ALTERNATIVES TO DRUG WAR CHAMPIONED AT CONFERENCE

EL PASO, Texas -- It's been called the U.S. war on drugs -- a
tough-minded government policy that for decades has targeted
traffickers and addicts with prosecution and punishment.

But that policy came into question last week during a conference that
brought together an unusually broad grouping of policymakers,
academics and community activists from Mexico and the United States.

Instead of discussing how to capture more drug lords, seize bigger
caches of weapons and further beef up border security, they proposed
alternatives such as creating social programs to raise the quality of
life for impoverished Mexicans vulnerable to joining the drug trade.
They also advocated for comprehensive programs to prevent and treat
drug addiction on both sides of the border, expand needle-exchange
programs and decriminalize the use of marijuana so it can be better
regulated.

The conference was held in El Paso, Texas, which has a close-up view
of the daunting battle against drug trafficking. This city sits side
by side with Mexico's Ciudad Juarez, where warfare among rival drug
organizations has led to a record homicide rate.

About 3,200 people have been killed there during the past 20 months.
Much of that toll is the result of the drug groups competing to
control a major smuggling corridor to the United States, which has the
world's largest demand for illegal drugs.

It seems that we supply the dead, and the United States (supplies) the
drug consumers," said Ciudad Juarez Mayor Jose' Reyes Ferriz, who
helped open the conference at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Beto O'Rourke, an El Paso councilman, called for major
changes.

We have a front-row seat to a failed policy," O'Rourke said. "There
are a lot of things we can do differently, and one of the things is
pursue a model of decriminalization of some drugs."

At the conference, the staunchest defender of the U.S. federal
government's drug-enforcement strategy was Anthony Placido, head of
intelligence for the Drug Enforcement Administration. Placido said
groups that traffic in illicit drugs must be confronted
aggressively.

It's about mind-altering substances that destroy human life, that
destroy societies, families and create the violence that we see a
couple of blocks away," Placido said. "Law enforcement will never be
the total response to this problem, but it must be part of the answer."

President Richard M. Nixon called for a national drug policy in a
special message to Congress in 1969 and officially declared a "war on
drugs" in 1971. Historian David Courtwright dates the increasingly
enforcement-oriented approach to 1973, when passage of anti-drug
legislation in New York state and a series of subsequent federal laws
and amendments led to the Reagan-era drug war of the 1980s.

Politicians found that voters responded much more strongly to the
punitive dimension," Courtwright said.

President Barack Obama's administration has sought to distance itself
from the "war on drugs" label. But U.S. regulations against illicit
drugs remain "much more punitive than those of the industrial nations
to which we compare ourselves," said Courtwright, who teaches at the
University of North Florida in Jacksonville.

The U.S. drug market puts between $25 billion and $35 billion of
profits in Mexican drug cartels' pockets each year, according to a
2007 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Overall use of illicit drugs in the United States has remained stable
since 2002, though methamphetamine abuse has dropped, according to the
Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, a division of the
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The idea for this week's conference emerged after El Paso Mayor John
Cook vetoed a City Council resolution condemning the violence in
Ciudad Juarez and urging "an honest, open national debate on ending
the prohibition of narcotics."

All eight members of the council had approved the resolution. Four of
them switched their votes during a bid to override the veto after
being told by Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, that support for the
measure could jeopardize federal funding for their city, one of the
poorest in the United States.

The point of the conference was "to do something different -- to build
constituencies for change," said Dr. Kathleen Staudt, a professor of
political science at the University of Texas at El Paso and chairwoman
of the event's planning committee.

Some participants said just being able to hold a public discussion on
touchy subjects such as drug legalization marked a step forward.

Especially in policy circles, but even in academia . . . it's been
taboo to talk about this. People are reluctant to take on the dominant
orthodoxy about drugs," said David Shirk, director of the Trans-Border
Institute at the University of San Diego.

Speakers highlighted moves toward decriminalization by governments of
countries such as Portugal and the Netherlands. In Switzerland, they
said, a heroin prescription program for hard-core users has led to a
reduction in crime. This year, Mexico adopted a law that emphasizes
treatment rather than prosecution for those caught with small amounts
of marijuana, cocaine and other drugs.

Let's face the fact that the drugs are here to stay," said James P.
Gray, a retired Orange County Superior Court judge known for his
criticism of U.S. drug policy. "We cannot repeal the law of supply and
demand."

For one conference session, participants traveled to Ciudad Juarez to
hear from Sergio Fajardo, former mayor of Medellin, Colombia.

Fajardo, now running for his country's presidency, was invited to
deliver his "From Fear to Hope" lecture by the civic group Plan
Estrategico de Juarez. He said building high-quality schools and
community centers in Medellin's poorest neighborhoods was key to
reducing the grip of crime and drugs during his tenure.

Education is the motor of social transformation," Fajardo told a crowd
of about 2,000 people. "Violence creates fear, and fear leaves us
closed off and isolated."