RETHINKING THE WAR ON DRUGS

Public Appears Willing To Consider A Scaling Down If Not An Outright
Cease-fire

For the first time since Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs 30
years ago, there are signs of a broadening public willingness to scale
down the attack if not go for an outright cease-fire. Drug policy is
elbowing its way into the national political dialogue.

Bill Clinton's admission in 1992 that he had tried marijuana a time or
two but "didn't inhale" signaled a generational change in what
politicians can say about drugs and survive on election day. Now we
see George W. Bush playing it coy on the question of whether he did or
didn't smoke, sniff or swallow something illegal in his salad days.
Apparently the time is past when a surgeon general can scandalize
Washington and jeopardize her job by suggesting that it might be
worthwhile for the government to study the pros and cons of legalizing
drugs. That's what happened to Dr. Jocelyn Elders in 1994.

But this is 1999. Last June, Rep. John L. Mica of Florida, a
Republican, convened a congressional hearing on that very topic: "The
Pros and Cons of Drug Legalization, Decriminalization and Harm
Reduction." Capitol Hill has conceded that the pros are at least worth
listening to.

The hard core of support for relaxation of drug laws still lies mainly
with Libertarians and liberals on the fringe, but the compass is
beginning to waver. Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico, who calls for
legalization, is a Republican. The decline in Gov. Jesse Ventura's
approval ratings after his Playboy interview probably stemmed more
from his remarks on religion than his call for a more liberal drug
policy. Who knows, Jesse may yet add drug legalization to the Reform
Party's collection of maverick viewpoints.

Outside of Washington grass-roots sentiment about drugs seem to be out
of step with federal policy. Voters in California and four other
states -- including conservative Arizona -- have approved initiatives
to permit medical use of marijuana. The U.S. Department of Justice is
in the awkward position of prosecuting people whose sale of marijuana
conforms to their own state laws but not to federal law, posing a
constitutional question of who gets to say what is and is not a crime.

George Soros, the billionaire who dabbles in social reform, has been
bankrolling medical marijuana initiatives and has given money to
promote needle-exchange programs as a means of reducing transmission
of AIDS and hepatitis among addicts who otherwise share needles. Soros
also is listed as a major supporter of a new California initiative
aimed at the 2000 ballot. It would decriminalize the simple possession
of illegal drugs, which now calls for jail or prison time.

Such an initiative might well find appeal in an atmosphere of public
frustration with what is happening now.

Attacks on the war on drugs are based mainly on arguments that it
costs too much ($18 billion a year currently), that it has had little
impact on the availability of drugs, that it plays into the hands of
international traffickers who can corrupt entire governments to
protect their interests, and that penalties are too severe and are
falling unfairly on black and brown people who are found in
disproportionate numbers among the drug offenders crowding our prisons.

Why not spend more of those billions on prevention, on treatment of
drug addicts, on improving the lot of poor people in drug-saturated
inner cities? Legalization would take the illicit profits out of the
drug traffic, and give users an incentive to come out of the shadows
and volunteer for treatment.

Such talk is irritating to Gen. Barry McCaffrey, head of the Office of
National Drug Control Policy and a ready defender of the present
anti-drug strategy. He told last summer's congressional hearing that
"a carefully camouflaged, well-funded, tightly knit core of people" is
using public sympathy for medical use of marijuana to advance a hidden
agenda for legalizing all drugs. He cites one poll after another
showing substantial public opposition to any legalization of drugs
regardless of how some states vote on allowing doctors to prescribe
marijuana. A relaxation of the present laws, he says, would only
increase the number of people using drugs and the resulting costs to
society and would undermine all the work the prevention agencies have
been doing to steer young people away from drugs.

The drug warriors do not have much to brag about, however. Although
drug use is far lower today than in the heyday of pot-smoking and
coke-snorting in the 1970s, the government's annual Household Survey
on Drug Abuse estimates that 13.6 million Americans were using illicit
drugs in 1998. The survey estimates that 2 million people become
marijuana users every year. About 81,000 persons used heroin for the
first time in 1997, and 730,000 became new cocaine users, many of them
destined to wind up in jail or prison under present laws. If there's a
bright spot in the data, it's a decline in the number of kids aged
12-17 who can be considered drug-users -- down from 11.4 percent in
1997 to 9.9 percent in 1998.

