IF ONLY ONE DRUG SWEEP COULD IGNITE CULTURE CHANGE

When federal, state and local law enforcement officers executed their
drug sweep in Williamsport Tuesday, they found all the disturbing
trappings that make this damaging culture so hard to eliminate.

They found high-level local and regional drug dealers, the people
that get illegal drugs to the street level while keeping larger names
in the drug network anonymous and safe.

They found poor living conditions in the targeted residences,
evidence that these dealers have either a transient existence or
consider their home address and neighborhood of no consequence to their lives.

Most disturbingly, the officers found 11 children - five of them
under age 4 - living with the arrested adults.

What are the odds that these children will grow up understanding and
respecting our system of law and evolve into productive members of
society? Not very good, but Lycoming County Children and Youth
caseworkers will try to help them overcome the stacked odds that the
generational drug culture provides.

This was a fairly impressive drug sweep by almost anyone's standards,
with 90 officers from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, the U.S.
Marshals Service, the state attorney general's narcotics division,
city police and county agents involved. The sweep followed an
eight-month undercover investgation.

We see this and we acknowledge and are grateful for the good work of
law enforcement personnel -- and then we wonder.

We wonder whether, eight months from now, the impact of this drug
sweep will still be felt locally in the form of a severely dried up
illegal drug market.

We'd like to think it would. But this is hardly the first major drug
sweep here.

That doesn't mean law enforcement and social services personnel aren't trying.

What it means is that there is a large demand locally for illegal
drugs. Millions of Americans snickered privately when First Lady
Nancy Reagan implored a generation to "Just Say No."

Trite as it may sound, that is the best way to change the market
forces that are driving the illegal drug culture and infecting our region.

Our dream should be to make the highly professional efforts that law
enforcement personnel executed Tuesday unnecessary in the future.