TEARING APART BUSH'S DRUG PLAN

Judging by recent media coverage, President Bush's new drug policy is much
more liberal than Clinton's, focusing primarily on treatment and prevention
and providing major new funding for such initiatives. "The best way to
affect supply is to reduce demand for drugs," Bush said as he announced his
strategy.

The plan "marks a sharp turn in anti-drug policy," says the L.A. Times,
"emphasizes treatment" according to the Buffalo News, and "should be
applauded for changing our course" the Georgia Macon-Telegraph asserts. TV
coverage also largely parroted the administration's line.

To its credit, the Washington Post recognized that it was being spun, and
couched its language, saying that "aides described [the plan] as an effort
to reorient federal drug policy toward treatment rather than enforcement"
instead of stating this as a matter of fact the way most others did.

Still, few papers -- notably the New York Times and USA Today -- bothered
to do the simple math required to find out that Bush is doing exactly what
Clinton did: talking treatment and funding law enforcement. And while the
media was sharply critical of Clinton for such double-talk, Bush has
largely gotten a pass.

Here's what's the numbers really show. Bush's steepest jump in spending
goes to what researchers say is one of the least effective ways of fighting
drugs: interdiction in foreign countries. According to a study by the Rand
Corporation, it would take 11 times as much money to reduce demand for
cocaine by 1% using interdiction than it would to do so via treatment
spending; similar figures are believed to apply for other drugs.

But in Bush's plan, spending for interdiction jumps 10% while drug
treatment spending only rises 6%. This actually means the policy shifts the
balance of enforcement/treatment spending away from treatment. No one in
the press thought it worth mentioning, but Bush's budget actually cuts
prevention by 3%*.

*[Though this may not be a bad thing given that the agency it cut has a
culture so opposed to empirical research that a conservative speaker was
told to "shut the fuck up" last Fall when she said that only
research-supported programs should be funded. On consideration, the fact
that a prominent conservative was insulted might be *why* the agency, which
is usually a sacred cow despite repeated research reports showing its
failures, was targeted. This view of the administration's motivation here
is sheer speculation on my part, however.]

So, overall, the budget is still overwhelmingly weighted towards law
enforcement and foreign interdiction programs -- less than 1/3 of the funds
go to treatment and prevention, and much of the prevention budget will be
spent on anti-drug commercials and school programs of doubtful efficacy.
Providers estimate that 90% of the nearly 4 million addicts the government
believes to need treatment currently do not have access to it.

Meanwhile, though Clinton increased treatment spending by approximately 33%
during the course of his administration (roughly 10% per year, though three
years saw cuts), the media calls Bush's 6% jump a major shift. This is
nonsense. The pattern of spending on "reducing demand" (which includes
treatment and prevention) as opposed to supply-side measures through
Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II shows few differences Reagan cut
spending on demand proportionally from 40% to 31%, Bush I got it back up to
34% and Clinton bounced around between 31 and 36%. None of them ever came
close to balancing the effort--let alone weighting it towards treatment and
prevention.

Bush's plan promises to cut drug use by 25% in five years -- still
pie-in-the-sky, clearly, but a tad more realistic than Congress's 1988 plan
which had America entirely drug-free by 1995,

And at least W.'s latest proposal does reflect one positive trend.
Politicians now recognize that they have to at least talk treatment to stay
in the mainstream. A recent poll conducted by Peter D. Hart research
associates for George Soros' Open Society Institute found that 3/4 of the
public believes that addicts should be treated, not incarcerated and 56%
now oppose mandatory sentencing laws.

Let's hope reality catches up with rhetoric rapidly.