INCARCERATION WON'T SOLVE DRUG PROBLEM

Narcotics: The nation's policy in dealing with violators is irrational,
racist, draconian and hugely expensive.

How long are we going to pretend that the United States is not one of the
major violators of human rights in the world? There are 400,000 people in
America's prisons simply because the government claims it must save them
from themselves.

What will it take for Americans to give a damn that so many people who pose
little or no threat to society are nonetheless languishing in prison due to
an out-of-control "drug war" that has irrationally defined their vices as
socially more dangerous than others that are equally destructive? Even
driving drunk is punished far less severely than the mere possession of
crack cocaine.

We lock up a higher percentage of our citizens than any country in the
world except for Russia, and we do so in a pursuit of a policy that is
frighteningly irrational in design and extremely racist in its
consequences. In a chilling story Sunday, the New York Times reported cases
of young mothers torn from their children for sentences as long as life
simply for possession of the wrong drug. The article reported this
astonishing fact about California, which has added 21 prisons since 1984:
"Five black men are behind bars for each one in a state university."

But it is an old story repeatedly documented ever since our draconian drug
policy was launched in 1986 by a Congress that had held not one single
hearing on the subject. Since that time, the number of people in prison for
drugs has increased by 400%--twice the growth rate as for violent criminals.

The initial impulse for ratcheting up drug penalties was shock over the
1986 death of promising college basketball player Len Bias, which was at
first attributed by the media to an overdose of crack cocaine. Simple
chemistry would have recognized the basic sameness of the crack and
powdered forms of cocaine and that the abuse of either should be treated as
a medical problem rather than a crime. At least that was the conclusion of
a seminal article in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. in 1996.
"Cocaine is cocaine," reported Dr. Marian W. Fischman, a co-author of the
article. "Regardless of whether you shoot it up or smoke it or snort it, it
has the same stimulant effect."

Yet the federal penalty for possession of crack, marketed basically to
minorities in the inner city, is 100 times greater than for powdered
cocaine, preferred by a customer base that is three times larger than that
for crack but also wealthier and whiter. Inspired by the leadership of Sen.
Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who has done so much to make the world safe for
tobacco, crack came to be legislated against as if it were the devil's own
candy invested with supernatural powers to possess the minds of men and
turn their actions wild.

Ironically, a year after his death, it was revealed that Len Bias had in
fact consumed powdered cocaine and not crack, but the damage to the
principle of equal application of the law had been done. Thanks to the
perversion of the law as constructed, a dealer caught in possession of 499
grams of powdered cocaine would be treated lightly compared to someone who
purchased five grams of the powder from that same dealer, mixed it with
water and baking soda and cooked it into crack in a microwave oven.

The result has been a distorted policing of the black community that has
left one in four young black males entrapped in what is euphemistically
called the criminal justice system. In the name of saving their lives, the
police power of the state has been abused to permanently scar a generation.

But the policy has failed miserably to curtail the supply of drugs, which
are ever more plentiful on the very streets that have been policed as if
they were a war zone.

It was also inevitable that the war metaphor be extended to those who lived
lives far removed from the inner city. The ravages of drug abuse have been
compounded by an emphasis on law enforcement over treatment. As a result,
entire families of varying races and income are destroyed not by the drug
as much as the state's efforts to ostensibly stem its abuse. Take the
example recounted in the New York Times of Gloria L. Van Winkle, a
39-year-old mother of two young children who is serving a life sentence in
Kansas under a third-strike conviction resulting from her purchase of $40
worth of cocaine.

Even drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey, the four-star general who entered the
drug war with gusto, now sees that there is here, as in Vietnam, where he
served, no light at the end of the tunnel. "We have a failed social policy,
and it has to be reevaluated," he told the New York Times. "Otherwise,
we're going to bankrupt ourselves. Because we can't incarcerate ourselves
out of this problem."

Lord knows we have tried. It costs $150,000 to build a prison cell and
$20,000 a year to maintain a prisoner in one, but we have spent on prisons
with an abandon unprecedented for any domestic program. Nationally, the
drug war costs a minimum of $35 billion annually, and it has bought us
nothing but social chaos and much individual and family pain.

Robert Scheer Is a Times Contributing Editor. he Can Be Reached by E-mail:
Rscheer@robertscheer.com