Drug War: The Enemy Within

By Stephen S. Rosenfeld

Regarding the jagged exchanges with Mexico and Colombia over
their alleged role in drug trafficking, many Americans 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 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 institutions
than 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 they can 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: hence the dangerous rolling
showdown with Mexico. 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
although, critics point out, the change is far from being fully
reflected in the president's $16 billion drug budget. A proposal for
a media campaign to head off use by adolescents is the
administration's most striking initiative.

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. Nor does
interdiction touch the plentiful and growing American sources of
marijuana and other, synthetic, drugs that Americans use.

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, Carter
State Department drugpolicy chief. Its report was timed to release
of the Clinton administration's own new drug control plan.

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. Enforcement at the source has its continuing valuable police
and foreignpolicy uses, the report suggests, but law officers cannot
comfortably cope with the ease with which growers plant new
fields and traffickers open new transit routes.

Recent research, the report goes on, 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."

In the drug-policy wars, of course, no good study goes unrebutted.
All the same, I share the general sense that we are not doing well
enough in reducing our drug problem. It also seems to me that
President Clinton is of a mind to review old thinking. It is a good
time to see a strong case being made for doing things differently.

Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

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