TALKS ON DRUG LAWS STALL AS STATE DEADLINE NEARS

ALBANY, June 7 - New York's top officials have agreed for several years
that the state's Rockefeller-era drug laws are too harsh, but their efforts
to overhaul them appeared to founder yet again Monday when talks broke down
without an agreement.

The state's drug laws are among the toughest in the nation, and there is
widespread agreement here that the long sentences they force judges to mete
out have clogged the prisons at great cost without stemming drug abuse or
drug-related crime. But for years the State Legislature and Gov. George E.
Pataki have failed to agree on how to shorten the sentences and when and
how to offer drug treatment instead of prison.

Last year, all sides briefly thought that they had a deal, but it unraveled
mysteriously in the middle of the night. This year the
Democratic-controlled Assembly and the Republican-controlled Senate took
the rare step of forming a conference committee to try to iron out their
differences on the laws. But after nearing agreement on many important
areas, the committee ended its sixth meeting here on Monday afternoon with
no general agreement on what to do and no plans to meet again.

Democrats on the committee asked to continue meeting, arguing that they
were close to a compromise, but Republicans left without agreeing to more
meetings, charging that the Democrats had been too inflexible. Two
Republican Senate officials said they were unlikely to reconvene the
conference committee, and added that the Senate might go ahead and pass a
bill on its own without the Assembly's agreement.

That left the effort to rewrite the state's drug laws effectively dead for
the year, or at least on life support with a poor prognosis, officials said.

The senators took a narrower view of their mission, saying that they wanted
to shorten the sentences that are doled out to people convicted of the most
serious drug charges. The Assembly agreed, but had a much broader series of
changes they wanted to make: they wanted to shorten the sentences more
significantly for lower-level offenders, and to give judges the option to
sentence offenders to treatment instead of prison.

Assembly members were unwilling to agree to only part of what they wanted,
for fear it would undo their leverage to get the Senate to agree to a
broader overhaul.

A group of women, many of them with sons serving long prison sentences for
drug offenses, sat in the hearing room. They listened as lawmakers debated
whether to keep talking and whether they should change drug laws that were
harsh but had not actually been passed during Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller's
administration.

"It looks like they're playing games," said Elaine Bartlett, 46, who was
arrested in 1983 for selling four ounces of cocaine and spent 16 years
behind bars as a first-time drug offender. She is the subject of a new
book, "'Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett"
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux), that helped rekindle the debate this year.

Assemblyman Jeffrion L. Aubry, a Queens Democrat and co-chairman of the
conference committee, urged his colleagues in the Senate to keep talking,
saying it was better to negotiate in public in a conference committee than
behind closed doors.

He alluded to last year's failed negotiations, when the so-called "three
men in a room" who control the state - Governor Pataki, Assembly Speaker
Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno - met behind
closed doors with a fourth man, Russell Simmons, a founder of Def Jam
records, to try to reach an agreement.

"This process is so vital and important, so it doesn't go back to three men
in a room, or three men in a room with a mogul, or however that process
seemed to have taken place last year," Mr. Aubry said. "What it ought to be
is us, in a public place, discussing this and resolving this."

But senators complained that the Assembly, by holding out for more changes,
was failing to sign off on the areas they all agreed on. And they said that
time was running out in this legislative session, which is scheduled to end
on June 22. State Senator David A. Paterson, who leads the Democratic
minority in the Senate, wondered aloud at the meeting what other pressing
business there was. "I was actually wondering what we were going to do here
for the rest of the week," he said.

One group of advocates pushing for change is blaming the Senate for the
inaction. The group, called Mothers of the New York Disappeared, has taken
out full-page ads in Spanish newspapers directed at New York City
Republicans in the State Senate who are seen as vulnerable this fall, when
the state's legislators face re-election. "We're like Sisyphus," said Randy
Credico, an organizer of the group. "This is seven years in a row."