IN THE WIN-AT-ANY-PRICE WAR ON DRUGS, WE HAVE SURRENDERED PRINCIPLE AND SANITY

SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Jonathan Kollman had been clean for months -- a struggle,
but he was hanging in there. Then he ran into this babe in a red sports car
who offered to buy him a fix. For a fragile teenager holding on by his
fingernails, it was one temptation too many. He made the buy and 10 minutes
later, he was back in the jaws of the dragon with heroin in his veins.

But what of the Dragon Lady? Who was this evil temptress? Turns out she was
a cop -- an undercover narcotics officer from the Plano Police Department in
Texas who needed an informant. Playing on the kid's vulnerability, she
reintroduced him to his habit, and once he was rehooked, she was able to use
him for a half-dozen drug buys.

If you believe the end justifies the means, this little operation would have
to be considered a resounding success -- three dozen people busted for
selling or holding heroin, including Kollman. But a lot of the folks in
Plano are uneasy about this business of using kids as offensive weapons in
the drug war. The boy's parents, for example -- having just waged a titanic
battle to free their son from addiction -- are understandably dismayed that
it was the police who turned him on again.

For all their trauma, Jonathan Kollman's parents are lucky. Chad MacDonald
Jr.'s mother probably would trade places with them in a second. When her
son's badly damaged young frame was found in an alley south of downtown Los
Angeles last month, it was revealed that he, too, had been lured into the
service of the law. Earlier in the year, the Brea Police Department in
Orange County had captured MacDonald with a half ounce of methamphetamine,
and they saw in him the makings of a useful snitch.

After MacDonald's arrest in January 1998 on charges of possession of
methamphetamine, the police offered Chad and his mother a deal. The pressure
must have been intense because they went for it in spite of the obvious
danger. Rather than treat his addiction, the deal dropped this high school
student into the boiling pot of cutthroats who populate the illegal drug
trade. Since these guys are often facing 10 or 20 years if they're caught,
they disdain informants -- a fact they underscored by torturing the kid
before killing him, then raping and shooting his girlfriend and leaving her
for dead in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Undoubtedly this is an arrangement that everybody involved wishes they could
do differently. But the truth is, we're likely to see more of this kind of
thing in the future, not less. Consider the problem from the cops'
viewpoint: You have a bunch of high school kids dealing drugs to one another
in private. How do you break into this closed circle? That's the intractable
nexus of the war on drugs, the thing that has driven our ongoing assault on
the Bill of Rights for more than 80 years.

The latest polls show 70 percent of Americans think the drug war is a
failure -- and that we should keep at it. We will continue to pulverize our
principles and devour our young until the drug war's violence and corruption
finally reach every nook and cranny of our lives. Only then will we face the
fact, as we did with prohibition in 1933, that the problem is not what's in
the bottle, but how we've chosen to deal with it.

Mike Gray is the author of ``Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How
We Can Get Out,'' to be released in June. He wrote this article for the Los
Angeles Times.