PRETEND WE ARE WINNING THE WAR

President Clinton announced last Friday that he will participate in the
annual game of "Let's Pretend."

The president will pretend that Mexico is a full and cooperating partner in
the war on drugs, the United States will continue to send Mexico aid that it
and the Mexican government will pretend will help to win the war, and
citizens will pretend that it all is helping a greater cause.

In 1986, Congress passed a law requiring the U.S. government to certify each
year that drug-producing and -trafficking countries are cooperating in the
war. But in reality, in Mexico, especially since the passage of NAFTA, the
economic and diplomatic stakes are too high for decertification, which could
carry trade penalties.

This annual ritual is a nothing short of an empty exercise in denial of
plain facts known to all concerned, but it's made necessary by the
ridiculousness of the drug war itself.

By most measures, the year has been a lackluster one for Mexican drug
warriors -- despite a reported expenditure of $770 million on the drug war
by the Mexican government.

Drug Enforcement Administrator Thomas Constantine says Mexico is losing the
drug war and claims Mexican drug traffickers have increased their
penetration into the United States.

U.S. agents on the ground say Mexico has done little or nothing to combat
corruption, even among elite units trained by U.S. drug agents and the CIA.
Charges against a couple of alleged methamphetamine kingpins were dismissed
and the Mexican government refused to extradite suspects fingered by a U.S.
Customs operation. Seizures and arrests were down; no kingpins were
arrested.

But the annual pretense of certification is only a small part of a larger
ongoing game of pretense and denial.

The government pretends that the drug war is a good idea. It pretends that
dealing with drug use as a law-enforcement problem rather than a personal or
medical problem doesn't make every aspect of drug use worse rather than
better. It pretends that the end result of the war is something other than
the enrichment of brutal traffickers, the expansion of corruption, the
diversion of law enforcement resources from real crime, the creation of
crime that wouldn't have occurred otherwise, the death of innocents and the
imprisonment of people who should be in some kind of treatment for an
addiction instead.

Until citizens are ready to deal with this larger game of "Let's Pretend,"
the annual pretense will continue.