It's much easier for armchair strategists to pooh-pooh the
effectiveness of the drug war than to offer alternatives that would
avoid magnifying what is already a serious health and social problem.

Some advocates of "legalization" of drugs point to the way alcohol and
tobacco are legal but subject to regulation in what passes for the
public good. Why not permit sale of other drugs under strict
regulation to keep them out of the hands of young people? The fact
that the law prohibits sale of alcohol to minors, and underage
drinking still flourishes, casts doubt on whether supplies of any
mind-altering drug can be kept within regulated channels.

One proposal for "decriminalization" suggests that drugs would remain
illegal but people caught using them would not be subject to the kind
of criminal penalties now on the books.

Finally, there is the movement for "reduction" which tends to look
beyond legal and moral issues to what might be done to make the drug
scene more manageable from a public health standpoint, such as
providing legal heroin to registered addicts, as some European
countries have done.

Michael Massing, whose book on the drug problem ("The Fix") won the
Washington Monthly's political book award for 1998, points out in a
recent issue of The Nation that treatment of addiction was the
principal weapon Richard Nixon had in mind when he first used the
rhetoric of war as the basis for an attack on the nation's drug
problem. Nixon's vision of a network of treatment centers for drug
users got shoved aside by a growing investment in efforts to catch
drug smugglers and put drug users and their suppliers behind bars.

Massing estimates that to make treatment available to all who want it
would require an additional $3.4 billion federal investment, but this
amount would be freed up if the $18 billion drug-war budget were split
50-50 between supply and demand sides of the equation. As it is,
prevention and treatment are getting about a third.

Massing and others point to a 1994 study by the RAND Corporation which
compared the efficacy of four different types of drug control in
achieving a specified reduction in drug use. The study found that
treatment is seven times more cost-effective than law enforcement, ten
times more effective than interdiction, and 23 times more effective
than attacking drugs at their source. Massing says "a public health
approach stressing treatment over prosecution and counseling over
incarceration would seem to offer our most humane, practical and
politically viable alternative."

The fact is, putting treatment over prosecution and counseling over
incarceration is already taking hold, not in legislative chambers but
in courtrooms. Drug courts that give non-violent drug offenders a
chance to stay out of jail if they agree to enter treatment and stay
with it, and the development of treatment programs in prisons to help
reduce recidivism, are putting a more humane face on the enforcement
policy and helping offset criticism that the drug laws are too severe.

California has 80 drug courts -- four of them in San Diego County.
Superior Court Judge David Ryan reported to the San Diego County
Substance Abuse Summit earlier this year that 50 men and women had
"graduated" from his drug court in Vista, successfully completing
their commitment to stay drug-free during a year in a treatment
program. Ryan calculates that his court alone has saved 14,000 days in
jail for offenders at a cost of $50 a day -- not to mention the saving
in social costs for those who remain clean and sober in long-term recovery.

Many states also have recognized the value of screening prison inmates
for a history of alcohol or other drug abuse and using their prison
time to get them started on a course of recovery they can follow after
their release. California is one of them, organizing "therapeutic
communities" within prison walls, embodying the same principles of
mutual support found in therapeutic communities and 12-step programs
on the outside.

A treatment program at the Donovan State Prison near San Diego has
been the subject of studies supported by the National Institute on
Drug Abuse. The studies have shown that prisoners introduced to
treatment in prison have a lower recidivism rate than those receiving
no treatment, and the benefit is much greater when parolees go from
in-prison treatment into an "aftercare" program on the outside.

If we're going to continue a war on drugs -- and there appears to be
little support for calling it off altogether -- the challenge is to
reduce the casualty rate. A drug policy tilted too much toward
punishment misses the opportunity to offer addicts a way out of the
their dead-end lifestyle.

Research has shown that even hard-core drug users can turn their lives
around if their motivation for treatment can be sustained, if they
remain in a recovery program for more than a few weeks, if they can be
steered away from their old circle of users and suppliers and made
part of a new, clean-and-sober community of people like themselves.
Those are big "ifs," but a debate on our national drug policy will be
worthwhile if it points the nation toward a more rational and humane
way to deal with victims of the war that drugs are waging against us.