ON MY MIND / By A.M. ROSENTHAL

Draining the Drug War

In the decade I have been writing about drugs and the drug war I have
been getting a bonus that gets bigger every year, and more valuable.

The bonus is a collection of friends across the country, widely varied but
united by the belief that drug addiction is an American plague that must be
fought by every legal technique from teaching and therapy to jail time and
with the passion, intellect and energy that America can muster when it
understands a danger is clear, present and continuing.

This column is for them those professional therapists, police officers,
doctors, lawyers, teachers, politicians who entered the struggle, and those
Americans who give their time, money and emotion not because drugs are
related to their work but because of the danger of narcotics to the mind
and safety of the nation.

But this is not a thankyou note at all. The purpose is to wring the
smugness out of the antidrug movement mine included.

We know the drug war is not lost but being won. We know that except
for marijuana among children, a dangerous except, drug abuse is going
down; 10 million fewer users now than in 1985. We know that without
the drug war we would be drowning in more addiction and therefore
more crimes and disease than the country has known.

But this is to warn my friends that the determination to fight drugs actively
is being drained and weakened and that we must start exacting a price
from those who are doing it. The price is exposure, followed by
withdrawal of social, peer and professional respect, the only penalty they
fear.

I am not interested now in trying to turn around Americans who finance or
propagandize for the lie that the drug war is lost, or push measures that
would lead to more use of drugs.

When the time comes that they offer narcotics to their own children, or
forgo the therapy and attention that their money and status can buy for
their children, then I may try again to take their minds out of the deep
freeze of their own selfishness.

I used to think maybe we antidrug types paid too much attention to the
minority of detractors of the drug war. I did not fully grasp their financial
strength, their own foundation network, nor the fact that by grants it
reached into nondrug foundations. And I did not understand the extent to
which so many intellectuals had walked away from the struggle or used
their influence to demean it and were getting away fat and free.

The Arizona and California victories for the marijuana "medicalization"
propositions were bugles. The key players were the financier George
Soros and his money. He and the foundations he created plan to use their
power to win "medicalization" primaries all over the country.

But no criticism of Mr. Soros came from the White House. Journalists
rushed to defend him. The use of money does not have to be illegal to be
contemptible or damage the country.

Please note that in my list of antidrug comrades, journalists and writers
are absent.

When ABC recently ran a monthlong series of programs and spots
stressing the need for parents to talk to children about drugs, the
journalistic responses were embarrassingly antiintellectual sneers that the
last program got "only" four million viewers and triumphant proclamations
that the drug war was lost, good riddance.

Government and organizational antidrug money is targeted for law
enforcement, interdiction and therapeutic work. With far less money a
relatively few million the backdoor legalizers can direct their work to
win "medicalization" primaries and to denounce all who oppose them.

Yes, parents must talk to children about drug use. But parents must also
talk to them, and particularly to other parents, about the propaganda
against the drug war, about campaigns that can spread the use of drugs
without taking the responsibility for it. They should talk about the
foundations involved and their subcontractors, and about journalists and
intellectuals who help them or just look away.

It will not take more money to talk and write about these things, or put
them into antidrug ads, just enough courage to expect nasty
counterattack. Maybe one day the White House might work up that
much, too.