LEARNING LESSONS FROM THE DRUG WAR

The words caught my eye immediately.

"We're not going to arrest our way out of this problem."

That they came from the mouth of soldier in the war on drugs, a former
undercover cop, made them all the more eye-catching.

Tom McNamara, special projects coordinator for the Southern Illinois
Enforcement Group, was talking about the latest front in the war on drugs -
methamphetamine. He's not the first law enforcement officer to conclude
police and punishment can't win this battle alone, but it's still rare to
hear anyone say it that political leaders might actually take seriously.
Twenty years after crack, you'd think they would have learned a lesson.

Cheap and highly addictive, a phrase regularly used to explain
methamphetamine's lure, was commonly used in reference to crack in the
1980s. Both drugs create similar highs and similar problems - except for
the meth labs.

Meth production cranks up the dangers inherent in the drug economy. Not
only does it eliminate that well-known middle man, the drug smuggler, its
manufacture relies on back-country entrepreneurs willing to blow up
themselves and endanger everyone around them in ways more like suicide
bombers than the average crack-house franchise.

By coincidence, Randall Webber and I had talked about the pernicious
chemical dangers of illicit meth labs a few days before I read McNamara's
quote in Mike Lawrence's column, which appeared on this page yesterday.

During the course of a meandering conversation, Webber, who knows as much
about treating drug addictions as McNamara knows about enforcing drug laws,
mentioned an even more startling point.

"Gangs in Chicago don't sell meth; they don't want to sell it," Webber
said. "It would compete with crack."

That's because a meth high lasts four to ten times longer than a crack
high, he said. Even if crack and meth were the same price, which they're
not, meth would be the better buy, so to speak. "That would cut down on
profits."

Webber, a senior trainer at Chestnut Health Systems in Bloomington,
detailed how some experts debate whether meth is more likely to produce
paranoid psychosis than crack is, but my mind was stuck in replay. Did he
just tell me Chicago drug lords would rather sell crack than meth because
of the profit motive?

Crack is considered the drug of America's predominantly black inner cities.
Meth is seen as the homemade equivalent of America's predominantly white
rural areas. In a world where researchers routinely find that black
Americans, collectively, pay a higher price for houses, cars, groceries,
loans, insurance and most other consumer goods than their whiter
counterparts, am I to conclude white drug addicts get a better bargain on
drugs, too?

The destruction sweeping through the country's rural ghettos is well-known
in poor black neighborhoods. It is another of those signs the old folks
used to warn about - what happens in black America first always hits white
America sooner or later, if not at the exact same time.

Of course, it's much easier, or it should be, to look at methamphetamine's
course and realize we can't arrest our way out of this problem. The prisons
are already overcrowded and state budgets strained, with young black males
serving long sentences for non-violent drug offenses. The foster-care
system is already overwhelmed with black children removed from their homes
as a result of parental drug use and abuse. The health-care system is
already taxed, in part, by the rise of drug-related AIDS cases, yet another
category where black people are disproportionately represented.

Crack cocaine has already taught a costly lesson about what not to do. How
we deal with meth and crack too, politically and otherwise from here on,
will show if we actually learned anything.