America Is Failing the Drug Test

By Stephen S. Rosenfeld

WASHINGTON Regarding the jagged exchanges with Mexico and
Colombia over their alleged role in drug trafficking, many of us in
America believe that it is worth any strain in our international relations
to protect our population from a menace arguably more sinister than
war. This is the current that inclines impatient legislators to undercut
the essential cooperation with Mexico by reversing President Bill
Clinton's certification of that country as a reliable antidrug partner.

Not only that. Many Americans are also prepared to overlook
the sobering reality that our national drug problem may inflict even
greater costs on some of the more vulnerable Latin societies in
wrecked lives, distorted economies and corrupted institutionsthan it
does on our own children, cities and civil prospects. At the end of the
day, after all, we 're still democratic and rich.

Finally, many Americans wonder whether we could pass a
Latin test for reducing drug demand, if one were imposed, any better
than Latins pass our very real test for reducing supply. Even so, we
conclude that a little hypocrisy is a small price to pay for doing
something effective about drugs.

But to mess up our foreign policy, damage and punish our friends,
come off as a hypocrite and then to cause these losses without cutting
back all that much on the flow of drugs to American consumers: that
seems to be where we are now. It is an intolerable place to be.

Supply and demand are the poles of a nagging and seemingly
interminable debate over where to place the urgency of defense against
the drug plague. It is, in its daily public aspect, a technical debate over
means: What works? What can be done? But it is also a political and
ideological debate over the responsibility for our drug problem. Some
think we are being poisoned by foreigners and would first fight the
suppliers. Others think our drug problem arises from flaws and fissures
in our own society, and they would go after demand. Taking the best
from both schools does not come easily.

This year's version of the drug debate, however, has seemed a
bit different. From the White House come signs of readiness to
supplement the traditional emphasis on reducing supply with a sharper
edge of attack on demand, especially among the young.

Restricting drugs at their foreign sources, or interdiction, has
long been the thrust of a counterdrug strategy employing military
means, law enforcement and crop eradication and substitution. There
are some statistical successes to report in drug seizures, convictions and
the like. But the salient measures of price, potency and availability of
cocaine and heroin on the street provide a more mixed picture. Official
sources report cocaine production (along with consumption) is down
but heroin is easily available.

The main lines of an alternative, more demandoriented
strategy are currently on fresh display by an experts' panel organized by
the Council on Foreign Relations and chaired by Mathea Falco, the
Carter State Department drugpolicy chief.

You do not have to embrace the whole Falco report to accept
that more attention could profitably be paid to reducing demand
through prevention, education, treatment and the sort of closetohome
law enforcement that seems to have the biggest payoff.

Recent research, the report says, suggests that reducing
demand is more costeffective than trying to reduce foreign supplies:
"Specifically, $34 million invested in treatment reduces cocaine use as
much as an expenditure of $783 million for sourcecountry programs
or $366 million for interdiction, according to a 1994 Rand
Corporation study."

The Washington Post.