THE WRONG DRUG WAR

The annual foreign-policy farce called drug certification, in which the
Administration verifies that a foreign government is (or is not)
cooperating in the fight against drugs, passed on March 1 with relatively
little controversy. Mexico was re-certified for aid, Colombia had its
sanctions lifted and a handful of strategically marginal nations like
Nigeria and Burma received failing grades. This year's certification
process raised so little dust because no one in Washington wants to draw
attention to the essential irrationality of the war on drugs. Indeed, the
White House and the Republicans are in a competition for the wildest
antidrug rhetoric. In mid-February, President Clinton and drug czar Gen.
Barry McCaffrey unveiled a $17.1 billion drug-fighting plan, pledging to
tighten interdiction and border controls while enhancing treatment and
prevention programs aimed at youth. McCaffrey claims he will cut drug use
in half in ten years. Not to be outdone, Newt Gingrich condemned that plan
as "slow, incremental and inadequate," while Republican Congressman Bill
McCollum of Florida declared the G.O.P.'s intent to reduce drug use "by 90
percent in five years."

Both McCaffrey and Gingrich pin their promises on dubious premises.
McCaffrey's largest budget item includes programs aimed at keeping
teenagers from involvement in "gateway drug-using behavior," which
basically means smoking pot. But the "gateway drug" theory of marijuana is
discredited by serious researchers; for the vast majority of users,
marijuana is a "terminus drug" rather than a gateway, and the markets for
harder drugs like cocaine and heroin rise and fall independent of the
pot-smoking statistics. Gingrich's only specific proposal was to broaden
aid to Christian faith-based antidrug programs.

Both McCaffrey and Gingrich envision combining their anti-drug Kulturkampf
in the homes of Americans with what Gingrich called a "World War II" style
all-out plan for victory" on the supply front. But as Eva Bertram and
Kenneth Sharpe pointed out in these pages last April 28, international drug
eradication campaigns often stimulate the market, raising the economic
incentives for suppliers. Furthermore, around the world, U.S.
drug-enforcement aid has become hopelessly entangled in human rights abuses
and corruption. The very week the State Department issued its report
lifting last year's military-aid sanctions against Colombia, Medell¡n
attorney and human rights activist Jesus Maria Valle Jaramillo, who last
year exposed links between army units and paramilitary death squads
responsible for massacring peasants, was shot dead by gunmen who burst into
his office.

U.S. civil liberties, too, continue to be sacrificed to this unwinnable and
damaging war. The Justice Department recently announced that it was
declining to press civil rights charges in the killing last year of
18-year-old goatherd Ezequiel Hernandez Jr. of Redford, Texas, shot dead by
a Marine under the command of the Border Patrol as part of a drug
interdiction mission. While the area's Republican Congressman, Lamar Smith,
complains that the incident "raises serious questions about the training
and supervision of the Border Patrol," this same Border Patrol and those
same military squads will hit the jackpot under Washington's new antidrug
budget. The remaking of domestic drug policy into a military campaign is
one of the most frightening developments: As The Washington Post has
reported, in 1996 more than 8,000 members of the armed forces took part in
754 drug-policing operations within the United States, with no measurable
impact on the drug trade.

There's an alternative to this transnational insanity. Instead of one-sided
"certification" and the market incentives of international eradication
campaigns, there are ways to lower incentives and prices worldwide, among
them a combination of government-approved drug supplies for hard-core
addicts and a strategy for alternative economic development in
drug-producing regions. There's also talk of replacing the unpopular U.S.
certification plan with a multilateral approach, a subject on the table at
a U.N. special session on drugs scheduled for June. U.N. officials talk of
combining economic incentives with ending the banking secrecy that protects
drug-money laundering.

But drug-policy advocates charge that the United States is undermining the
U.N. conference by pushing a tough eradication agenda. That's too bad.
Among public health advocates, the notion of "harm reduction" has gained
currency as an alternative to prohibitionist drug policies (a dimension
sadly missing in the Clinton plan). A broader notion of harm
reduction--political and legal as well as medical--ought to be the
cornerstone of a new drug policy, uniting the domestic and international
arenas.

Copyright (c) 1997, The Nation Company