CHILDREN ARE LEFT TO TAKE HIT WHEN WE FIGHT WAR ON DRUGS

Sixteen-year old Jonathan Kollman had been clean for several 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, Texas, police
department 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.

But 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 apparently saw in him the makings of a useful
snitch.

After MacDonald's arrest this past January on charges of possession of
methamphetamine, the police offered Chad and his mother a deal, and 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 unprepared in 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 and 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 had
to do over again. 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 cop's 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. In
a drug deal, there's no complaining witness.

Most other criminals -- the rapist, the robber, the axe murderer -have
somebody chasing them or have victims or survivors demanding justice. But
when there's nobody to call the cops, the cops have little choice.

To break up what is essentially a private transaction, they inevitably have
to resort to some subterfuge that will trample on somebody, whether it's
turning your kid into a junkie or splintering your front door without
bothering to knock or forcing you to the pavement because you happen to be
a black man in an expensive car.

It is the nature of the drug war itself that creates this ethical quagmire,
not the perversity of the police. Brea Police Chief William Lentini was
simply trying his best to carry out the impossible task we've handed him.

Our hands are hardly clean on this issue. The latest polls show that 70
per cent of U.S. people think the drug was is a failure --and that we
should keep at it. As President Bill Clinton has pointed out, doing the
same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition
of insanity.

Like a man who has set his hair on fire and is trying to put it out with a
hammer, we will continue to pulverize our principles and devour our young
until the drug war's violence and corruption finally reaches every nook and
cranny of our lives. Only then will we face the fact, as we did with
alcohol prohibition in 1933, that the problem is not what's in the bottle,
but how we've chosen to deal with it.