DRUG CZAR ODS ON RHETORIC

Last month, Washington's top drug warrior, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, fumed
and sputtered as he tried to respond to a letter about drug policy that more
than 500 prominent men and women from around the world sent to U.N.
Secretary General Kofi Annan. The letter, whose signatories include former
U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, former Secretary of State
George Shultz, former Senator Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and Walter Cronkite,
stated the obvious: By focusing on punishing drug users, the United States
and other countries have helped to create a worldwide criminal black market
that, in turn, has wrecked national economies and corrupted democratic
governments.

The letter, which was circulated by The Lindesmith Center, a New York-based
group that advocates drug-law reform, reads in part: "Every day politicians
endorse harsher new drug war strategies. What is the result? ... Human
rights are violated, environmental assaults perpetrated and prisons
inundated with hundreds of thousands of drug law violators. Scarce
resources better expended on health, education and economic development are
squandered on ever more expensive interdiction efforts. Realistic proposals
to reduce drug-related crime, disease and death are abandoned in favor of
rhetorical proposals to create drug-free societies."

McCaffrey side-stepped the substance and resorted to name-calling. Railing
against "a carefully camouflaged, exorbitantly funded, well-heeled elitist
group whose ultimate goal is to legalize drug use in the United States,"
McCaffrey accused his critics of perpetuating "a fraud on the American
people, a fraud so devious that even some of the nationD5s most respectable
newspapers and sophisticated media are capable of echoing their falsehoods."

But the truth is, the critics are right. The war on drugs is a multifaceted
disaster. Drug use has not declined and cannot be eliminated. Tens--perhaps
hundreds--of billions of dollars are squandered in this hopeless and
harmful cause. Hundreds of thousands of people are rotting in prison for
nonviolent crimes. Thousands more are dead, victims of AIDS or hepatitis
contracted through contaminated needles.

McCaffrey's screed is not a response to an elite conspiracy to legalize
drugs, but to the tide that is beginning to turn against the drug warriors.
People in all walks of life and at all levels of society are becoming aware
that a new approach to this public health problem is needed. Most propose
some form of regulation under which drug abusers would receive treatment
and support, rather than harassment and jail. Such an approach makes good
sense for three reasons.

First, drug use is a public health problem. This primarily is an issue with
the heavy users of the hardest drugs. These people cannot be helped by
current drug laws. They need education about safe use. They need clean
needles and uncontaminated drugs. And they need a supportive environment in
which they can learn to minimize use.

Second, criminalization of drugs does not address the root causes of crime
and violence. Very little of the crime and violence associated with drugs
is the result of use. Indeed, alcoholics are the source of much more
domestic violence than drug users, most of whom simply zone out.

Drug-related crime and violence, as we should have learned from the years
of Prohibition, are a direct result of competition for control of an
illegal market. And the law, as Orange County judge Jim Gray has pointed
out, actually helps promote violence by arresting and incarcerating the
nonviolent pushers not wary enough to avoid the police, leaving the
lucrative market open for better organized, violent dealers.

Third, the drug war corrupts police departments and, in some countries,
entire governments. The large amounts of money generated in the illegal
narcotics trade, combined with the impossibility of its elimination,
guarantee that law enforcement and other officials will be tempted to
become part of the game. Corrupt cops, CIA-protected drug traffickers, and
bribed Latin American government officials are so common that they have
become standard characters in movies and on television. Among other things,
this has eroded public respect for the law and government, undermining our
democratic culture.

In the United States, a sane discussion about drug policy is still beyond
the realm of acceptable public discourse. Yet, in other countries there is
a growing awareness of the need to rethink drug policies. In Britain, for
example, a harm-minimizing approach recognizes that preventing drug use
entirely is not an achievable goal. About half of British secondary schools
have adopted drug educational materials based on this understanding. In
addition, there is a lively public debate in Britain about the legalization
of marijuana. In March, a poll of 243 members of Parliament found that 65
percent favored a Royal Commission to reconsider Britain's drug policies.
Similar activities are also cropping up in Australia and Canada. The
handwriting is on the wall. That's why McCaffrey freaked.

- --J.W.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski