AS I SEE IT By Cynthia Tucker

Mexico Is Scapegoated for U.S. Drug Abuse

LAST YEAR'S political campaign was noisy, with a loud undercur rent of
bashing anything and anyone even vaguely associated with Mexico even our
own citizens. Now American politicians are after Mexicans again. A booming
economy makes it harder to castigate either legal or illegal immigrants for
taking scarce American jobs. So we're now after the Mexicans for a
different reason: our drug problem.

As President Clinton prepares for his first state visit to Mexico, he is
seeking ways to crack down on Mexican drug lords operating in this country.
Early this year, Clinton and Congress held a tortured debate over
"certification." The process essentially posed this question: Has the
government of Mexico done enough to stop Americans from becoming drug
addicts? Certification is an annual assault on other countries not deemed
to be doing their part to save us from ourselves.

This is not to deny the narcoterrorism that has destabilized Colombia and
threatens the democratic institutions of other Latin countries, Mexico
included. But Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo has long since identified
narcotics trafficking as a grave threat to his country's democratic
institutions.

Meanwhile, neither Clinton nor Congress could say with a straight face that
the problem of illegal drug use in the United States would disappear if
every Colombian cartel collapsed and every Mexican official were suddenly
straightarrow honest. The United States is a country with a significant
rate of drug I abuseof both illegal and legal drugs. For some reason, we
have a hard time addressing the subject with candor.

Centuries from now, social historians will undoubtedly view our chaotic and
contradictory approach to drug abuse as one of the more confusing aspects
of late 20thcentury American society. Here is a technologically advanced
society that has discovered the biological causes of many perplexing
diseases, that has accepted the cloning of living beings as inevitable,
that has found ways to help I postmenopausal women bear children. But the
same culture refuses to adopt a rational, scientific approach to the
subject of drug abuse.

Never mind the lessons of Prohibition. After a ban on alcoholic beverages
that turned many lawabiding citizens into criminals, made millionaires of
bootleggers and launched the most violent period in American history since
the Civil War, the federal government came to its senses and legalized
alcohol again. Might the lessons we learned from that experience be applied
to the current class of illegal narcotics?

Apparently not. Former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was run out of
office for merely suggesting that legalizing narcotics be studied. Even if
the legalization of narcotics such as heroin and cocaine would be
unwiseand it probably would be there is another approach that too few
politicians or citizens are willing to consider: decriminalizing the use of
those drugs. What if we took some of the billions we pour into our punitive
"war on drugs" and set up lowcost or free drug treatment centers
everywhere? What if free drug rehab were available in every prison and
every hospital? Might we have fewer addicts?

Instead, we have concentrated on filling our prisons with crackheads. And
what have we gained? Even as the level of cocaine addiction has finally
stabilized, the violence that sprang up around its illicit trade has
stayed.

So, if Clinton wants to freeze the assets of Mexican drug lords, let him.
But he ought to lay off Zedillo. The Mexican president can hardly be blamed
for Americans' inconstancy on drugs.

Chronicle Features

Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor of the Atlanta Constitution.