GOOD REASON TO CONTINUE WAR ON DRUGS

WASHINGTON - Exasperated by pessimism about the "war on drugs,"
John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy, says: Washington is awash with lobbyists hired by
businesses worried that government may, intentionally or
inadvertently, make them unprofitable. So why assume that the illicit
drug trade is the one business that government, try as it might,
cannot seriously injure?

Walters understands that when there is a $65-billion-a-year American
demand for an easily smuggled commodity produced in poor countries,
and when the price of cocaine and heroin on American streets is 100
times the production costs, much will evade even sophisticated
interdiction methods. And, he says, huge quantities of marijuana are
grown domestically, for example, in California, Kentucky and West
Virginia - often on public lands because the government can seize
private land used for marijuana cultivation.

Marijuana possession, not trafficking, accounts for most of the surge
in drug arrests since 1990. Critics suggest an armistice on this front
in the $35 billion-a-year drug war.

Walters responds that the bulk of the demand for illegal drugs is from
addictive users. Of the 19 million users, 7 million are
drug-dependent. Marijuana use is a "pediatric onset" problem: If
people get past their teens without starting, Walters says, the
probability of use is "very small" and of dependence "much less."

Use of marijuana by youths peaked in 1979, hit a low in 1992, and then
doubled by the mid-1990s. The age of first use of marijuana has been
declining to the early teens and lower. Often, Walters says, the
"triggers" for use are "cultural messages" - today, for example,
from rap music. Nevertheless, teen marijuana use has declined 18
percent in the last three years. Because marijuana is, unlike heroin
and cocaine, not toxic - because marijuana users do not die of
overdoses - its reputation is too benign. The 5 million users in the
12-to-17 age cohort are, Walters believes, storing up future family,
school and work problems, and putting their brain functions at risk
with increasingly potent strains of marijuana.

Even Prohibition, Walters says, for all its bad effects, changed
behavior. After repeal, per-capita alcohol use did not return to
pre-Prohibition levels until the 1960s.

Walters says the data do not support the theory that society has a
"latent level of substance abuse" - that if one problem declines,
another rises commensurately. And he thinks indifference to drug
abuse, which debilitates the individual's capacity to flourish in
freedom, mocks the nation's premises. Having studied political
philosophy at the University of Toronto with the late Allan Bloom,
Walters describes the drug war in Lincolnian language: "There are
certain requirements of civilization - to keep the better angels of
our nature in preponderance over the lesser angels." Fighting
terrorists, he says, is necessary even though it is like seeking a
needle in a haystack. Illicit drugs are at least not a
needle-in-a-haystack problem.