OUR SO-CALLED WAR ON DRUGS IS A BIG WASTE

I wish I could believe that spending $120 million to expand the
federal pen at Lompoc was a good thing.

Or that it would do anything about our useless, wasteful $35
billion-a-year so-called war on drugs.

Or that it would reduce the flow of drugs into our
country.

Or get at the root of the problem:

The richest country in the world has created a society that hundreds
of thousands of people want to escape from through mind-bending
chemicals to sniff, smoke or inject.

Millions more, of course, escape through alcohol abuse. But then booze
is legal and even drunken driving is punished far more leniently than
being caught with drugs.

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world. Only Russia
has a larger percentage of its population in prison. Since 1984,
California has built 21 prisons -- and only one university campus. In
fact, the high cost of building and running those prisons has
stagnated state spending on education.

It costs $150,000 to build a prison cell and $20,000 a year to keep a
prisoner there. It'd be cheaper to send non-violent offenders to
college. Even better to do it before they go wrong.

California spends nearly $4 billion a year to operate the nation's
largest prison system. Prison guards, a powerful political force in
Sacramento, make about $51,000 a year for doing a tough, dangerous
job. A first-year professor at one of the campuses of the state's
once-vaunted university system makes $41,000, the Times reported.

Now the last drugs war warrior has admitted defeat. Barry R.
McCaffrey, a retired four-star general, and President Clinton's
once-zealous anti-drug czar, has run up the white flag. He's admitted
that the war against his fellow Americans has been a disaster.

"We have a failed social policy and it has to be re-evaluated," he
told The New York Times, which published a devastating report Feb. 28.
"Otherwise, we're going to bankrupt ourselves. Because we can't
incarcerate ourselves out of this problem."

More than a quarter of a million Americans in prison for drug offenses
could be better dealt with in treatment programs, saving $5 billion a
year, he said.

We have more people behind bars in the United States for drug offenses
- -- about 400,000 -- than are in prison for all the crimes in England,
Germany, France and Japan combined. Has anyone wondered why? The war
on poverty has long been abandoned, leaving the poor to fend for
themselves. But the war on drugs is being mounted with an intensity
matched only by its utter failure.

Since the Draconian crackdown on the overrated problem of crack
cocaine in the mid-1980s, the number of people in prison for drugs has
increased by 400 percent, twice the growth rate for violent crime.

If the social costs of drug use are high, the costs of waging war in
the ghettos in search of crack cocaine is shocking. In California five
black men are behind bars for each one in a state university. If newly
elected Gov. Gray Davis is sincere about making education his top
three priorit-ies, he will reverse this equation.

Sadly the war on drugs has netted mostly low-level peddlers and users
rather than kingpins, but not cut the flow of drugs. The photo of
Gloria L. Van Winkle, 39, with her two children, looks out from the
pages like a well-scrubbed Goleta PTA family. She's not an inner-city
drug queen. But under Kansas' three-strikes law she's in the sixth
year of a life term for possessing $40 worth of cocaine.

Undercover agents set her up for a sting when they heard she was
smoking the drug.

Louie Cordell, a 55-year-old father of nine in Kentucky, is finishing
a five-year federal rap for growing 141 marijuana plants to help make
ends meet. Since then his son had to quit college and the family was
on and off welfare.

Tonya Drake, 35, mother of four with a clean record, said she mailed a
package for a friend, unaware that it contained crack cocaine. She's
doing a 10-year jolt in federal prison.

At the same time, recreational drug users need to face the ugly facts
that their kicks are directly responsible for the corruption of huge
portions of law enforcement, top to bottom, in countries like Mexico,
Colombia and others, as well as cops in our own USA. Snorting coke is
not a victimless crime.

Neither is the so-called war on drugs.

Read Barney's Bits at www.silcom.com/~barney/