SHIFT EMPHASIS FROM DRUG WAR TO WAR ON TERRORISM

There is little good news from the anti-terror front these days. The
whereabouts of Osama bin Laden are still unknown; the entrenched Washington
bureaucracy is fighting the new proposal for a Cabinet-level Homeland
Defense Department; and al-Qaida has regrouped to foment jihad in Kashmir,
the area hotly contested by two new nuclear powers, India and Pakistan.

In other words, world affairs remain depressing. Still, there was this
small notice mixed in with recent news about reorganizing and retooling the
FBI: The agency will scale back its efforts in the so-called war on drugs.
It comes as a relief - a bit of good news - that the FBI has shifted its
priorities away from corner crackheads and petty methamphetamine dealers.

With terrorists threatening to explode dirty bombs and poison the water
supply, it seems silly for a major law enforcement agency to expend its
precious resources hunting down drug offenders. The war on drugs, which
always amounted to a war on drug users, has long been a form of official
terrorism - an overzealous but unimaginative effort to stop irresponsible
Americans from abusing their own bodies.

Much like Prohibition, the war on drugs has created more problems than it
has solved, incarcerating hundreds of thousands of nonviolent Americans and
guaranteeing a black market, which, in turn, has sparked an epidemic of
violence. Had there not been hefty profits in selling banned substances,
drug gangs would not have sprung up to sell them and to war with each other
as they fought over turf.

This seems as good a time as any for the White House and Congress to
quietly end the war on drugs. There is no great enthusiasm for it among
average American voters. Why not go ahead and quietly ease back from a
40-year "war" the nation has no chance of winning?

While it would be politically risky for any formal announcement of
retrenchment, the war on terror provides plenty of cover for scaling back.
For one thing, billions more dollars will be needed to safeguard American
soil from terrorists. What better place to get it than from the money set
aside for punitive anti-drug efforts - from police raids to prison beds?
The entire budget of the Drug Enforcement Administration, which has grown
from $65 million in 1972 to $1.8 billion this year, could be shifted to
homeland defense.

With the nation's federal law enforcement agencies concentrating on
terrorism, the abuse of illegal narcotics could be confronted logically, as
a public health problem. If America made a serious commitment to drug
treatment and rehabilitation, rather than incarceration, our streets might
actually be safer. The violence of the drug war has largely been an
unintended consequence of the law enforcement effort to squelch drug sales.

That is not to say that major drug cartels would disappear if police
stopped going after petty drug dealers. As long as there is money to be
made from illegal drugs, criminal enterprises will hang around to reap the
profits. The biggest and most dangerous of those criminal enterprises
should always be in the gun sights of law enforcement officials. But
shifting money from the drug war to the war on terror also will interrupt
some of those drug cartels.

As the U.S. Customs Service tightens borders to stop Islamist terrorists,
inspecting packages, trucks, trains and container ships, it inevitably will
stop more shipments of illegal drugs. So why not beef up Customs with money
from the DEA? After more than 40 years of trying to stop Americans from
using illegal narcotics - wasting billions of dollars and countless lives
in the process - U.S. politicians and policy-makers ought to be ready for a
new strategy.