DRUG LAWS LACK DIGNITY, SENSE

WHILE on a recent business trip I overheard a conversation between two
airline employees waiting at a gate at Houston Intercontinental Airport.

I was flying to San Diego. One of the airline guys was waiting for the crew,
which was flying into Houston on the plane I was about to take.

His job was to take them into a private area, have them urinate in a bottle
and send it off to the laboratory the airline uses for its mandatory federal
random drug testing.

I thought then that being forced to stand and pee into a bottle while
someone watches must be the ultimate job-related indignity. But then I
decided the worst job would be having to watch someone do that day after
day.

The law mandating that kind of testing is yet another example of our failed
policy of trying to stop the use of illegal drugs .

The problem is, so far no one has found a policy that does not have serious
consequences for someone.

Until very recently, our national policy was to try to stop drugs at the
border - or in the case of home-grown marijuana, at the farm plot.

It hasn't worked. The best evidence that it hasn't comes from the street
price of illegal drugs , which has declined. If we were stopping drugs ,
prices would have gone up.

Drug criminals fill jails

We've put plenty of people in jail. About 60 percent of all prisoners
nationwide are inside on drug-related crimes.

But the profits are so good in the business that there's always been someone
willing to step up and replace those caught by the law.

Talk to law enforcement officials and they'll tell you that much of the
other crime comes from people stealing or robbing to support their drug
habits.

One solution is to decriminalize drugs . Hand them out free to those with a
habit, goes the theory, and crime will decrease. We won't be spending all
that money catching and jailing those in the drug trade. Nor will others be
knocking us in the head to get money to buy drugs .

Of course, making drugs readily available means much more use, more
destroyed lives.

No one wants to face the choice of which life to destroy - those who would
start taking drugs if they were readily available or the innocent victims
now hurt by those selling or stealing to buy drugs .

Focus shifts to education, rehab

The Clinton administration has decided we should quit concentrating on drug
interdiction. Instead, it is stepping up efforts to persuade those who don't
do drugs not to start while placing those who run afoul of the drug laws
into rehabilitation programs.

Both policies can be successful. But education usually takes a generation to
work, while rehabilitation is expensive and has a high failure rate.

We are seeing a decrease in drug use, primarily by the casual user. Much of
that decrease, I suspect, comes from company drug policies.

Pre-employment testing is now almost universal. If you apply for a new job,
the odds are you'll have to take a drug test.

Some wind up failing such tests - which given their widespread use might
just serve as an intelligence test for the job applicant. Or they might have
been unfortunate enough to eat a lot of poppy seeds the day before, or been
around secondhand marijuana smoke - both of which can give a false positive
on tests.

A few companies are replacing conventional drug testing - especially for
random testing of already employed workers - in favor of computerized tests.

One test by Performance Factors of Alameda, Calif., measures eye-hand
coordination. Another by Essex Corp. of Columbia, Md., measures thinking
skills against previous results.

Both are quick, inexpensive and detect other problems, like lack of sleep,
which might make an employee dangerous in a high-risk situation. They also
measure - with dignity - how the employee can perform on the job, not what
he might have done on his free time.