ON MY MIND / By A.M. ROSENTHAL

LEAN BACK OR FIGHT

It's nice to think that in another five or ten years maybe the right over
one's consciousness, the right to possess and consume drugs, may be as
powerfully and as widely understood as the other rights of Americans are."
If that thought strikes you too as nice, you don't have to do much. Just
lean back and enjoy the successes of Dr. Ethan Nadelmann, who said it in
1993, and other executives of well-financed "drug reform" foundations.
Maybe he is a little optimistic about his timing. But he and others who
would like now-illegal drugs to be a right certainly have made political
headway since his pronouncement at the San Francisco conference to
celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of LSD.

Still, perhaps the thought that narcotics will become a basic American
right strikes you as plain horrible. Perhaps you have love for your
children, or theirs, or for the mental, moral and civil stability of the
country in which you live. Perhaps you will become worried about a new
report from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. It shows that
marijuana use among children and teen-agers is increasing, and parents
don't know it, and that children and teen-agers find it much easier to get,
and parents don't know it, and that among the youngsters the fear of the
risks of the drug is decreasing -- and parents don't know that either.

Or, maybe you will be startled at the report's finding that parents think
they talk to their children about drugs a lot more than than their children
recall hearing -- and wonder if the parents remember right. Or it could be
that you are sick to the gorge of the press and TV accepting the flood of
false compassion that reformers used to attain the triumph of
"medicalization" of marijuana in California and Arizona. Perhaps you know
the "reformers," supported by benefactors like George Soros, Peter Lewis of
Ohio and John Sperling of Arizona, plan to use the same weapon in other
referendums across the country. Then, under any of those conditions, the
time has come for you to get up and fight against drugs, instead of just
looking worried. Here are three ways:

1. With your votes, letters, mouths
and religious and social organizations, pressure the people you elect to
every level of government. Demand detailed exposure of backdoor
legalization, its funders and techniques. Ask the President, again and
again and again, to become the political, passionate leader against drugs
that the country lacks and so terribly needs. Maybe he will never do it,
which does not excuse us from saying it is his duty.

2. Join and support
organizations that actively fight drugs and ask that Congress fully restore
the funds it cut from their anti-drug education work. Pester newspapers and
TV to give full hearings to the organizations and to the anti-drug case.

And if the organizations are not on the Internet, tell them they are
surrendering to the crowds of legalizers who are.

(National Families in Action, an anti-drug organization, publishes "A Guide
to the Drug Legalization Movement and How to Fight It," a most useful book
in which I came across Dr. Nadelmann's "nice" thought. Ten dollars, Suite
300, 2296 Henderson Mill Road, Atlanta, Ga. 30345; (770) 934-7137;
www.emory.edu/NFIA (http://www.emory.edu/NFIA)).

3. Any way you can, spread the truth that law enforcement, drug
interdiction and therapy are all necessary to fight the war, and that
therapy, especially in prisons, is not getting enough government funds.
Help therapeutic communities like Phoenix House, Daytop Village and others.
Expect no medals. Many journalists have used drugs, particularly marijuana,
and having survived themselves think everybody can. And America's
best-known writers are either cold to the drug war or apparently never
heard of it. American pop stars would rather go bald than fight narcotics.
But 87 percent of Americans are against legalization, which is why
legalizers use euphemisms and back doors and have to depend on big donors,
not little ones.

If you help the huge anti-drug majority know its strengths and the backdoor
techniques of the legalizers, then parents and their children will not only
talk at home about drugs, but hear each other.