TO MAKE NARCOTICS LEGAL DEFIES HISTORY AND SCIENCE

Supporters of decriminalization of hard drugs, on the political right
and left, ignore both bad and good news

It has become very much the fashion on the left and the right to
denounce the "war on drugs" as a failure so abject that the only
possible solution is to legalize drugs. The legalizers have taken to
speaking of drug "Prohibition," as if cocaine and heroin were
comparable to alcohol, and insisting that the big problem is, and
always has been, not the drugs themselves but our drug laws. The
latest entry from the left is Hollywood filmmaker Mike Gray's "Drug
Crazy. How We Got Into This Mess, How We Can Get Out" (Random House,
251 pages, $23.95).

The latest entry from the right is conservative Republican Dirk Chase
Eldredge's "Ending the War on Drugs: A Solution for America" (Bridge Works
Publishing Co., 224 pages, $22.95).

Legalizing drugs is one of the few issues that unites those on both
the far left and the far right. The legalizers tend to be people with
little firsthand experience with the hard-core drug culture. This
allows well-meaning people like Republican Eldredge to assert that,
"If illegal drugs were legalized ... there is no reason to expect an
increase in the number of people whose value systems or psychological
profiles destine them to substance abuse." Any addiction expert will
tell you that availability and exposure are key.

I certainly understand the simple allure of saying just legalize
drugs, because I too once assumed, like many baby boomers, that this
would be a nice, clean answer. But the horrors of the crack epidemic
and a dozen years spent immersed in the history and policy of drugs
have thoroughly persuaded me that drugs are just too addicting,
complex, dangerous and corrupting to be made yet more available.

Moreover, there is highly promising news on the anti-drug front that
the legalizers choose to ignore: drug courts, the fastest-growing and
most successful development in decades. More on that later.

The legalizers, in arguing that illegal drugs are really not so much
worse than alcohol, reconfigure both history and medical experience to
advance their cause.

Mike Gray in "Drug Crazy" argues that American addicts were happily
using such new drugs as heroin and cocaine at the turn of the century,
and causing no pain to themselves or society. Yet as early as 1895,
Scientific American was writing, "Cocaine habitues are utterly
unreliable and disregard all personal appearance, going about unkempt,
bedraggled and forlorn. The cocaine habit Is & swift road to
destruction."

Moreover, claims Gray, our first federal drug law, the Harrison
Narcotics Act of 1914, was foisted upon an unwary nation. He glosses
over the hard fact that American cities and states had been steadily
passing local anti-drug laws from 1875 on. Why? Because even then
Americans could see how easily people became addicted and then

anti-social.

Heroin, for instance, had been a popular street drug for only a few
years when a Manhattan doctor working in the prison system wrote in
1914, "The increase in the number of people addicted to habit forming
drugs has been extraordinary within the last five years. The greatest
increase has been within the last year."

The legalizers also like to ignore the 50 years when our drug laws
worked quite well. I would argue that-the laws were so successful that
drugs became a marginal social problem, removed from our public policy
radar screen until the 1960s. Yet, "Drug Crazy" author Gray declares
all events post-Harrison Narcotics Act "a brutal eighty-year conflict
that has produced the opposite of what was intended,"

In fact, we were doing fine keeping drugs off limits until the late
1980s. But the Cold War gave national security precedence and we
winked at Cold War allies --like the French -- who did little as their
gangsters steadily escalated the postwar heroin trade. By the late
1960s, this growing heroin trafficking set off an inner-city epidemic.
At the same time, many baby boomers decided that getting high on
illegal drugs was a fun way to express social rebellion and perhaps
even achieve a better, more interesting self. By the time the
middle-class began to relearn history's lesson that the down side to
drugs is far bigger than the up side, driven home by basketball player
Len Bias' death from cocaine in 1986, the Colombian cartels were busy
shipping in 300 tons of cocaine a year. When the middle-class turned
away, the Colombians refocused on the poor, setting off the crack
epidemic, adding more than 3 million crack addicts to the existing
half-million heroin addicts. Are alcohol and illegal drugs really
comparable? Medical science shows that alcohol is moderately
addicting. It is also legal. We have about 10 million alcoholics.
Medical science shows that heroin and cocaine are highly addicting.
They are illegal. We have about 4 million drug addicts. The reality is
that making drugs illegal keeps a great many people from trying and
using them. If these extremely seductive substances became legal, we
could expect our addict population to triple, if not quadruple.

In "The Fix: Under the Nixon Administration, America Had an Effective Drug
Policy. We Should Restore It; (Nixon Was Right)," by Michael Massing, (Simon
& Schuster, 275 pages, $25), the author, who spent many years as a reporter
immersed in the drug culture, is also unconvinced by what he terms the
legalizerss' "revisionist" view that drugs are not so much worse than
alcohol.

Listen to the experience of one of the major characters in "The Fix":
"Before trying crack, Yvonne Hamilton was no angel, nonetheless, the
drug unhinged her in a way even drinking had not. 'Alcohol is a
depressant,' she' observed. 'You're down. Drinking allowed me to open
up to other people, to venture into new things. Drinking, I never
would have thought of robbing people. Crack gave me the confidence to
do that. I was very self-centered and selfish, and drugs intensified
that. It made me feel smarter than the rest of the world. It made me

become very physically aggressive. I did a lot of things under the
influence of crack that I otherwise would not have."

Multiply Yvonne by the millions who used and still use crack and we
can understand why the quality of life has crumbled in so many
neighborhoods. Which brings us to drug courts. We now have an awful
drug problem that needs serious attention. In Massing's book he
performs a highly valuable service recounting how the Nixon
administration, when confronted with the fast-escalating heroin
epidemic of the late 1960s, put together the best drug policy of any
postwar administration.

Notably, the White House brought in psychiatrist Jerome Jaffe (a
Baltimore resident) to set up 80,000 methadone maintenance treatment
slots. For the first time ever, there was meaningful help for heroin
addicts.

Equally important, though Massing doesn't emphasize It, was the
dismantling of the French Connection. We got the Turks to stop growing
opium poppies and the French finally cracked down on their heroin
traffickers. Heroin availability would remain low for another 15 years.

Massing also then tells the depressing tale of how Jaffe's whole
treatment system was subsequently so -underfunded that while addiction
soared sixfold thanks to crack, treatment slots barely grew.

What is puzzling about Massing's book, which rightfully proposes that
treatment should be greatly expanded, is that he barely mentions drug
courts, the most promising development in treatment since methadone.

We have gone from one drug court in Dade County in 1981 to 500 drug
courts all over the country supervising 90,000 addict-offenders (still
a fraction of the total problem).

There is a simple reason for the exploding interest. The 200 oldest
drug courts have shown twice as much success in rehabilitating
hardcore addicts as the regular treatment system. How is this done?
Drug court participants are intensively supervised, expected to work,
go to school and remain drug-free or face escalating court sanctions,
ranging from sitting in court all day to time in jail.

Most offender-addicts are with the drug court at least a year. If
indeed our hardcore addicts consume three-quarters of the illegal
drugs, a vastly expanded drug court system could seriously diminish
demand and the whole drug scene. Why not start here in Baltimore?
While we've had a drug court since 1994, It only has 600 slots to deal
with its offender-addicts in a city said to have 50,000 addicts. How
about it, Mayor Schmoke?

Jill Jones became interested in narcotics while writing a history of
the South Bronx. That led her to write "Hepcat, Narcs, and
Pipedreams," published by Scribners in 1996 and soon to be released as
a paperback by Johns Hopkins University Press. She has a doctorate in
American history and is historian and curator for the DEA museum,
scheduled to open in Washington this year .

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady