IT'S A 1980S POLICY ON 1990S DRUG CRIME

TO HEAR Gen. Barry McCaffrey talk, you'd think he was leading his troops in
the right direction. The nation's drug czar was in New York City this week,
pushing a new set of drug statistics and describing his strategy for
attacking the nation's drug problem. "You hook drug treatment to the
criminal justice system. This is not a war on drugs. It's a cancer," said
McCaffrey, who's made a big deal out of pushing treatment, prevention and
research about the effect of drugs.

But, while the Clinton administration claims to have a new approach to the
drug problem, it's waging the same war on drugs that George Bush started a
decade ago. This year the federal government will spend $15 billion on drug
control, two-thirds of it for law enforcement (drug busts and locking
people up) and only one-third on treatment, prevention and research. That's
the same breakdown as 10 years ago.

Only now the government spends twice as much.

"McCaffrey is a liar," says Chuck Thomas, a spokesman for the Marijuana
Policy Project, an advocacy group that opposes criminalization of
marijuana. "McCaffrey says, 'Oh, our new strategy is prevention.' But it
isn't. It's the same old policy."

Gray-haired, and appearing fatherly when he talks about the harm caused by
illegal drugs, McCaffrey - who led troops in Vietnam and Iraq - puts a
friendly face on the government's scorched-earth drug policies. And he has
been known to lie. Last year he criticized the Dutch system, which allows
adults to buy small amounts of marijuana in coffee shops, claiming that the
crime rate in the Netherlands is 'twice the United States'. In fact, both
crime and marijuana use are lower in the Netherlands.

McCaffrey sabotaged Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala's
plan to fund needle-exchange programs, which have been proved to prevent
HIV infection, for fear of the political fallout. He then announced that he
and Shalala saw eye-to-eye on needle exchange. In an appearance at St.
Luke's Roosevelt Hospital this week, McCaffrey talked about the importance
of basing drug policy on the results of scientific research.

Yet he has ignored 30 years of research showing that smoking marijuana
doesn't lead to hard drug use, is not particularly addictive, doesn't kill
brain cells or sap motivation, doesn't damage the lungs any more than
smoking tobacco or lead to crime.

After the federal Institutes of Medicine released a report last week saying
that marijuana has medical uses for the sick, McCafrey has tentatively
suggested that doctors might be allowed to prescribe it for sick patients.
The best-kept secret of the war on drugs is that's it's being waged against
a small enemy. Of the 14 million Americans who use illegal drugs, 11
million are people who smoke marijuana or hashish a few times a week.

Last year police arrested 700,000 people for marijuana crimes, most of them
for possession. Despite stories about how drugs are ravaging our
communities, hard drug use is way down since the mid-1980s. There's a
small, steady core of heroin users, all of them adults, and a dwindling
group of cocaine and crack users. Virtually no teenagers in New York City
use crack, recent studies show. Yet half of all drug arrests nationally are
for marijuana.

Drinking alcohol can lead to violent behavior, running over someone with a
car, passing out, throwing up on someone's porch or urinating in someone's
yard. I've never known anyone who became violent after smoking marijuana or
who died from an overdose. I don't want to see school children smoking all
day long, so we should prosecute people who sell marijuana to minors, just
as we do those who sell alcohol and cigarettes. People get an idea in their
heads and can't let it go. Which is why we continue to equate marijuana
with hard drugs, forcing those who want it into the hard drug underground.

Plenty of folks have an interest in keeping it illegal - police officials,
the people who run the prisons and politicians experiencing the kind of
moralistic fervor we haven't seen since the late 19th Century. Bill
Clinton, still embarrassed about a hitless toke he took 35 years ago,
doesn't have the courage to admit this policy is wrong.

Instead of arresting marijuana smokers, we should be going after the hard
drugs and treating the addicts. At McCaffrey's press conference, he
repeated a remark he heard somewhere that "the most dangerous person in
America is a 12-year-old smoking marijuana on a weekend." If that's what
the war on drugs is about, we're in deep trouble.