George W. Bush said last summer.

Now if he can actually sell this line to his teen-age daughters, he's a
better politician than I've given him credit for.

But he has successfully sold it to the rest of us, avoiding further prying
into whether, when and how often his own youthful mistakes might have
included the use of illegal drugs.

Since then it has been fashionable, especially among reporters, to shrug and
dismiss the entire issue of candidates' drug use as a distant artifact of
the settled past. When Vice President Al Gore was recently accused, in a new
biography by Newsweek correspondent Bill Turque, of using marijuana as a
young man far more habitually than he had admitted, the allegation commanded
little coverage. The public no longer has an appetite for "character cop"
journalism, we tell each other. And besides, aren't we talking about minor
peccadilloes? And don't a lot of us live in glass houses ourselves, where
college-era drug use is concerned?

There's just one problem with this dismissive instinct: It concerns a class
of possible crime for which the U.S. government and many states now
routinely jail their citizens, with the hearty approval of both candidates.

Welcome to the first all-boomer presidential contest. Now that both parties
have essentially settled their nomination battles, we are left to face what
it means to have, as presidential choices, two men who appear to have
predictably complicated pasts in the area of drug use. Try as we might to
deny that it matters, the hypocrisy of both campaigns is something for which
we may ultimately pay a heavy price.

I don't care much, personally, about either man's past use of drugs: If the
allegations about Gore, for example, are true, they mark his history as
similar to my own. But I do care about having a president who has both the
will and the political running room to begin a radical shift in our entire
approach to drug control. And a boomer president laboring to finesse the gap
between his own history and the climate of hysteria that surrounds our drug
policy is probably the last person who can deliver the change we need.

Our laws, policies and social attitudes toward drugs today are a mass of
contradiction and willed ignorance. Despite ample evidence that our real
problem -- the locus of almost all the violence, crime and mortality
associated with drugs -- concerns hard-core addicts who use drugs such as
cocaine and heroin, we act and talk as though the biggest menace we face is
pot-smoking by middle-class teen-agers. Despite two decades of proof that
interdiction and tough law-enforcement will do nothing to stop the sale or
use of drugs, our prison populations are skyrocketing.

Mandatory minimum sentences have consigned to prison, without parole, great
numbers of low-level dealers and even users, forcing the release of violent
offenders for whom there is no longer room. And our drug war compromises
both the ideals and the workings of our criminal justice system, which metes
out far harsher treatment to black than to white drug defendants.

There was a brief time when we addressed drugs as the public-health concern
they really are. As detailed in Michael Massing's wonderful history of the
war on drugs, "The Fix," the Nixon administration was the unlikely
high-water mark of sane drug-control strategy, for it focused the
government's efforts overwhelmingly on treatment. But in the years since, we
have flipped our spending priorities; now only a third of our efforts go to
treatment and prevention, the rest to interdiction and law enforcement. Ever
since the Reagan administration, we have told drug addicts to pull
themselves together, while systematically reducing the resources available
to help them do it.

A sane national conversation about drugs would incorporate the best ideas of
the "harm reduction" movement (needle exchange programs, the insight that we
will never eradicate the human impulse to self-medicate); a hard-headed,
realistic emphasis on treatment programs that have proven their
effectiveness; and a nuanced message to teen-agers that marijuana is a
lesser but still real danger to their young bodies and lives.

But voters who don't bear the burdens of the war on drugs -- that is to say,
middle- and upper-middle-class Americans -- don't seem very eager to have
this conversation. Boomers want to think of drugs as something that belongs
to the past, something that was okay for us, at our unique cultural moment,
but that is now assigned by stern social consensus to a place beyond the
pale, where our kids can't get at it. And so we allow our leaders their
hypocrisies, and they in turn let us nurture our own.

Next time you feel the impulse to wave this issue away, try an exercise:
Imagine, if you will, a female candidate for national office. She is
anti-abortion. Reporters learn that when she was 27, she had an abortion
herself. What would they do?

They would crucify her, for starters. They sure wouldn't let her describe it
as a mistake she may or may not have made.