BEYOND THE DRUG WAR

Most of the media regard the coy refusal of George W. Bush to indicate
whether he did or did not use cocaine -- when he was, in his words, "young
and irresponsible" -- as a simple matter of candidate candor. But this
battle of wills between Bush and the press corps goes far deeper. Any honest
discussion by Bush would presumably lead to another question he'd rather not
answer: whether his young and irresponsible self would have benefited from
the harsh mandatory-minimum sentences he embraces for first-time Texas drug
offenders. George W. Bush, like Bill Clinton when asked about pot smoking in
1992, is a walking exhibit of how the prohibitionist political culture
collides with facts and common sense on drugs.

That collision -- recognized by a growing chorus of judges, prosecutors and
police officials -- creates an opportunity for discussion of a sane drug
policy, which is the subject of this special issue of The Nation,
guest-edited by Michael Massing. Massing and the other contributors offer a
variety of sometimes-contending viewpoints on a provocative question: How
can the left generate new ideas that oppose the current drug war, without
glossing over the social disruptions caused by drug abuse, and move toward a
public-health-based approach to drug policy?

If ever there was a moment for fresh strategies, this is it. For the first
time since the seventies, the national drug consensus is rife with
fractures. This summer the unlikely trio of Henry Hyde, Bob Barr and the
ACLU collaborated to pass Hyde's reform of the civil confiscation of drug
suspects' property: a financial boon to police agencies based on the
presumption of guilt, and one of the most chilling weapons in the
prosecutor's arsenal. Among the diverse supporters of forfeiture reform is
philanthropist George Soros (interviewed by Russ Baker on page 32), who has
used his financial might to move the drug policy debate in new directions. A
few prominent politicians--among them Republicans like Governor Gary Johnson
of New Mexico and Senate candidate Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island--are not
only acknowledging their histories of recreational drug use but pursuing
reform agendas. And a growing number of liberal and conservative federal
judges are vocally dissenting from drug-sentencing requirements.

Although voices within the Clinton Administration sometimes acknowledge the
need for a new approach, Clinton has ultimately failed to back them up. Last
year, after releasing a report documenting the lifesaving value of
needle-exchange programs, the Administration scandalously declined to
endorse them. In July the White House issued a series of proposals to make
methadone more widely available to the nation's 800,000 heroin addicts,
accrediting hospitals and doctors to routinely prescribe a treatment now
available only at a small number of specialized clinics -- a fundamental and
welcome shift. But this one step forward was soon followed by two large
steps back in drug foreign policy. In late August, taking the side of
Colombia's generals and right-wing paramilitaries against moderate President
Andres Pastrana, White House drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey and Under
Secretary of State Thomas Pickering presented Pastrana with an ultimatum:
End peace talks with Marxist guerrillas who support themselves by protecting
drug trafficking or face a cutoff of aid to an economy already in a
tailspin. This dangerous intervention is emblematic of how current drug
enforcement strategies distort not only US criminal justice but also foreign
policy, with no measurable diminution of drug abuse or increase in public
safety.

For the most part, Washington -- elected officials and the media alike --
remains trapped by the dishonest language of drug war orthodoxy. As Carol
Bergman notes in her essay on page 46, true reform is more likely to
originate at the state level, where local coalitions dramatize the social
and financial costs of the current drug strategy--engaging families who have
suffered the destruction wrought by mandatory-minimum sentences, or district
attorneys and prison and police officials charged with enforcing the
unenforceable. Indeed, enlightened prosecutors like San Francisco's Terence
Hallinan and ground-level leaders like Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore
(whose city's unique experiment in treatment on demand is described on page
22) see a punitive drug regime as a dead end, making streets more dangerous
rather than safer.

To employ the language of twelve-step programs: Ending the government's
addiction to a repressive drug regime requires an end to denial--perhaps
individual denial by leaders like George W. Bush, certainly the collective
denial of policy failure. A progressive drug reform campaign must aim to
hasten that reckoning but also to provide a vision of an alternative drawing
on commitments to civil liberties, public health and social equity.