AMERICA'S MISGUIDED DRUG WAR

Attacking suppliers of drugs without addressing the demand guarantees drug
sales will continue

No credible evidence exists showing that stringent enforcement of US
narcotics laws actually reduces drug use in this country. Indeed, the
opposite seems true: Law-enforcement efforts actually promote illicit drug
use.

That's certainly my observation after 10 years working with homeless drug
addicts in Washington, D.C. The endless police raids on crack houses,
shooting galleries, and various open-air markets simply help push drugs
block-by-block through the city, guaranteeing that every D.C. teenager will
eventually have a full-blown market on his street corner.

The problem is simple: Attacking supply without addressing demand guarantees
that drug markets and drug sales will not cease. They simply move to another
spot momentarily untargeted by police raids. Then they move again.

This phenomenon exacerbates the epidemic, casting a wider net than would
otherwise be cast, reeling into drugs youths who would otherwise stand a
much better chance of staying drug-free.

It's important to be very clear on this point: Our law-enforcement efforts
actually help peddle drugs. Society has become a pusher. It's hard to
conclude otherwise.

Now comes news that we'll soon get more of the same. The Clinton
administration's annual antinarcotics budget, unveiled earlier this month,
calls for roughly $12 billion in spending for law enforcement, interdiction
and other efforts to attack narcotics supply. That's a 30-percent increase
since 1996 and nearly a doubling of such funding over the past decade. This
means more money for more cops and other resources to help facilitate the
spread of crack, heroin, and marijuana through the streets of America's
cities.

Tragically, as in past years, funding to reduce drug demand constitutes
barely a third of the proposed federal narcotics budget. This, while local
spending for treatment in many US cities continues to drop. Washington's
treatment system is in shambles. Between 1993 and 1998, the city's treatment
budget fell from $31.3 million to $19.7 million - a 37-percent drop. Drug
offenders - sentenced to treatment by judges - languish in prison for months
for lack of a bed, and about 1,200 people are on the city's waiting list for
methadone maintenance. Across the United States, treatment programs can
accommodate only about 50 percent of hard-core users.

This, despite the fact that treatment is widely acknowledged to be much
cheaper than narcotics enforcement and interdiction efforts. For example,
for the cost of a single customs department drug surveillance plane - a
reported $47 million - the District could treat all those on its waiting
list and more.

But instead of treating drug addiction as a public health issue, we continue
to criminalize it with endless street raids, sending hundreds of thousands
of nonviolent drug offenders to prison. And incarceration is yet another way
our policies actually promote drug use. Almost half of all inmates at D.C.'s
Lorton prison are nonviolent drug offenders, many of them sentenced under
draconian federal laws requiring a mandatory minimum of five years in jail
for possessing as little as 5 grams of crack - the weight of two pennies.

Any offender who isn't chronically deviant and prone to long-term drug use
before incarceration has his chances ratcheted up significantly during five
years' exposure to the violence and dysfunctions of prison culture.

It's time to end what amounts to state sponsorship of drug use in our
cities. Let's increase and improve treatment and drug education programs as
a first step toward gradual decriminalization and possible legalization.
Holland, to cite an example, has seen no significant increase in marijuana
use since legalizing coffee-house consumption more than 20 years ago. Among
young adolescents, drug use in Holland is actually lower than in the US.

Even with its risks and challenges, legalization seems to offer a better
alternative to the mess we have now, where tax dollars and law-enforcement
techniques police officers use actually encourage young people - however
inadvertently - to use drugs and take that first fateful step toward
addiction.

* Mike Tidwell is the author of 'In the Shadow of the White House: Drugs
death and redemption on the streets of the nation's capital' (Prima
Publishing, 1992). He lives in Takoma Park, Md.