TRACES OF COCAINE -- THE WAR IN YOUR POCKET

Readers may wonder why I can't seem to stop beating the drum about
drugs. The simple answer is that I have come to regard the topic as
this nation's most pressing civil rights issue. The War on Drugs has
led to abuses of government as severe as some of the worst forms of
segregation. It has surpassed McCarthyism in its destructive mania.

The "cure" our government is trying to impose on problems real and
imagined is itself threatening the health of our country. We can't
build prisons fast enough. Families and neighborhoods are being
shattered. Restraints on police that were once embedded in our laws
have been systematically abandoned.

This government's drug addiction is skewing its decisions in every
corner of life. And, as with segregation and McCarthyism, its rhetoric
rises on its own noise, drowning out calmer voices of reason and humanity.

Here's an example of how dangerously crazy life has become in the
bunkers of this war. The Arkansas Department of Correction installs a
scanning device that's sensitive enough to detect traces of drugs on
the hands of anyone trying to enter a facility. The only problem with
it, officials explain, is that almost anyone who has handled a dollar
bill has picked up traces of cocaine, so pervasively has the powder
dusted our currency.

Then we read in this week's news of the couple in Dallas who found
$300,000 on the freeway and turned it in to police. Even though no one
has claimed the money, police now say, it will not be returned to the
finders because agents of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration
found traces of cocaine on it, declared the money drug proceeds, and
confiscated it. By that logic, one could imagine the DEA going into
any retail store in America, opening the cash drawer and confiscating
its contents. Or what about banks? What about the money in your
pocket? It's tainted with traces of cocaine. You can just about count
on it. And so is most of the money that flows around Washington.

So what are we going to do? Confiscate every dollar and lock up every
American who still occasionally uses cash? Don't laugh. The extremes
to which we have already gone would have shocked us 20 years ago.

As usual, when a mania takes control, judgment in all areas is
affected. Right now, for instance, the federal government is fighting
tooth and nail to beat back grassroots efforts to legalize marijuana
as medicine. The drug is far too dangerous, federal officials say,
even to be smoked by the terminally ill seeking relief from pain. The
feds insist years of testing are needed before the drugs risks can be
weighed against its benefits.

At the same time, this same government is injecting an anthrax vaccine
into the arms of every member of its armed services, despite multiple
uncertainties about both the safety of the vaccine and its
effectiveness. Unlike marijuana, whose effects -- positive and
negative -- have been known for centuries, the Pentagon's anthrax
vaccine is relatively new. It has not been widely used. And the single
facility that supplies it has been cited for numerous safety violations.

Never mind that soldiers are resigning from the armed services rather
than submit to the injections -- or that, on the other hand, people
who smoke marijuana do so of their own volition. The government -- the
true drug lord, these days-imprisons for the use of some drugs and
imposes the use of others.

Perhaps most tragically, this fixation on illegal drugs robs us of
genuine opportunities to improve in such crucial areas as health and
education. Take for example Rep. Asa Hutchinson's upcoming visit to
Northwest Arkansas, where he plans to hold a "field hearing" about
methamphetamine, now that Arkansas leads the nation in meth labs per
capita.

One wonders why he did not scramble to hold field hearings over the
results of a study just released by the AARP that citizens of his
state have the second-highest death rate in the nation due to stroke;
that its citizens are among the most uninsured in the nation for
health; and that it leads the nation in the number of women who don't
get mammograms. Hutchinson's answer to the burgeoning methamphetamine
problem is, as always, tougher enforcement.

More laws. More police. More prisons. What a remarkable experience it
would be if, just once, a hearing were held to examine whether there
might be a relationship between Arkansas's top-of-the-chart rates of
poverty, ill education and ill health and all those methamphetamine
labs. But like the die-hard segregationists and fiery Joe McCarthy,
the demagogues of this current hysteria stoke their cause with fear.
They point to a supposed scourge and say civil rights must be
sacrificed to repel it. I say let's hang onto our civil rights and
throw out the demagogues.