THE WAR ON DRUGS IS BEING LOST

BOSTON --- 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 leading politicians
persist in calling for ever more stnngent measures to enforce the policy of
total prohibition, doing their best to prevent even a discussion of
altematives.

In 1980, the federal govemment 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 is worse than the financial cost. In 1996, 545,000 Americans
were arrested for possession of marijuanaW giving these mostly young people
a criminal record for use of a drug as accepted in much of their culture as
alcohol in ours.

Many thousands of people are serving long terms in prison for a first,
nonviolent drug offense.

Is there an altemative 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 Mr.
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 haxm-reduction approach to drugs is in growing use throughout Europe.
That includes a country as 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.

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 George Bush,
the White House and Congress have blocked the use of drug-abuse funds for
that purpose. The result, Mr. 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.

"Most proponents of harm reduction do not favor legalization," Mr.
Nadelmann says. 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 ill take someone with the courage to say that
the emperor has no clothes (someone like Senator John McCain, Republican of
Arizona) to end our second disastrous noble experiment.