DRUG CZAR MIGHT BRING BETTER INSIGHT TO THE BATTLE

We've come a long way from "I didn't inhale," Bill Clinton's rather
lame attempt to explain away a marijuana toke years before he became
president. President Barack Obama has been candid about his use of
marijuana and cocaine as a young man, when he was grappling with his
identity. In his autobiographical Dreams From My Father, he wrote, "I
got high (to) push questions of who I was out of my mind."

The revelation barely caused a ripple during the campaign.

Maybe America is maturing on the question of what to do about illicit
drug use. When youthful experimentation no longer dooms a career in
politics, it means that people have stopped equating former drug use
with degeneracy. Most adults in our country have either used a banned
drug themselves or know someone who has -- someone perfectly
upstanding today. And that will help us move beyond the sensational
and destructive "war on drugs" rhetoric to a place where drugs are
viewed primarily as a public-health problem.

For four decades, we have tried to imprison our way out of the drug
mess. And all we have to show for it is a bulging prison population,
decimated urban communities and real drug wars in Mexico and
Colombia, where the narcotics trade terrorizes the population and
corrupts policing.

That is why our smart new president said on the campaign trail that
the war on drugs "has been an utter failure" and we need a new
paradigm "so that we focus on a public-health approach." Obama is
tapping Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske to be his drug czar.
Kerlikowske supports research-driven public policy, but we'll see if
that means real change.

There always have been two competing sets of harms relative to the
drug problem. First, there is the damage that a drug user does to
himself. A crack addict generally ruins his life and probably that of
his family; there's no getting around that. But the prohibitionist
approach to drugs carries its own set of harms, which are now priced
beyond our means.

About 2.4 million people are incarcerated in the U.S., and roughly 20
percent of state prisoners and 50 percent of federal prisoners are
doing time for a drug offense. We arrested 775,000 people for
marijuana possession last year alone. The estimated cost of
incarcerating drug offenders is $15 billion annually. Addiction
destroys lives and families, but so does prison, particularly long,
mandatory-minimum sentences for minor offenses that are a direct
consequence of political demagoguery rather than sane policy.

Would you rather see $25,000 in tax money go toward sending someone
found with marijuana to prison for a year or providing three addicts
with substance-abuse treatment? A Rand Corp. study in 1994
commissioned by the U.S. Army found that $7 in societal costs were
saved for every dollar invested in treatment. Yet as a nation, we
choose to imprison the marijuana possessor time and again. The
priorities are backward and spendthrift.

Meanwhile, drugs of all varieties are still cheap and plentiful. And
the basic economics of drug dealing remain: Take one dealer off the
street, another takes his place. That simply doesn't happen for other
crimes, such as murder, embezzlement or burglary.

In a just-released report, former presidents of Brazil, Colombia and
Mexico say that their countries face out-of-control drug violence
spawned by America's prohibitionist approach, and they ask
point-blank that we change course to focus on public health and the
possible decriminalization of cannabis.

Kerlikowske comes from a place where medical marijuana is legal and
voters approved a ballot initiative to make marijuana arrests the
lowest priority for law enforcement. And while he has not publicly
approved of these policies, it is hoped that he'll bring this Seattle
sensibility to his new assignment.

The war on drugs is an expensive flop by every measure. Now that
we're back in evidence-based reality, it's time we try something that works.