THE `CURE' FOR THE CRACK EPIDEMIC HAS PROVEN FAR WORSE THAN THE ILL

It's an odd country, really. Our largest growth industries are
gambling and prisons. But as you may have heard, crime rates are
dropping. We're not putting people into prison for hurting other
people. We're putting them into prison for using drugs, and that
doesn't help them or us.

Our entire system of criminal justice is becoming more and more
bizarrely prosecutorial - a federal court has just held that the
Miranda rule no longer applies.

Last year, more than 600,000 people in this country were arrested for
possession of marijuana, a drug less harmful for adults than alcohol.
A famous British medical journal, The Lancet, concluded last year:
``On the medical evidence available, moderate indulgence in cannabis
has little ill effect on health.''

Of course, drug policy in this country has a long history of
tragicomic turns. Back in the early '70s, Texas still had berserker
marijuana laws (first-offense possession of any amount was a
two-to-life felony). I will never forget the jaw-dropped amazement
with which we learned that Nelson Rockefeller, then the governor of
New York, had proposed a similarly Draconian law there on the grounds
that ``Texas has it, and it works well.''

It worked so badly that it was a rank, open scandal, and the very next
year, the Texas Legislature - which by no means had any claim to the
progressive credentials for which Rockefeller was noted - repealed the
thing. Even the Texas Lege could see what a piece of folly that was.

But the history of our drug policy is that there's always some new
drug to be frightened of, usually associated with a feared minority
group, as opium was with Asians and marijuana with Mexicans. And in
the 1980s, along came crack, associated with inner-city blacks.

According to a series currently running in The New York Times, ``Crack
poisoned many communities. Dealers turned neighborhoods into drug
markets. As heavily armed gangs fought over turf, murder rates shot
up. Authorities warned that crack was instantly addictive and
spreading rapidly and predicted that a generation of crack babies
would bear the drug's imprint. It looked like a nightmare with no end.

``But for all the havoc wreaked by crack, the worst fears were not
realized. Crack appealed mainly to hard-core drug users. The number of
crack users began falling not long after surveys began counting them.
A decade later, the violence of the crack trade has burned out, and
the murder rates have plunged.''

Which would be great news, except for Boots Cooper's immortal dictum:
``Some things that won't hurt you will scare you so bad that you hurt
yourself.'' And you should see what fear of crack has done to the
justice system.

The Times reports that every 20 seconds, someone in America is
arrested for a drug violation. Every week a new jail or prison is
built to house them all in what is now the world's largest penal system.

A lethal combination of media sensationalism and political
law-and-order opportunism pushed through a virulent stew of
get-tough-on-drugs laws. The worst were mandatory minimum sentences,
which took away the discretion of judges to lighten up when they feel
it appropriate, and the three-strikes-and-you're-out laws.

The Times seems slightly startled by the injustices that these laws
have wrought, noting in one alarmed bit of type: ``Mother of two gets
life in prison for $40 worth of cocaine.'' Shoot, that's nothin' - in
Texas, we gave a guy life for stealing a sandwich. ``Father of nine
gets 10 years for growing marijuana plants.'' Hah!

A further distortion in the system produced by these wacky laws is
that good behavior can no longer get you out of prison early; the only
way out is to roll over on somebody else. It pays to sing in this system.

The gross disparities in sentencing between powder cocaine users
(largely white) and crack users constitute another of the open
scandals of America. What is less well known is that most crack users
are white, too. But law enforcement has so heavily targeted inner-city
black neighborhoods that black users are going to prison at a far
higher rate.

But none of this - not all the new drug laws and new prisons or
incredible incarceration rates - has reduced illicit drug use. Far
fewer Americans use drugs today than did at the peak years in the
1970s, but almost all of the drop occurred before crack or the laws
passed in response to it, according to the Times.

Unless you are a drug user or know somebody in the joint, all this may
seem far removed from your life. It's not. They're taking money away
from your kids' schools to pay for all this, from helping people who
are mentally retarded and mentally ill, from mass transit and public
housing and more parkland and . . .