THE DRUG QUAGMIRE

As a physician, Dr. Robert Painter has seen the damage that illegal drugs
do to the body. As a Hartford city councilman, he's seeing the wreckage
that the drug trade inflicts on his city. He'd like to do something about it.

Dr. Painter is the driving force behind a two-day conference on drugs,
"Illicit Drugs - Burden & Policy," Friday and Saturday at Trinity College.
The conference will feature national experts as well as local law
enforcement and government officials. The objective is to find ways to
reduce drug use and its associated pathologies.

We applaud Dr. Painter's initiative. Something must be done, and what is
being done now hasn't worked for more than three decades.

The so-called "war on drugs" has become the domestic Vietnam, an endless
quagmire of wasted lives and wasted money with no appreciable progress.
Hartford cannot revive itself if the city is viewed as unsafe, and the
string of drug-related shootings this year hasn't helped. Hartford has
recorded almost 9,000 serious crimes in 2005; police estimate that 70
percent of them are drug-related. Connecticut has spent billions of
dollars, there is a massive criminal justice bureaucracy, and yet residents
in some city neighborhoods go to bed in fear that a bullet will tear
through the walls.

It's shameful that Americans still haven't decided whether illegal drugs
are a criminal or a public health problem, and whether to put more emphasis
on treatment and prevention than on criminal enforcement. Treatment beds in
Greater Hartford are so scarce that prosecutors say the easiest way for any
folks to get into treatment is to commit a crime. That is crazy.

This predicament exists because of an unwillingness to question the wisdom
of existing policies. Maybe the Trinity conference will be a start in a new
direction.

For more information and registration, call Jennifer Cassidy at
860-522-4888, Ext. 6106.