CANDIDATE SPEAKS TRUTHS ABOUT WAR ON DRUGS

IT WAS LOVELY to see A. Robert Kaufman the other morning. He showed up at
North Avenue and Rosedale and about 15 guys, who were out there either
selling dope or basking in the delightful arctic winds, immediately vacated
the corner. It's hard to know why. Kaufman doesn't want to put them in
jail. He just wants to put them out of business.

There is a distinction, and it's the basis of Kaufman's latest plunge into
his familiar realm of sheer political futility. This time, he's running for
Congress, aiming for Elijah Cummings' seat. Permit Kaufman this much: He
gives himself no shot at winning. But that's never his point.

He just wants to toss a little provocation our way. Chances are we will not
listen, because Kaufman, 71, has about a four-decade history around here of
running fabulous losing causes. Once, long ago, trying to preach socialism
outside a high school, he was crammed into a trash can. Once, he was pelted
by snowballs. He has lost not only quite a few political races, but
sometimes his sense of public dignity.

This is a shame, for Kaufman is part of the great unruly noise of America.
Agree with him or not, he speaks some uncomfortable truths. On Tuesday, the
day he went to North and Rosedale to conduct a news conference, an army of
two reporters showed up, plus retired attorney Leonard Kerpelman, who is
now shooting videos for a cable news operation.

As Kaufman spoke, the morning newspaper carried a front-page story about
the 4-month-old war on terrorism taking the government's attention away
from its 40-year so-called war on drugs.

"Look at this," Kaufman said, pointing to a nearby building on North
Avenue. "Remember when this was a movie theater?"

He turned to his friend Gary Nelson, an emergency vehicle driver for the
Baltimore Fire Department. Kaufman has lived in this neighborhood, at the
western tip of North Avenue, for 29 years. Nelson lived here, on and off,
for more than 20 years. They looked up and down the street now, eyeing
countless buildings either boarded up, battered beyond redemption, or
protected by iron bars over windows and doors.

"Over here," said Nelson, "was the Walbrook Theater."

"And over here," said Kaufman, "the Windsor and the Hilton theaters. And
the bowling alley was over there."

Gone now, all gone.

And everybody knows why -- every politician, every cop on the beat,
everybody who ever lived in the area and imagined the good life and saw it
slip away behind empty talk of the utterly futile, utterly endless battle
against narcotics traffic that has wiped out families, and entire
neighborhoods, and a couple of generations of the formerly hopeful.

"Elijah Cummings," Kaufman said now, referring to the man he will
challenge, "is one of the best people in Congress. I have no illusions of
defeating him, just debating him. His Achilles heel is that he supports the
war on drugs, which is self-defeating and murderous."

If this sounds contradictory, read on.

"The war on drugs," said Kaufman, "has given us poverty, the highest murder
rate in the western world, and unspeakable municipal decay. The answer to
this is simple: Take the profit out of drugs. That doesn't mean
decriminalize it. If you treat it as a health problem, you won't have
people selling it on the street, so you won't have people committing that
criminal act."

Kaufman is not the first to say such a thing. Kurt Schmoke said it years
ago, and heard himself shouted down so ferociously that his voice first
turned timid and then nearly silent. The clamor was a direct measure of the
country's desire to continue its endless failed drug war.

"What we have to have," Kaufman said, "is public health clinics where
addicts can get the drugs they need. At nominal cost. You do that, and the
very next day, the dealers on this corner" -- he pointed across North
Avenue, where all 15 guys once cluttered on the corner of Rosedale had now
vanished, perhaps at the sight of Kerpelman's video camera -- "those
dealers would have nothing to sell and no reason to shoot anybody, and
addicts would have no reason to steal, no reason to use dirty needles and
spread AIDS, and there would be no financial incentive to addict a whole
new generation of young people, and no need for vast expenditures on
insurance and locks and burglar alarms."

Is this a perfect plan? Hell, no. It's a terrible, terrifying notion, the
thought that any government might contribute to the zombification of human
beings. But they're already zombified, and taking it out on everyone around
them despite 40 years of legal and police and political efforts to make it
stop.

"We have to take the profits out of it to make it stop," Kaufman said.
"Until we do that, we lose. Everybody loses, except the banks that are
laundering the drug money, and the political people getting laundered
bribes, and the dealers raking in the cash."

As Kaufman stood there in the morning chill on North Avenue, two things
happened. An ambulance raced down North Avenue, siren blaring. "Who got
shot this time?" somebody asked. And those dealers on the corner slowly
began to reassemble -- followed, a few moments later, by a couple of
uniformed cops -- leading those on the corner to leave again, at least
until the heat was off.

It's a hell of a way for any neighborhood to exist, and it's the thing that
has motivated Kaufman to run for office once again. He does not run to win;
he never does. He runs because he is, in the fullest sense, a citizen:
cranky, ticked-off, full of belief in his own contrary points of view --
and, ultimately, so in love with the notion of a free society that he
honors it by speaking uncomfortable ideas to people who would rather huddle
behind locked doors and hope for some miracle to make the world safe again.