FROM NEW MEXICO'S GOVERNOR, RARE CANDOR ON DRUGS

New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson drew back the drapes, opened the
door, and invited us to enter the safe suburban world of drugs. ''I
hate to say it, but the majority of people who use drugs use them
responsibly,'' Johnson said last week at a drug policy conference in
Washington. ''They choose when to do it. They do them at home. It's
not a financial burden.''

Johnson never referred to the suburbs, peopled mostly with
middle-class and wealthy white Americans. Nor did he invite an
explosive comparison between the 'burbs and inner cities of low-income
African-Americans and Latinos. All Johnson thought he was doing was
calling for national drug legalization.

''For the amount of money we're putting into the war on drugs, I
suggest it's an absolute failure,'' Johnson said. ''Make drugs a
controlled substance like alcohol. Legalize it, control it, regulate
it, tax it. If you legalize it, we might actually have a healthier
society.''

Johnson was reflexively attacked by the feckless leaders of the drug
war. Drug czar Barry McCaffrey said that Johnson ''has done more
damage in the last few months than has been done in the last several
years by drug legalization forces.''

Instead of scolding Johnson, we should appreciate his candor. Johnson
told the truth on America. In the inner city, we have declared drugs
to be an insidious tumor, so malignant that we have imprisoned tens of
thousands of nonviolent users. For the children of privilege, dope is
a benign indiscretion.

Drugs are a ''curiosity,'' as multi-million dollar CBS News anchor Dan
Rather has explained about his use of ''everything,'' including
heroin. Drugs are, as President Clinton and former US Representative
Susan Molinari have said about marijuana, an ''experiment.'' If the
Democrats keep the White House in 2000, we will have another president
who has smoked dope. Both Bill Bradley and Vice President Al Gore said
they used marijuana as young adults. Gore said, ''it was looked at
similar to the way moonshine was looked at during Prohibition.''

Reducing drug use to a high school chemistry experiment is fine for
the privileged and certainly no excuse, in their minds, to block them
from the highest offices in the land. Yet, the Gore-Clinton White
House, Molinari's vengeful Republicans, Bradley's cowering Democrats,
and Rather's news executives made drug use for low-income
African-American and Latinos a crime for the dungeons.

Though 76 percent of illegal drugs are consumed by white Americans,
and 14 percent are consumed by African-Americans, nearly matching
their share of the US population, African-Americans make up 35 percent
of the arrests, 55 percent of drug convictions, and 74 percent of all
sentences for illegal drugs.

Even though white Americans and African-Americans use illegal drugs
equally, African-American men went to jail for drugs at more than
double the rate of white American men from 1985-1995. The number of
juveniles of color jailed for drug offenses went up by 78 percent
while the number of white youth dropped 34 percent. African-American
juvenile drug cases are four times as likely to be transferred to
adult court than white juvenile drug cases.

Johnson, the 46-year-old triathlete said, ''I was somebody who smoked
marijuana in college. I didn't experiment with marijuana, I smoked it.
I made a bad choice, but even then, it wasn't a choice that I felt
should have landed me in jail.''

Yet no one seems to have the political will to reverse the politics
that land African-Americans and Latinos in jail for bad choices. The
best example is crack cocaine. In the late 1980s a hysterical Congress
made made crack possession such a deadly sin that a person with 5
grams of crack received the same punishment as one who was nailed with
500 grams of powder cocaine.

The Clinton-Gore administration, fearful of being seen as soft on
crime, has allowed the 100-to-1 crack-to-power ratio persist even
though the pharmacology of crack cocaine is little or no different
from powder. Even though the drug was stereotyped by politicians and
the media as a black inner-city drug, 65 percent of its users are
actually white, according to the US Sentencing Commission. But only 5
percent of those convicted for crack offenses were white, while 93
percent of crack convictions were meted out to African-Americans.

Johnson was right to keep legalization a topic for open debate. ''We
really need to put all options on the table,'' he said. Of course,
putting all options on the table means an open discussion about the
racism of the drug war.

It may be debatable whether people can use pot, coke, and heroin
''responsibly.'' What is not debatable is who pays the consequences.
The suburbs smoke dope and snort coke behind fences, drapes, and doors
at no visible financial burden. Meanwhile, mothers in the inner city
have to scrimp for change to get on a bus to go see their sons and
daughters who were snatched off corners by the police and put in
prison. For them, it is no experiment. Curiosity killed the cat.