HIGH TIME TO RECONSIDER APPROACH TO WAR ON DRUGS

When David Simon, creator of HBO's late dramatic crime series The
Wire, heard through news media that Atty. Gen. Eric Holder wanted to
see the series return for a sixth season, he offered the nation's top
prosecutor a deal.

He'll start working on a sequel season, Simon responded in an email to
the Times of London, "if the Department of Justice is equally ready to
reconsider and address its continuing prosecution of our misguided,
destructive and dehumanizing drug prohibition." Holder was not
available for comment, but it's a safe bet that Simon's deal asks too
much of the Obama administration. Despite its declarations to the
contrary, Team Obama appears to be stuck in the same old 40-year-old
rut better known as the "war on drugs."

That's how long it has been since President Richard M. Nixon on June
17, 1971, announced $155 million in new anti-drug funding that he
would later call "the war on drugs." A third of the funds would go
after drug traffickers and two-thirds of it would be aimed at
treatment and rehabilitation. That's called a balanced approach, but
it didn't last long.

The lock-'em-up side surged with the new mandatory-minimum sentencing
under the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, largely in reaction to the rise
of a crack cocaine epidemic and related street violence.

Among the results, a 100-to-one sentencing disparity between crack
cocaine and powder cocaine offenses that boosted incarceration rates,
particularly of African-Americans -- producing statistics that Michelle
Alexander, an Ohio State University legal scholar, calls The New Jim
Crow in her well-researched book with that title.

I come not to praise drug use. I condemn it. But some drug fights work
better than others. A new report by the Global Commission on Drug
Policy, which includes former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan,
President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State George Shultz, former
Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker and the former presidents of
Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, calls the global war on drugs a costly
failure "with devastating consequences for individuals and societies
around the world."

The commission urged the Obama administration and other governments to
try new ways of legalizing and regulating drugs, especially marijuana,
to deny profits to drug cartels and focus law enforcement on violent
offenders. The White House immediately responded: No way.

So did the government of Mexico, which is allied with the U.S. in a
war against drug cartels that has killed more than 38,000 people in
Mexico in the past five years.

Obama's drug office fired back with statistics that claimed huge
declines in drug use since the peak of the late 1970s. But
correlations between those declines and the drug war are highly
disputed. What's indisputable is the increased incarceration of
millions of Americans, many for simple possession.

To his credit, Holder has called for the U.S. Sentencing Commission to
release some of the 12,000 federal prisoners who were sentenced or
arrested for crack cocaine before Congress changed the sentencing law
last year to reduce the crack-powder disparity. Holder recommended
early release for 5,500 prisoners whose crimes did not involve the use
of weapons and who did not have long criminal histories. The releases,
which could begin later this year, would be a good start.

But why, we may reasonably ask, should people be subject to prison
terms at all if their only offense is the use of illegal substances?

"Drug addiction should be handled as a health issue," says Neill
Franklin, executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.
The organization released a report Tuesday that finds the Obama
administration carrying on the drug war as usual. That includes Drug
Enforcement Administration raids of legal medical marijuana clinics at
a higher rate than the George W. Bush administration did, despite
pronouncements that states would be allowed to govern themselves on
that issue.

LEAP favors drug legalization and strict regulation. That means,
arrest the sellers and send users to treatment. "It's easier to beat a
drug addiction," Franklin observed, "than to beat the devastating
impact of a prison sentence."

Franklin is a former narcotics officer with the Maryland and Baltimore
police departments. He finds it tragic that Obama, the first president
to be elected after revealing youthful drug indiscretions, has not
done more to help today's nonviolent offenders get a second chance. So
do I.