CASUALTIES OF THE DRUG WAR

PRACTICALITY has been a feature of American life from the start, and a
reason for the country's success. Americans on the whole eschewed ideology.
We judged ideas by whether they worked. When they didn't, we tried
something else.

A strange contemporary exception to that tradition is the war on drugs. By
any rational test it is an overwhelming failure. Yet our leading
politicians persist in calling for ever more stringent measures to enforce
the policy of total prohibition, doing their best to prevent even a
discussion of alternatives.

In 1980, the federal government and the states spent perhaps $4 billion on
drug control; today the figure is at least $32 billion. The number of
people in prison on drug charges has also multiplied by eight: from 50,000
to 400,000.

Yet the use of forbidden drugs remains a reality of American life. Supplies
are plentiful despite costly attempts to stop the production of drugs in
other countries.

The human cost of the drug war is worse than the financial cost. In 1996,
for example, 545,000 Americans were arrested for possession of marijuana,
giving these mostly young people a criminal record for use of a drug as
accepted in much of their culture as alcohol in ours. Thousands -- many
thousands -- of people are serving long terms in prison for a first,
non-violent drug offense.

But is there an alternative way of dealing with the grave human and social
problem of drug abuse? Yes, there is. It is explored in the new issue of
Foreign Affairs, in an illuminating article by Ethan Nadelmann, director of
the Lindesmith Center in New York, a drug policy research institute.

The alternative is to acknowledge what Americans came to understand about
alcohol after 14 years of the noble experiment, Prohibition. That is, as
Nadelmann puts it, ``that drugs are here to stay, and that we have no
choice but to learn how to live with them so that they cause the least
possible harm.''

The harm-reduction approach to drugs is in growing use throughout Europe.
That includes a country as bourgeois and conservative as Switzerland.

In 1974, Switzerland began an experiment allowing doctors to prescribe
heroin, morphine or injectable methadone for 1,000 hardened heroin addicts.
The results, reported last July, showed that criminal offenses by the group
dropped 60 percent, illegal heroin and cocaine use fell dramatically,
health was greatly improved, and stable employment rose.

Swiss voters overwhelmingly support the policy. In a national referendum in
September, 71 percent of voters voted for it.

Another policy adopted in much of Western Europe, Australia and Canada is
to allow exchange of used needles for clean ones. This has had an important
effect in reducing HIV infections. In the United States, despite proposals
for needle exchange by commissions starting under President Bush, the White
House and Congress have blocked the use of drug-abuse funds for that
purpose. The result, Nadelmann says, has been the infection of up to 10,000
people with HIV.

Similarly with marijuana, the practice in much of Western Europe is not to
prosecute for mere possession. In the United States, a commission appointed
by President Nixon proposed in 1972 that possession of up to one ounce of
marijuana be decriminalized. The proposal got nowhere, and White House
intransigence is unchanged. After Californians voted to allow medical use,
the White House drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, hurried to warn that
federal law still made it a crime for doctors to prescribe it.

``Most proponents of harm reduction do not favor legalization,'' Nadelmann
writes. But ``they recognize that prohibition has failed to curtail drug
abuse, that it is responsible for much of the crime, corruption, disease
and death associated with drugs and that its costs mount every year.''

A good many Americans, including police chiefs and doctors, believe that it
is time for a change in our failed drug policy. It is our political leaders
who are afraid to change. It will take someone with the courage to say that
the emperor has no clothes -- someone like Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. -- to
end our second, disastrous noble experiment.