DON'T ACCEPT ANTI-DRUG PLAN ON FAITH ALONE

Gov. Jim Gilmore's $60 million proposal should rise or fall on its
potential for reducing illegal-drug abuse,not the political popularity of
getting tough on "kingpins."

POLITICIANS of both parties are rushing to embrace the proposed $60
million, get-tough-on-drugs program unveiled this week by Gov.
(http://www.state.va.us/home/governmt.html)Jim Gilmore.

Virginia presumably can afford it: The state treasury is flush from record
revenues arising from a booming economy. Besides, legislative elections are
coming up in little more than a month, and few candidates lose elections by
being too hard on illegal drugs.

But before the 2000 session of the (http://legis.state.va.us/)General
Assembly signs on too quickly and too fervently to the Gilmore plan,
legislators should at least ask a few questions about it.

For example, would Gilmore's proposals -- drastically defining down what
constitutes drug "kingpins" subject to the draconian punishment of life
imprisonment, establishing cash bounties for information on dealers who
sell to minors, creating a new 210-trooper division for the Virginia State
Police -- in fact improve efforts to dampen drug trafficking and abuse in
the commonwealth?

If so, would it add up to $60 million worth of improvement over the next
two years, and -- because the bulk of the cash would go for hiring 210 new
state troopers -- millions more in the years thereafter?

The answer to neither question is immediately self-evident. The proposals
coincide with declining rates of violent crime -- homicide, forcible rape,
aggravated assault and armed robbery. Nationwide, rates also are falling in
illegal drug use by teens, a legitimate focus of Gilmore's plan, though not
yet to the lower levels of the early '90s. >From strictly a public-safety
viewpoint, does it make more sense to create a new State Police division to
fight drugs or to use the money to hire more troopers to, say, patrol
Virginia's increasingly crowded highways?

Those who, like ex-prosecutor Gilmore, see illegal drugs as essentially a
law-enforcement problem can point to the ever-greater potency of illegal
drugs, and to the link between them and violent crime. Those who see
illegal drugs as essentially a public-health problem can point to the much
more frequent role of a legal drug, alcohol, in violent crime, and to the
general failure of the public-safety approach, during the many years it
clearly prevailed, to reduce drug trafficking and abuse.

Drug abuse is bad -- bad for society, bad for the individuals enmeshed in
its web. But before accepting Gilmore's proposals as a worthwhile answer,
legislators should require the governor to make the case for them.