DOSE OF REALISM IN DRUG WAR

WASHINGTON -- During his immersion in his new job, Gil Kerlikowske
attended a focus group of 7-year-old girls and was mystified by their
talk about "farm parties." Then he realized they meant "pharm
parties" -- sampling pharmaceuticals from their parents' medicine
cabinets. What he learned -- besides that young humans have less
native sense than young dachshunds have -- is that his job has
wrinkles unanticipated when he became director of the Office of
National Drug Control Policy.

"People," he says, "want a different conversation" about drug
policies. With his first report to the president early next year, he
could increase the quotient of realism.

Law enforcement has a "can-do culture" but it also instructs its
practitioners about what cannot be done, at least by law enforcement
alone. Kerlikowske, who was top cop in Buffalo and then Seattle,
knows that officers sweeping drug users from cities' streets feel as
though they are "regurgitating perps through the system."

He dryly notes that "not many people think the drug war is a
success." Furthermore, the recession's toll on state budgets has
concentrated minds on the costs of drug offense incarcerations --
costs that in some states are larger than expenditures on secondary
education. Fortunately, the first drug courts were established two
decades ago and today there are 2,300 nationwide, pointing drug
policy away from punishment and toward treatment.

Kerlikowske is familiar with Portugal's experience since 2001 with
decriminalization of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. Nature
made Kerlikowske laconic and experience has made him prudent, so he
steers clear of the "L" word, legalization, even regarding marijuana.

Asked if he thinks that is a "gateway" drug leading to worse
substances, he answers obliquely: "You don't find many heroin users
who didn't start with marijuana." And he warns that more intense
cultivation of marijuana is yielding a product with notably high THC
content -- the potent ingredient.

In 1998, the United Nations, with its penchant for empty
grandstanding, committed its members to "eliminating or significantly
reducing" opium, cocaine and marijuana production by 2008, en route
to a "drug-free world." Nowadays the U.N. is pleased that the drug
trade has "stabilized."

The Economist magazine says this means that more than 200 million
people -- almost 5 percent of the world's adult population -- take
illegal drugs, the same proportion as a decade ago. The annual U.S.
bill for attempting to diminish the supply of drugs is $40 billion.
Of the 1.5 million Americans arrested each year on drug offenses,
half a million are incarcerated.

"Tougher drug laws are the main reason why one in five black American
men spend some time behind bars," The Economist said.

"There is no correlation between the harshness of drug laws and the
incidence of drug-taking: citizens living under tough regimes
(notably America but also Britain) take more drugs, not fewer." Do
cultural differences explain this? Evidently not: "Even in fairly
similar countries tough rules make little difference to the number of
addicts: harsh Sweden and more liberal Norway have precisely the same
addiction rates."

The good news is the progress America has made against tobacco, which
is more addictive than most illegal drugs. And then there is alcohol.

In "Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson," historian David S.
Reynolds writes that in 1820, Americans spent on liquor a sum larger
than the federal government's budget. By the mid-1820s, annual per
capita consumption of absolute alcohol reached seven gallons, more
than three times today's rate. "Most employers," Reynolds reports,
"assumed that their workers needed strong drink for stimulation: a
typical workday included two bells, one rung at 11 a.m. and the other
at 4 p.m., that summoned employees for alcoholic drinks."

The elderly Walt Whitman said, "It is very hard for the present
generation anyhow to understand the drinkingness of those years. ...
it is quite incommunicable." In 1842, a Springfield, Ill., teetotaler
named Lincoln said that liquor was "like the Egyptian angel of death,
commissioned to slay, if not the first, the fairest born in every family."

Which helps explain why the nation sobered up (somewhat; these things
are relative). One reason crack cocaine use has declined is that a
generation of inner-city young people saw what it did to their
parents and older siblings.

Kerlikowske can hope that social learning, although slow and
intermittent, is on his side. But perhaps he knows the axiom that
experience is a great teacher, but submits steep bills.