TIME TO RETHINK FAILED 'DRUG WAR'

It hardly comes as a revelation that the drug war, with its
imprisonment of countless thousands of nonviolent offenders, has been
a fiasco. Nearly everyone, from the head of the Office of National
Drug Control Police on down, has pronounced the drug war an utterly
misguided and wrong-headed policy.

Chris Christie recently said that New Jersey is in the Dark Ages for
the way it imprisons nonviolent addicts rather than getting them
treatment that would restore their lives and produce huge savings for
the state. It is encouraging to hear such forceful language on the
subject from a candidate for governor of New Jersey -- the state with
the distinction of having the nation's highest proportion of inmates
serving terms for nonviolent crimes.

New Jersey is one of nine sties nationally participating in the Close
the Addiction Treatment Gap initiative (CATG), one area of concern for
which is a shift toward treatment rather than incarceration of
nonviolent drug offenders. New CATG polling in the state shows a solid
majority of residents (78 percent) agree that addiction is a disease.
It follows that treatment is a far better course than prison for
individuals who break the law because of an addiction.

The success of the state's drug courts makes a compelling argument for
moving further in this direction. Drug courts and intensive treatment
cost less than half of imprisonment and have a far better chance of
avoiding recidivism than imprisonment. Drug courts have a 3 percent
reconviction rate vs. 40 percent for releases from prison.

A great many of nonviolent offenders are sentenced under the state's
mandatory minimums laws intended to keep drugs away from school
children, a goal no one would argue with. The state's Sentencing
Reform Review Commission called for shrinking drug-free school zones
to within 200 feet of schools, down from 1,000 feet. The 1,000-foot
zones mean that in cities there are few places that do not fall within
the zones. The commission demonstrated that if you exclude the
airport, virtually the entire city of Newark is a drug-free zone.

The evidence conclusively shows that most arrests in drug-free zones
were not dealing drugs to school children but were ensnared in a
double trap of drug use and an ill-conceived if well-intentioned law.
The time has come for New Jersey to cast aside the drug-war policies
that envelope many addicted individuals in darkness of prison and the
bleak future that comes with it.

New Jersey needs to allocate resources so that enlightened responses
to addiction -- and incidentally, ones that make better fiscal sense --
are allowed to flourish.