THE DRUG WAR: SUPPRESSION TACTICS WILL NEVER WORK

(Rod Quinn, who lives in Green Valley, was the Secretary of State of
Maine for five terms and is a retired Air Force officer.)

Drug Enforcement Administration chief Thomas Constantine blames the
failure of our drug war on the public; he said the public is unwilling
and unable to fight the war.

Maybe. It seems more likely the public is willing to fight a war, but
dissatisfied with the present tactics. The drug war as presently
conducted, it turns out, may be a grand mistake.

From the very beginning, official exaggerations hold an honored place
in the government mendacity hall-of-fame. During the Nixon
administration when the program first needed a worthwhile enemy, the
Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs decided that for every
known addict there were four unknown and, a year later, seven unknown,
causing the ``official'' number of addicts to rise from 68,088 to
559,000 in only two years.

Along with the manipulation of statistics, the drug war has waged a
vigorous campaign to elevate drugs in the public consciousness from a
behavioral and psychological concern to a major national depravity.
These essentially natural products that have been with us for history
have suddenly become evil incarnate - the 20th century snake in the
American Garden of Eden. There is reason to believe much of the purple
prose about the horrors of drugs may be as suspect as the bureaucratic
guesstimates of addict numbers.

Alcohol, too, is a drug. But we've managed to live with it. Marijuana
(Asian hemp, kief) has been in worldwide recreational and agricultural
use for thousands of years. Poppy derivatives have been used to ease
human suffering for the same millennia.

As recently as this century, morphine (or its siblings) was a key
ingredient of many patent medicines that provided a few relaxed
moments in the day of overloaded farm wives and lonely widows.
Laudanum (morphine) was the only commonly available anesthetic for
Civil War medicine. By the end of 19th century, it was in broad use
but declined as the old soldiers died off.

Cocaine, the addiction of Sherlock Holmes and many early soda pop
drinkers in Georgia, has been in recreation use for centuries. The
cocoa leaf, from which cocaine is processed, is legal in many South
American countries, especially at high altitudes, where it makes life
more bearable and workers more efficient. Here in the United States,
the overwhelming majority of cocaine use is by well-educated,
financially secure professionals.

Many drugs have valuable medicinal qualities. Heroin possesses unique
pain-killing properties with few side effects and is prescribed for
the terminally ill in most civilized countries. Known in England as a
Brompton cocktail, it is widely used to ease the final hours of
terminal cancer patients.

Marijuana is believed by a growing number of responsible scientists to
reduce or ameliorate side effects from cancer chemotherapy, as well as
from some glaucoma symptoms.

All that aside, however, the basic failure of the war on drugs is, it
is simply not winnable as long as we insist on using the tactics of
suppression. According to the director of the Office of Drug Abuse and

Law Enforcement, the entire U.S. market for heroin could be provided
from crops grown in 10 square miles of poppy farming and two 10-ton
trucks can carry enough of the product to supply the U.S. market for
one year. So much for programs that pay foreign countries not to produce.

The physical parameters of drug entry into this country mean even the
fabulously rich United States cannot eliminate drugs by force and
interception any more than British muskets arranged in close-order
drill were able to defeat frontiersmen shooting from undercover with
squirrel rifles.

Entering the United States each year are more than 100 million cars,
300 million people, 500,000 airplanes and 200,000 ships (each of
which, Customs officials estimate, has more than 30,000 potential
hiding places).

The Associated Press quoted Francis X. Kinney, Director of Strategic
Planning for the Office of National Drug Control Policy; ``Our current
interdiction efforts almost completely fail to achieve our purpose of
reducing the flow of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines across the
border.''

But we hardly need to consult Kinney. The true measure of drug
availability is cost. For the past 20 years, the street price of
drugs, in constant dollars, has hardly kept up with inflation. Beyond
the obvious inadequacies of the drug war strategy is the damage being
done our society.

In one year, from 1997 to 1998, prosecution for drug offenses in
federal courts increased 19.2 percent, one quarter of all criminal
cases. The drug war is a lawyer's dream of a growth industry.

We are not, nor are we likely to be, even close to winning the war,
and the costs in human misery and taxes are escalating at a rate that
is fast becoming unsustainable.

In the 1920s, we thought the problems associated with alcohol could be
solved by police and jails. Prohibition taught us we were wrong. The
strategy of the present drug war is Prohibition redux.