AMERICA'S ENDLESS WAR

During his immersion in his new job, Gil Kerlikowske attended a focus
group of seven-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 U.S. 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 city 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."

The Economist magazine notes that more than 200 million people -
almost 5% 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 US$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 innercity 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.