BUSH DRUG FIGHTER BELIEVES EFFORT ESSENTIAL

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?

Here is why: When Pat Moynihan was an adviser to President Nixon, he
persuaded the French government to break the "French connection" by which
heroin came to America. Moynihan explained his achievement to Labor
Secretary George Shultz, who said laconically: "Good."

Moynihan: "No, really, this is a big event."

Shultz, unfazed: "Good."

Moynihan: "I suppose that you think that so long as there is a demand for
drugs, there will continue to be a supply."

Shultz: "You know, there's hope for you yet."

Walters understands that when there is a $65 billion annual 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,
Walters 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. And particularly potent strains of the drug are grown indoors.
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.

Marijuana's price has fallen and its potency has doubled in the last eight
years. So say David Boyum and Peter Reuter in their new book, "An Analytic
Assessment of U.S. Drug Policy," from the American Enterprise Institute.
They say that, although the number of persons incarcerated for drug
offenses on any given day has increased from 50,000 in 1980 to 450,000 in
2003, the inflation-adjusted prices for cocaine and heroin are half what
they were 25 years ago.

So, should there be an armistice on this front, too? Walters responds that
the bulk of the demand for illegal drugs is from addicted 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. Many of
which - and perhaps one-third of the total U.S. marijuana supply - come
from Canada. A few years ago police estimated that there were 10,000
growers in the Toronto metropolitan area.

Last year 400 metric tons of cocaine were seized worldwide, but 200 entered
the United States. However, some seizures, by causing abrupt shortages in
some metropolitan areas, cause addicts to seek detoxification. Walters says
that breaking the "French connection" did that in New York in 1972. Even
Prohibition, he 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 - millions of tons marketed to millions
of Americans - are at least not a needle-in-a-haystack problem.