ARIZONA SHOWS THE WAY ON DRUGS

Arizona voters, tired of paying the exorbitant costs of imprisoning drug
users and addicts who might be helped more cheaply, voted twice to provide a
treatment alternative to jail. Now an Arizona Supreme Court study of the
first year of probation with mandatory drug treatment -- instead of
prison -- has shown the apparent wisdom of that decision. Congress and the
legislatures of New York and other states should take heed.

For a decade and a half, since crack cocaine and its murderous dealer wars
frightened the electorate in the mid-80's, the knee-jerk political reaction
has been to pass tougher criminal drug laws, build more prisons and put more
drug users and dealers in them. Many states now spend more on prisons than
on higher education. More than 1.8 million people nationwide are in prison,
400,000 of whom are addicts or chronic users. But punishment has not solved
the problem. Addicts, untreated, emerge from prison and quickly return to
drugs, resorting to robbery or even murder to get the money for them.

The approach approved by voters in Arizona diverted people who are convicted
of or plead guilty to nonviolent drug-related crimes from jail to probation
and treatment. The treatment and supervision are largely paid for by a tax
on a legal drug -- alcohol.

It is the kind of program that an increasing number of law enforcement
chiefs, including Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the head of the national drug
policy office for the Clinton Administration, have been advocating.

The results of the new policy's first year of operation in Arizona suggest
that it is a success. The cost of prison, the State Supreme Court said, is
$50 a day. The cost of treatment, counseling and probation is $16 a day. The
amount saved, it estimated, is more than $2.5 million the first year, and
more than three-quarters of the people monitored on probation have stayed
free of drugs.

Arizona is a politically conservative state. Its voters showed that they
were tired of paying the costs of a bad idea. In requiring that drug
offenders be treated before being freed of supervision, they may have made
themselves safer. By treating drugs as a health problem, they have shown
states like New York, which spends $700 million a year to imprison drug
felons, a better way.