POINTING THE FINGER

The three-day meeting on fighting drugs was one of the more useful United
Nations conferences in decades.

It was well led by Pino Arlacchi, the Italian Mafia-buster, drew chiefs of
state and narcotics specialists from every part of the world, and wound up
with a plan to eliminate the growing of illegal heroin and cocaine in 10
years -- certainly difficult but certainly doable.

So, months before the opening Monday, a campaign to attack the conference
was planned.

It was worked out by Americans who devote their careers and foundation
grants not to struggling against narcotics but legalizing them under one
camouflage or another.

Before the first gavel, they were ready with advertisements writing off the
conference, had rounded up American and European signatures denouncing the
war against drugs as a failure, and had mobilized their network of web
sites. They convinced one or two convincible journalists that people
opposed to the anti-drug effort had been banned from talking at meetings of
specialists and organizations. That's strange, because at the very first
forum I attended there were as many legalizers as drug fighters making
statements and asking questions. The propaganda was professionally crafted.

Hundreds of well-known people and wannabes signed an opening-day two-page
advertisement in The Times. It had no proposals except for a "dialogue,"
which already has gone on a half-century.

The word "legalization" was not used. Legalizers and their financial
quartermasters know Americans are 87 percent against legalization. So now
they use camouflage phrases like "harm reduction" -- permitting drug abuse
without penalty, the first step toward de facto legalization.

One signer told me that she did indeed favor legalization but that in such
campaigns you just don't use words that will upset the public. I have more
respect for her, somewhat, than for prominent ad-signers who deny drug
legalization is the goal. And for signers who, God help us, do not even
know the real goal, here's a statement by Dr. Ethan Nadelmann, now George
Soros' chief narcotics specialist and field commander, in 1993 when he
still spoke, unforked, about legalization: "It's nice to think that in
another 5 or 10 years . . . the right to possess and consume drugs may be
as powerfully and as widely understood as the other rights of Americans
are." Plain enough?

The conference is finished, legalizers are not. Hours after publication of
this column, masses of denunciatory E-mail letters to the editor will
arrive at The Times. Judging by the past, the web-site chiefs will announce
gleefully that virtually all the letters The Times printed supported them,
and how much that publicity would have cost if they had to pay for it.
Anti-drug letters will arrive too late.

Now, I have a problem.

Knowing that Americans are so against legalization and the multiplication
of addiction, crime and destroyed souls it will create, I ask myself why I
write about legalizers at all. They live by publicity, which can mean more
millions from Mr. Soros and a few other backers. But the legalization
minority includes many intellectuals, academics, journalists and others
with access to lecture rooms, print and TV. So consistently do they spread
their falsehood that the drug war has failed that even some Americans who
want to fight drugs believe there's no use trying. America still suffers
agonizingly from illegal drugs, but as President Clinton told the U.N.,
overall U.S. drug use has dropped 49 percent since 1979, cocaine use has
dropped 70 percent since 1985, crime usually related to drugs has decreased
five years in a row. Yet the anti-drug movement has never rallied to tell
Americans about the legalizers, identities and techniques.

Washington and the U.N, including Mr. Arlacci, have even softened their
language -- such as not using the phrase "drug war" anymore. Washington's
big new anti-drug ad campaign will be useful, but not very, unless it not
only urges parents to talk to children, but parents to talk to other
parents, about the legalizers, in or out of camouflage. Surely it is time
for the President to dissect America's legalizers and publicly point the
finger at them. If he is too delicate, or politically fearful, the rest of
us will have to do the job of denying them acceptability or cover; it's
worth the space.

Checked-by: Richard Lake