HOW WE LOST THE WAR ON DRUGS

Ten years ago today, then-President George Bush hoisted a bag of crack
cocaine for the cameras and proclaimed that "the gravest domestic threat
facing our nation today is drugs."

Expanding upon his predecessors' tough policies, Bush launched the most
ambitious and expensive battle ever against narcotics and drug peddlers,
setting nine goals for the nation to meet within a decade.

With opinion polls showing overwhelming public support, Bush and Congress
endowed law enforcement with awesome powers for waging an all-out war
against drugs -- unprecedented legislative and legal authority, a new
government agency with more than 100 drug-battling agents, and a budget $3
billion larger than any before proposed.

But despite all the fanfare and huge investment in the artillery against
drugs, the war failed. Ten years and more than $100 billion later, only two
of Bush's goals have been met.

More youths are doing dope today, and more people are ending up in medical
emergency rooms with overdoses and drug-related problems. Meanwhile, the
amount of drugs used nationwide has remained virtually the same.

The tough law enforcement policies have succeeded mainly in packing the
nation's prisons with drug users and drug law breakers, leaving the United
States with more people in prison than any other country, and swelling the
prison population to 1.8 million, larger than all but three of the nation's
cities. Only one in 10 of those prisoners receives drug treatment; many are
released with the same drug problems and soon return to a life of crime.

Faced with that evidence, law enforcement officials and drug war hawks like
former Attorney General Edwin Meese are beginning to meet therapists and
drug war doves like the Hoover Institution's Joseph McNamara halfway. What
is emerging is a new approach that combines the strengths of criminal
justice with substance abuse treatment.

"I hate to sound like a bleeding-heart liberal, but you need to attack it
from two different ways. Enforcement alone does not work," said one veteran
Oakland narcotics officer. "Just tossing people in prison is not the answer."

Drug use continues unabated

Putting people in prison has not ended the illegal use of drugs. Since
1971, the annual National Household Survey on Drug Abuse has asked
thousands of Americans whether they used illegal drugs in the past 12
months. The percentage answering "Yes" has not changed significantly since
before Bush's 1989 speech from the White House Oval Office.

Cocaine -- the scourge of the 1980's, by popular belief, though it actually
has fallen out of favor since President Ronald Reagan's administration --
continued its decline after Bush's speech. But old favorites like heroin
and marijuana have held strong, and increasing numbers of users have taken
up newly popular drugs like today's stronger methamphetamine.

Young people, in particular, have been turning on to drugs in numbers that
only this year began to decline. Bush's 10-year plan called for the number
of adolescent Americans using drugs to be cut in half within a decade.
Instead it increased by more than 20 percent, as young people grew more
tolerant of drug use, continued to smoke marijuana and discovered more
potent forms of heroin.

Where the war did have an impact was on the nation's prison population.
Police, prosecutors, politicians and the public got fed up with criminals
in the 1980s -- and especially with drug offenders. So they put them in
prison, in larger numbers and for longer sentences than ever before.

"If you take California, the statistics are kind of stunning," said
Franklin Zimring, director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute at the Boalt
Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

"There were more people in 1991 in California prisons for drug offenses
than were in California prisons for all offenses in 1980. Not only did the
number of drug offenders go up fifteen-fold, but that one unit of the
California prison population was larger than the whole prison population
had been a decade before," he said. "You can't find too many historical
episodes like that in American history."

The same thing happened nationwide. More people are now arrested for
breaking drug laws than for driving under the influence, theft, simple
assault or any other crime. Statistics show that once in the system, drug
offenders are more likely to be convicted and receive longer sentences than
any other nonviolent offenders in both state and federal courts.

Prison becomes a growth industry

Between 1985 and 1998, under a deluge of drug criminals, the nation's
prison population expanded from 744,206 to 1.8 million.

When the prisons were filled, the taxpayers built more. In 1980 the total
nationwide operating budget for state and federal prisons and jails was $7
billion. By 1998, it was $39 billion. California spends more on prisons
than any other state -- about $4.6 billion per year.

Locking up 1.8 million drug violators and other criminals has at least one
clear benefit, some experts say. The nation's crime rate has plummeted
since Bush's speech: by one major measure, the National Crime Victimization
Survey, crime hasn't been this low since 1973.

"The criminal justice system can take primary credit for this," said Morgan
Reynolds, director of the criminal justice center at the private National
Center for Policy Analysis and a longtime supporter of incarceration as a
tool against crime.

"That's gotten a lot more respect lately," he said. "More police, new
police tactics including community policing, tougher laws, and of course
the fact that we have more offenders out of commission behind bars."

But others worry about what happens to those offenders once they are behind
bars -- or, more accurately, what doesn't happen: treatment for their drug
problems.

Steven Belenko, a researcher with the National Center on Ad diction and
Substance Abuse at Columbia University in New York City, reports that a
majority of both state and federal prisoners had links to illicit drug use.

About 19 percent of state prisoners and 55 percent of federal prisoners had
been convicted of a drug law offense, he said. Seventeen percent of state
prisoners and 10 percent of all federal prisoners had committed a crime to
get money to buy drugs. Thirty percent of state in mates and 16 percent of
federal inmates were under the influence of drugs or drugs combined with
alcohol when they committed their crime. And 64 percent of state inmates
and 43 percent of federal inmates had used drugs regularly -- most of them
in the month prior to their arrest.

"If you measure that against the amount of substance abuse treatment and
prevention activities that take place in prison, it's quite a dramatic
figure, because only about 10 to 15 percent of inmates are getting any kind
of substance abuse treatment when they're in custody," he said. "So there's
a huge gap."

And it's getting wider. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, more
state prisoners admitted using drugs before their arrest in 1991 than 1997,
but fewer got to participate in prison drug treatment programs each year.

By 1997, more than eight out of 10 state prisoners said they had used
drugs, but only one in 10 received prison drug treatment. And slightly more
than half of those received treatment in a residential facility, the kind
of treatment experts say stands the best chance of preventing a return to
drug abuse and crime.

Saving taxpayers' money

Residential treatment is expensive -- about $6,500 per inmate per year,
Belenko estimated, including vocational training and follow-up care. But
each inmate who stays clean for a year after release saves taxpayers
$68,800 through wages, savings in health care and prison costs, and reduced
crime, he said.

"With these huge numbers of inmates now who are getting released, if
they're released un treated, it's likely -- given past research -- that
without intervention a large portion of them will return to using drugs and
committing crimes related to those drug problems," he said.

Belenko's report is getting attention. California is one of several states
experimenting with increased drug treatment in the correctional system and
expanded after-care for ex-felons. And Belenko's ideas are echoed by
longtime drug war hawks like Reynolds and Meese, and in proposals from Drug
Czar Barry McCaffrey.

"It is clear that we cannot arrest our way out of the problem of chronic
drug abuse and drug driven crime," McCaffrey said in a recent speech. "We
cannot continue to apply policies and programs that do not deal with the
root causes of substance abuse and attendant crime."

Interdiction vs. treatment

Some treatment advocates and drug war critics say the new drug warriors are
not putting their money where their mouth is -- yet.

On July 22, 1999, for example, McCaffrey announced his sup port for new
regulations improving the quality and accessibility of methadone treatment
for heroin addicts. But a day later, he called for a $1 billion expansion
of the United States' long standing military interdiction efforts in the
jungles of Colombia.

McCaffrey has been speaking in favor of a less punitive drug war
"practically since he came in three years ago, and there has been almost no
change in the budget," said attorney Eric Sterling, president of the
Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in Washington. "Where is the evidence
he's put any effort into fighting for more treatment?"

The Clinton administration's drug enforcement budget re quest for next year
is $17.8 billion. About 66 percent of that budget is earmarked for
controlling the supply of illicit drugs through domestic and international
law enforcement. The rest -- about 34 percent -- is divided between
treatment, prevention, and research.

Many critics of the nation's drug policy believe those percentages should
be reversed.

"I think we'll be living in a better country if we have a lot of drug
treatment in prison," Zimring said. "(But) we're too busy expanding penal
facilities to provide any content other than incarceration in them."

Other policy makers and observers say the changes may be out of Clinton and
McCaffrey's hands, because there is little political will in Congress to
change the drug budget's ratio of law enforcement to treatment.

"I don't get punished (politically) if I vote against money for treatment.
But I do get punished if I vote against more money for the law enforcement
aspects," said Dr. Herbert Kleber, deputy for demand reduction in the
National Drug Policy Office from 1989 until 1991. "Most congressmen want to
get reelected. Why are they going to vote against their own self interests?"

Changing the goals

Ten years from now, the success or failure of the new war on drugs will be
measured in terms similar to the old one's. Although the National Strategy
for Drug Control has been re written each year since Bush first announced
it in 1989, each has included a set of short-term and long-term goals.

Clinton's most recent strategy includes a total of 97 goals, with 12 key
objectives, compared with the Bush administration's original nine. Some of
those objectives -- reducing the avail ability of illicit drugs by 50
percent, halving drug use by youth, cutting overall drug use by 50 percent
- -- are identical to goals in Bush's plan.

The deadline to meet them is 2007.

"Every one of the indications that they themselves had set years ago are
not working ... then McCaffrey has the chutzpah to say 'You can't judge us
now, you have to wait 10 years," said Joseph McNamara, former San Jose
police chief and now a sharp critic of anti-drug policy at the Hoover
Institution at Stanford University. "They just keep changing the goals.
Every time they fail, they just gloss over that."