THE DRAFT AGE IS DROPPING IN THE 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 ten 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 re-hooked she was able to use him for half-a-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 McDonald, Jr.'s mother would probably trade places with
them in a second. When her son's badly damaged young frame was found
in an alley south of downtown L.A. last month, it was revealed that
he, too, had been lured into the service of the law. A few weeks
earlier, police in suburban Los Angeles had captured McDonald with
half-an-ounce of methamphetamine and they apparently saw in him the
makings of a useful snitch.

The Brea 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, they dropped this
high-school student unprepared into the boiling pot of cutthroats who
populate the illegal drug trade. Since these guys are often facing
ten or twenty 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. Here you have a bunch of high-school kids
dealing drugs to each other 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
over eighty years. In a drug deal, there's no complaining witness.

Most other criminals have somebody chasing them - the rapist, the
robber, the ax murderer all have victims or survivors demanding
justice. But when there's nobody to call the cops, the lawmen have
little choice. To break up what is essentially a private transaction,
they inevitably have to resort to some subterfuge that will trample
the Constitution, whether it's turning your kid into a junkie, or
splintering your front door without bothering to knock, or proning
you out on 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 Chief Bill 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 seventy percent of the American people think the drug
war is a failure and that we should keep at it. As President Clinton
himself 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 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.

Mike Gray

Los Angeles

Mike Gray's latest book, "Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and
How We Can Get Out, " was released by Random House this June 15. Mr.
Gray was an Academy Award nominee for the screenplay of The China
Syndrome. He lives in Los Angeles.