TARGETING ADDICTION

The Globe's recent series on the scourge of hard drugs, as experienced from
Boston to the coca fields of Colombia, returned again and again to the hard
truth of its title, "The Endless War."

The participants in that war who spoke to reporters Richard Chacon and John
Donnelly shared an assumption that there will be no surrender, no
cease-fire, and no peace treaty to conclude this conflict. Even General
Barry McCaffrey, the Clinton administration's drug czar and a man who led
the successful "left hook" of ground forces that drove Saddam Hussein's
troops out of Kuwait, does not envision an imminent victory in the war on
drugs.

McCaffrey foresees a tactical advance, not ultimate triumph, in his brief
for the administration's request to Congress for $1.4 billion to equip and
train Colombian forces to fumigate coca crops, rout drug lords, and fight
the leftist insurgents known in Colombia by their Spanish acronym, FARC.
The determined general is making the best case he can for drug interdiction.

But when Chacon and Donnelly take the reader to the apartments and
treatment centers where addicted users of cocaine or heroin are living
proof the war has not been won, McCaffrey's well-intentioned campaign to
attack the drug supply in the Andes looks insufficient or even futile.

A devoted clinic worker, Brianne Fitzgerald, says of the expensive
interdiction effort in Colombia: "People just laugh at it." Even if it did
result in driving up prices and reducing supply, she told the Globe, the
Colombian venture would not diminish the number of hard-core addicts.

The Clinton proposal for US intervention in Colombia's civil war - the
inevitable byproduct of trying to eradicate crops and destroy drug
refineries - is dubious enough as a foreign and security policy. When
judged for its effectiveness in the war against drugs, it seems a
distortion of priorities. History suggests that increased funding for
treatment of addicts and programs for prevention - attacking the demand for
drugs - can accomplish more to ameliorate the individual and social
pathologies associated with the endless war on drugs.