HEY, DAS: THE ROCK MUST GO

The DAs are hanging on by their fingernails.

Just about everyone else in New York is convinced: The Rockefeller-era drug
laws need to be reformed - and drastically. Long prison sentences for
nonviolent drug offenders just don't make sense any more. We've seen the
human disaster that approach has caused.

The gullible girlfriends doing 15 to life.

The ignorant mules sent off forever.

The street-corner dime-bag boys punished far more harshly than the kingpins
- - far more harshly than murderers, rapists and kidnappers.

But Albany is inching toward action on drug reform this coming week. And
still, the state's 62 district attorneys can't stand the idea of giving up
the wide latitude they've enjoyed under these Rockefeller laws, a latitude
they've exercised by sending thousands and thousands of nonviolent New
Yorkers off to prison for very long times.

Year after depressing year, the prosecutors have refused to learn the
lesson that everyone else can see: These laws are cruel. They are
expensive. They are way out of proportion to the crimes they seek to
punish. They are applied, in 19 out of every 20 cases, to dark-skinned
people, even though every study shows that drug use cuts across society.
Worst of all, these Rockefeller laws have proven utterly ineffective in
stopping the flow of drugs.

How do we know? Narcotics are cheaper, more potent and more plentiful than
they've ever been.

But here, on Friday afternoon, was some hick district attorney, trotting
out the tired old insults, trying to sound tough, pedaling ferociously to
keep these absurd laws alive.

His name was John Tunney. He represents Steuben County. He was holding
forth at his office in tiny Bath, N.Y.

"Radicals," Tunney harrumphed at those state legislators who may finally be
on the verge of changing these arcane laws.

Before he got to be the DA up there in 1987, Tunney was a lawyer in Painted
Post, N.Y. I'm not making that up.

I'm not sure what kind of drug problem they have in Painted Post, or in
Bath, for that matter. I'm not sure how many of his neighbors have been
sent off to decades-long prison terms for nonviolent drug crimes.

None of his white neighbors, I can promise you that.

Almost 95 percent of the people sent to prison under the Rockefeller laws
are black or Latino. Every study shows, of course, that drug use and drug
selling cuts across society.

The first time I ever heard of Tunney, he was prosecuting a 13-year-old for
murder. Maybe that should have told us something. But here he was again,
speaking for the DAs.

"Do not allow proponents of radical overhaul of our drug laws to hold these
widely supported reforms hostage," he warned.

The "widely supported reforms" he referred to were not the ones everyone
else is talking about - a significant overhaul of this phony war on drugs.
He meant a tiny tinkering the DAs are proposing so they too can claim to be
for reform.

Tiny tinkering, while leaving the old system in place.

The DAs won't even support the small changes Gov. George Pataki has agreed
to and the Republican-controlled state Senate has passed.

All this had the reformers steaming.

"The prosecutors use the same tactic every year," said Deborah Small,
director of public policy at the Drug Policy Alliance. "They wait until the
11th hour, when it looks like the sides are talking about significant
reform. They write a letter slamming every bill, whatever it is. Saying it
is unnecessary. Saying it compromises public safety. Making all these
assertions that reform is coddling criminals. All of which is provably untrue."

Never do they explain the racial imbalance.

"Do they really believe that only 5 percent of drug users and drug sellers
are white?" Small asked.

The Assembly is pressing forward with some real reform, led by Queens
Assemb. Jeffrion Aubry. Pataki's new criminal-justice coordinator, Chauncey
Parker, appears partly on board. He has been meeting with the relatives of
prisoners locked up for years and years and years.

"It is the top priority of the governor to get this done," Parker said in
an interview the other day.

So will we get a deal this year?

Will we finally Drop the Rock?

Will the girlfriends and the mules and the dime-bag boys finally come home?

It'll have to happen quickly. Albany is alive for just another week.

And the elected officials will have to have the guts to tell the pandering
district attorneys:

Your approach has been tried.

It failed.