DRUG WAR NEEDS HONESTY

More than two years ago, The Maui News devoted considerable time, space and
manpower resources to detail the corrosive effects of the illegal, but
easily obtainable, crystal methamphetamine, also known as "ice" or "batu."

Any regular reader of The Maui News knows how often the use of ice is a
factor when a defendant is charged in criminal court cases. The drug is an
unmitigated plague on the families of the users and the community.

Monday, the U.S. attorney for Hawaii, Edward Kubo Jr., went to state
lawmakers with a shocking disclosure. He said there were an estimated 30,000
hard-core users of ice in Hawaii and some 90,000 recreational users. Kubo
told the Joint House-Senate Task Force on Ice and Drug Abatement, the
statistics were "reliable ballpark figures."

It turns out the ballpark had nothing to do with Hawaii. Kubo later said he
was using figures reported by a Honolulu police vice officer. Trouble is,
the officer said he was misquoted and he advised Kubo of that before the
attorney spoke to the lawmakers. Kubo, sticking to his guns, said he didn't
believe the officer had been misquoted since other narcotics officers told
him the numbers were right and that they came from a University of Hawaii
professor.

William Wood is a UH professor of sociology who works with the National
Institute on Drug Abuse. He said a 1998 household survey of more than 5,000
people in Hawaii led him to estimate there were 8,100 people in the state
who were hard-core ice users. That's a far cry from indicting 10 percent of
the state's population, but Kubo had his reasons.

The U.S. attorney used the numbers to back up his request to weaken the
state's constitutional search-and-seizure privacy clause and the
constitutional requirements for obtaining wire-tap warrants.

Kubo's request may or may not be warranted in light of all the ice being
consumed in Hawaii, but using inflated figures for shock value, even after
his source said he had been misquoted, is typical of the sort of
misinformation - it could be called lying - officials have been guilty of
promoting throughout the history of the "war on drugs."

The ice epidemic is a hot political issue this summer, but it will take cool
heads to find the right combination of interdiction, enforcement and
treatment to end it, not phony statistics.