183 PERCENT RISE SHOWS WAR'S VALUE

Ed Pawlowski was livid. "You are asking me to help you, only so you can beat
me up some more," he said.

At the office of the Alliance for Building Communities, of which Pawlowski
is executive director, I was asking for his "Comprehensive Drug Elimination
Proposal."

Last Sunday, I discussed how that proposal resulted in ABC getting a
$125,000 federal grant to fight drug abuse and crime in Allentown's
obstreperous 1st Ward. I expressed doubts about a plan that had, in
Pawlowski's words, a "nebulous" approach to combating drugs.

Despite his anger and trepidation, he got the grant proposal and made copies
of its key parts for me.

It calls for "education" and "skill-building" for youth, "neighborhood
empowerment," joining forces with another government-funded drug-fighting
organization, intervention in gangs, better residential security, "positive
role modeling" and so forth. A main element of the drug prevention plan will
be to "assist families to make connections to services."

After stating such lofty goals, the proposal avoids details on how the goals
will be achieved or how they differ from anything that has been tried a
million times before. I guess I've become jaded, but I have heard every one
of the ABC goals stated in various ways since the 1950s, and every
government-backed idea has only made the drug problem worse.

Nevertheless, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was eager
to fling $125,000 of the taxpayers' money at ABC's drug plan.

The grant proposal does, however, contain fascinating data on how the genius
of government-sanctioned programs has worked thus far. One chart says
assaults in the 1st Ward increased 50 percent from 1997 to 1998. Narcotics
violations increased 183 percent -- nearly triple in one year!

With every sortie in the government's war on drugs, we are promised that
more spending, more police power, more erosion of rights and more
bureaucracy will bring victory, just as we were promised that ever more
sacrifices would win the War in Vietnam. And year after year, the public
swallows lie after lie and expects things to get better.

In this case, it is not Pawlowski who should get figuratively beat up by me
or anyone else. He is only trying to run a nonprofit housing organization
that wants to make things better for its needy tenants.

If ABC merely sought better security and other housing improvements, I would
not object. The evil here is that a grant of that sort could not get
approved in Washington.

As I reported last Sunday, Pawlowski agrees with my view that the war on
drugs does not work. Then why, I asked, put all the emphasis of your grant
proposal on drugs?

"You address that because that's what the criteria of the grant are,"
Pawlowski said. He was not necessarily looking for a drug grant; he was
looking for a housing grant.

Why not accentuate the housing needs in the grant application?

"Ask HUD," he said.

In other words, no drug hoopla, no HUD approval of the grant proposal.
Housing improvements, per se, be damned. The mentality of government
regarding drugs has become so perverted and locked that it taints everything
government touches.

At one point, Pawlowski suggested that I must favor drug legalization.
Others who read last Sunday's column inferred the same thing.

I do favor some decriminalization, which is not the same as legalization,
but the main thrust of any viable drug program must be economic.

The drug problem is caused almost entirely by simple market dynamics.
Tougher law enforcement and louder preaching serve only to aggravate the
problem by forcing both demand and prices upward.

Destroy the market and you eliminate the problem, and there are logical ways
to do that without throwing open the legalization door, which evokes images
of a plague of junkies.

And that brings us to the magnificent Carpenter Drug Manifesto, which I
formulated a few years ago. I'll outline parts of it on Tuesday.