AMERICA'S MISGUIDED WAR ON DRUGS

Attacking suppliers of drugs without addressing the demand guarantees
drug sales will continue.

No credible evidence exists showing that stringent enforcement of U.S.
narcotics laws actually reduces drug use in this country. Indeed, the
opposite seems true: Law-enforcement efforts actually promote illicit
drug use. That's certainly my observation after 10 years working with
homeless drug addicts in Washington, D.C. The endless police raids on
crack houses, shooting galleries, and various open-air markets simply
help push drugs block-by-block through the city, guaranteeing that
every D.C. teenager will eventually have a full-blown market on his
street corner.

The problem is simple: Attacking supply without addressing demand
guarantees that drug markets and drug sales will not cease.

They simply move to another spot momentarily untargeted by police
raids.

Then they move again. This phenomenon exacerbates the epidemic,
casting a wider net than would otherwise be cast, reeling into drugs
youths who would otherwise stand a much better chance of staying drug-free.

It's important to be very clear on this point: Our law-enforcement
efforts actually help peddle drugs.

Society has become a pusher.

It's hard to conclude otherwise.

Now comes news that we'll soon get more of the same. The Clinton
administration's annual anti-narcotics budget, unveiled earlier this
month, calls for roughly $12 billion in spending for law enforcement,
interdiction and other efforts to attack the narcotics supply.

That's a 30 percent increase since 1996 and nearly a doubling of such
funding over the past decade.

This means more money for more cops and other resources to help
facilitate the spread of crack, heroin, and marijuana through the
streets of America's cities.

Tragically, as in past years, funding to reduce drug demand
constitutes barely a third of the proposed federal narcotics budget.

This, while local spending for treatment in many U.S. cities continues
to drop. Washington's treatment system is in shambles.

Between 1993 and 1998, the city's treatment budget fell from $31.3
million to $19.7 million, a 37 percent drop. Drug offenders sentenced
to treatment by judges languish in prison for months for lack of a
bed, and about 1,200 people are on the city's waiting list for
methadone maintenance. Across the United States, treatment programs
can accommodate only about 50 percent of hard-core users.

This, despite the fact that treatment is widely acknowledged to be
much cheaper than narcotics enforcement and interdiction efforts.

For example, for the cost of a single customs department drug
surveillance plane-a reported $47 million-the District could treat all
those on its waiting list and more. But instead of treating drug
addiction as a public health issue, we continue to criminalize it with
endless street raids, sending hundreds of thousands of non-violent
drug offenders to prison.

And incarceration is yet another way our policies actually promote
drug use. Almost half of all inmates at D.C.'s Lorton prison are
non-violent drug offenders, many of them sentenced under draconian
federal laws requiring a mandatory minimum of five years in jail for
possessing as little as five grams of crack-the weight of two pennies.

Any offender who isn't chronically deviant and prone to long-term drug
use before incarceration has his chances ratcheted up significantly
during five years' exposure to the violence and dysfunction of prison
culture.

It's time to end what amounts to state sponsorship of drug use in our
cities. Let's increase and improve treatment and drug education
programs as a first step toward gradual decriminalization and possible
legalization. Holland, to cite an example, has seen no significant
increase in marijuana use since legalizing coffee house consumption
more than 20 years ago. Among young adolescents, drug use in Holland
is actually lower than in the U.S. Even with its risks and challenges,
legalization seems to offer a better alternative to the mess we have
now, where tax dollars and law-enforcement techniques police officers
use actually encourage young people, however inadvertently, to use
drugs and take that first fateful step toward addiction.
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- -The Christian Science Monitor, March 8, 1999

Mike Tidwell is the author of In the Shadow of the White House: Drugs,
Death and Redemption on the Streets of the Nation's Capital (Prima
Publishing, 1992). He lives in Tacoma Park, MD.