DO WE REALLY WANT A 'NEEDLE PARK' ON AMERICAN SOIL?

Prevention, Not Legalization, Is The Key To Winning The War On Drugs.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy, a 19-member panel chaired by
former Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, has declared
America's "war on drugs" a failure with "devastating consequences for
individuals and societies around the world." In a report released in
early June, the commission recommended "far reaching changes including
. . . decriminalization and experiments in legal regulation."

Not surprisingly, the report has led to increased calls for the
legalization of drugs as a panacea to end the violence and
criminal-justice costs of current U.S. drug policies. Just last week,
Reps. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) and Ron Paul (R., Texas) introduced a
bill in Congress to remove marijuana from the list of federally
controlled substances, leaving it up to the states to decide if they
want to legalize it.

But legalization is no panacea. Without question, abuse and addiction
involving all substances (tobacco, alcohol, illegal and controlled
prescription drugs) is the nation's top health-care and
criminal-justice problem, filling our hospitals and crowding our
courts and prisons. But making illegal drugs more readily available is
hardly the answer.

Legalization will only make harmful substances cheaper, easier to
obtain, and more socially acceptable to use. The U.S. has some 60
million smokers, 20 million alcoholics and alcohol abusers, and 21.2
million illicit drug users (over seven million of whom are addicts).
If illegal drugs were easier to obtain, this latter figure would rise
sharply. Moreover, more readily available drugs will increase criminal
activity. Most violent crimes, such as murder, assault and rape, occur
when the perpetrator is either on drugs or drunk, and a high
percentage of property crime involves people seeking money to buy
drugs and alcohol.

Approximately 30% of our federal and state health-care spending is
attributable to the use and abuse of addictive substances including
tobacco, alcohol and illegal drugs. The National Center on Addiction
and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA) estimates the total
financial cost to taxpayers to be $500 billion annually. The human
misery is incalculable. Increased use of illegal drugs will increase
these costs and this misery.

A Medicaid patient with drug and alcohol problems costs $5,000 to
$15,000 a year more in health-care costs than one without such
problems. Most Medicaid hospital patients readmitted within 30 days
are those with drug and alcohol problems. Do states, crushed
financially by Medicaid costs, want to increase the number of Medicaid
patients abusing and addicted to drugs and alcohol?

The notion that taxing sales of marijuana and drugs like cocaine and
heroin will provide a windfall for our public coffers is also
illusory. For every $1 of taxes collected from the sale of tobacco and
alcohol, we incur $9 in state and federal health-care, criminal
justice and social-service costs. These costs will skyrocket if
legalization becomes the norm, draining our public coffers at an even
more alarming rate.

Legalization in other countries has had disastrous results. In the
1990s, Switzerland experimented with what became known as Needle Park,
a section of Zurich where addicts could buy and inject heroin without
police interference. Policy makers saw it as a way to restrict a few
hundred legal heroin users to a small area. It soon morphed into a
grotesque tourist attraction of 20,000 addicts that had to be closed
before it infected the entire city.

In the Netherlands, where marijuana can be bought in "coffee shops,"
adolescent use, citizen anger and international irritation have
soared. Responding to the outcry from its own citizens and from other
countries, the Dutch government has reduced the number of marijuana
shops, limited the amount that can be purchased, and raised the age of
legal buyers to 18 from 16. This May, the Dutch government also
announced that it will prohibit tourists from purchasing marijuana at
coffee shops by the end of this year (in part, it said, to curb
criminality and drug trafficking).

Here in the U.S., facing an onslaught of angry citizens whose
neighborhoods were overrun with marijuana users, the Los Angeles City
Council last year closed 437 of the thousand or more "medical
marijuana" shops that opened after California's medical-marijuana law
passed in 1996.

Sweden offers an example of a successful restrictive drug policy.
Faced with rising drug use in the 1990s, the government tightened drug
control, stepped up police action, mounted a national action plan, and
created a national drug coordinator. The result: Drug use is a third
of the European average.

We strongly support greater emphasis on prevention and public-health
initiatives to reduce drug use, especially among children and teens.
This is a war that has to be fought on all fronts, from prevention and
treatment to law enforcement and interdiction. But legalization, a
policy certain to increase illegal drug availability and use among our
nation's children, hardly qualifies as sound prevention. The facts are
indisputable: 20 years of CASA research shows that a child who reaches
21 without using illegal drugs is virtually certain never to do so.

Sadly, we've shown little capacity to keep our two legal drugs,
tobacco and alcohol, out of the hands of children and teens. There is
little reason to believe that we can legalize drugs like marijuana,
cocaine and heroin only for adults and keep them away from our
children and teenagers.

At the end of the day, we must remember one thing: Drugs are not
dangerous because they are illegal; they are illegal because they are
dangerous.

Mr. Califano is the founder and chairman of The National Center on
Addiction and Substance Abuse. Mr. Bennett was secretary of education
during the Reagan administration, and the first director of the Office
of National Drug Control Policy during the George H.W. Bush
administration.