THE WRONG WAY TO FIGHT DRUG WAR

Drug czar Barry McCaffrey talks as if he gets it. This is what he is saying
about the so-called war on drugs:

''We have a failed social policy and it has to be re-evaluated. Otherwise,
we're going to bankrupt ourselves. Because we can't incarcerate our way out
of this problem.''

''Demand must be the priority. People's desire for drugs is what sets the
drug abuse cycle in motion ... If demand reduction is the primary effort,
prevention is the key. Clearly, preventing drug abuse in the first place is
preferable to waiting to address the problem later with law enforcement.''

''We have begun to shift federal spending priorities and programs ...
Resources for prevention have increased 33 percent in the past two years
while spending for treatment has increased by the same ratio over the last
five years.''

''Prevention is the ultimate key to reversing the upward trend in the use
of drugs and empowering communities to address their drug problems.''

''I don't think we're going to arrest our way out of this.''

This sounds as if McCaffery, director of the White House's Office of
National Drug Control Policy, wants to end the hysteria that has turned the
drug war into Vietnam. It seems that he knows that the call for more law
enforcement is as ineffective as Lyndon Johnson's orders for more troops.
He seems to know that prisons are napalm, defoliating African-American men
to the point where 13 percent of them cannot vote.

ButMcCaffrey does not yet have the courage to put enlightenment into
action. He is still calling for more troops and more napalm.

Last week, McCaffrey went to Capitol Hill to detail his $17.8 billion
budget for fiscal year 2000. Many studies say prevention and treatment (not
to mention education and jobs) are more effective in reducing addiction and
recidivism than the porous walls of interdiction or the barbed wires of
incarceration.

Yet the portion of the budget reserved for prevention and treatment, $6
billion, is only 34 percent of drug-war spending. That is exactly the same
percentage as in 1991.

So much for shifting the priorities. While McCaffrey has proposed an
increase of $210 million for the programs to help Americans combat drug
addiction, he has proposed an increase of $525 million for domestic and
international law enforcement. While the portion of the budget for
prevention has remained stagnant for a decade, the share for domestic law
enforcement, i.e. cops and incarceration, rose from 41 percent in 1991 to
55 percent in 1996. The percentage in 2000 would be 52 percent.

The drug war budget, which has more than quadrupled since 1988, and always
with two-thirds for incarceration and interdiction and one-third for
prevention, has not affected drug use or availability. A serious drug war
should have resulted in limited supply and steep prices. Both the price of
cocaine and heroin have dropped dramatically over the last two decades.

While the budget in the drug war for prevention and treatment would rise by
3.6 percent, the budget for the Bureau of Prisons would go up 13 percent.
The FBI would go up 19 percent. The budget for the US Attorney's office
would go up 50 percent.

While the budget for prisons will go up nearly 20 percent from 1988 to
2000, community policing, seen as a more sensitive way to reduce
drug-related crime, will drop by 22 percent.

A spokesman for McCaffrey said Monday that the prison budget is is
difficult to control because there has to be a place to put the people
already arrested. The spokesman said McCaffrey wants more money for
prevention, but the need for prisons is so great that it will take several
years to see a change in funding.

This ignores the fact that huge percentages of people incarcerated are
nonviolent, low-level users and dealers. The White House knows it could
dramatically slow the need for prisons by pushing to end mandatory minimum
sentences and discriminatory laws that serve more to employ prison guards
than to stop drugs.

McCaffrey's failed budgets and plays to hysteria are generating
high-profile criticism. A series of statements where he denounced needle
exchange and medical marijuana and badly exaggerated drug crime in Holland
sparked a recent open letter that included signatures from Harvard
University professors Henry Louis Gates Jr., Alvin Poussaint, Orlando
Patterson and William Julius Wilson, and Boston University professor Glenn
Loury.

The letter exhorted McCaffrey to provide facts ''that could help us deal
realistically and effectively with our very real problems of addiction.''
It will be hard for McCaffrey to hear them when his primary weapon in the
drug war is still napalm.