DRUG-FIGHTERS PAN LEGALIZATION IDEA

A central premise of Gov. Gary Johnson's belief that the nation should
consider legalizing some illegal drugs is his conclusion that the drug war
has been a "miserable failure."

But for El Paso-based Drug Enforcement Administration agent David Monnette,
the problem is with the oft-used war metaphor -- not the fight against
illegal substances.

"It's a nonsensical metaphor," said Monnette, drug demand reduction
coordinator in the DEA's El Paso Intelligence Center. "A war has a
beginning and an end. This is not a war." It is a huge community problem,
said Monnette. And by several measures, the U.S. and New Mexico have
serious problems associated with drug use and abuse, Johnson and his
critics agree.

But Monnette and others along the New Mexico-Mexico border attempting to
stem the flow of illegal drugs say making drugs legal is a risk not worth
taking.

"If we give up the effort and remove the thin blue line, we'd be totally
overrun by this scourge of traffickers who would have easy access to the
U.S. with tons and tons of poison for our citizens," says James Jennings,
the Las Cruces-based director of the New Mexico High Intensity Drug
Trafficking Area.

The federally funded program joins federal, state and local agencies on
drug investigation and interdiction efforts.

"We are concerned about the comments of the governor -- I consider them to
be careless, without proper thought and background, and certainly not in
the best interests of our children," Jennings said.

Making Headway

Certainly federal agencies in New Mexico have made strides in capturing
bigger and bigger quantities of illegal drugs crossing the Mexican border
- -- the source of more than half the cocaine consumed in the U.S., as well
as large quantities of heroin and marijuana.

Federal agents seized 858 tons of illegal drugs along the Southwest border
in 1998, a 26 percent increase over 1997, according to the DEA's El Paso
Intelligence Center.

Border Patrol agents in the El Paso sector, which includes West Texas and
all of New Mexico's southern flank, made 1,267 seizures of marijuana and
cocaine in the 1999 fiscal year -- a 14 percent increase over the previous
year. Drugs seized during the 1999 fiscal year -- which ended Sept. 30 --
were valued at $257.4 million.

Customs agents in the same region hauled in nearly 250,000 pounds of
illegal drugs in the eleven months ending Aug. 30, roughly six times the
amount seized in all of 1990.

But federal officials know that they are still capturing only a small
portion of the drugs secreted through the porous border with Mexico.

According to drug czar Barry McCaffrey's Office of National Drug Control
Policy, 254 million people, 75 million cars and 3.5 million trucks and rail
cars entered the U.S. from Mexico in 1996 through 63 crossings and ports of
entry along the 2,000-mile border.

Conducting searches of each of those vehicles is a physical impossibility
with the staff available and the need to keep traffic moving through the
border's clogged ports of entry.

U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, former Border Patrol chief of the El
Paso sector, has estimated that federal authorities capture 10 percent of
the illegal drugs entering the United States from Mexico.

U.S. Customs officials based in the El Paso headquarters declined to
comment on how effective the fight against cross-border drug trafficking
has been.

"I don't think we can say we've won the battle," Jennings said, "but I
think we are getting closer to that point than we are to losing. ... We are
making headway."

The Drug Debate

McCaffrey argued last week during a visit to Albuquerque that drug use in
the nation has dropped significantly -- from 25 million "current" drug
users -- those who had used drugs in the previous 30 days -- in 1979 to 13
million nationwide in 1996.

Advocates of drug law reform argue that such rosy results are exaggerated
because the surveys are unreliable. Surveys of students' drug use "rely on
a child's willingness to admit to doing something that the government calls
an illegal and immoral act," said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of
the Washington, D.C.-based National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws Foundation.

Assuming surveys accurately reflect drug use among the state population,
the picture does not look good in New Mexico, whether the subject is legal
drugs, such as alcohol or cigarettes, or illegal drugs. According to a 1997
school survey, 41 percent of New Mexico students from grades 9 through 12
had smoked marijuana. According to the same survey, 71 percent of high
school students had consumed alcohol, and 52 percent smoked cigarettes.

Without commenting on the wisdom of decriminalizing some drugs, state
Health Department epidemiologist Dr. C. Mack Sewell said of the war on
drugs: "Do you or does anyone else think we are winning the war on drugs?
If you look at the data we put out, it's pretty clear that we have a
significant substance abuse problem in the state."

Johnson has argued that federal, state and local governments, which spend
$50 billion a year on drug enforcement, should divert much of those funds
to education and treatment programs once drugs were legalized.

Johnson says he believes drug abuse would be reduced under legalization
because the distribution of drugs would be government regulated and taxed
and more resources would be available for education and treatment,
spokesman Diane Kinderwater said.

Jose Frietze, executive director of the Las Cruces-based Families and Youth
Inc., a private agency that administers drug treatment programs for
teen-agers, is concerned about the impact of legalization on young people.

Even if drug sales were prohibited to teens under a system of legalization,
he said, the risk of teens gaining access to drugs would increase.

For many, Johnson's views get to the heart of whether drug use is really
criminal behavior.

At a speech in Las Cruces last month, Johnson said of drug use: "Do I think
it's criminal? Personally, I don't think it's criminal. I think it's a
terrible personal choice that is dangerous, that has all sorts of negative
health consequences for anyone choosing to use drugs." Steven Bunch,
president of the New Mexico Drug Policy Foundation in Albuquerque, said
Johnson has tried to make room in the drug war debate for a simple notion
considered taboo to law enforcement -- that illegal drug use does not
always lead to personal or social problems.

"There's a huge part of drug users who use occasionally and use
responsibly," Bunch said. "Gov. Johnson doesn't want people to take drugs.
What he's talking about is getting a handle on people taking drugs."

But Monnette argued that, simply by discussing a policy of legalizing
drugs, Johnson is undermining efforts to deter drug use. Besides parental
disapproval, one of the top two reasons teens cite for the decision to
abstain from drug use is fear of the law, Monnette said. "If your goal is
to reduce drug use, then legalization is totally counterproductive,"
Monnette said.

And no one should ever realistically expect drug use to be eliminated, said
Monnette.

"You are holding society to an unrealistic standard, because this war has
no end," Monnette said.

And far from being solely a law enforcement problem, Monnette said,
"Substance abuse and violence is a community problem and requires a
community solution."