NEW STRATEGY FOR THE FAILING WAR ON DRUGS: DECRIMINALIZE THE AMMO

Not Only Does Effort Waste Money, It's Target Is Off The Mark

Ballot Initiative B would deprive the police of their version of "user
fees," the proceeds from property seizures in drug arrests. But Ogden's
police chief, Jon Greiner, suggests the hidden agenda here is legalization
of drugs.

That accusation inevitably raises the larger issue of the country's
30-year-old War on Drugs. Political wars typically promise much and deliver
little. Remember Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, Richard Nixon's War on
Cancer, or Jimmy Carter's Moral Equivalent of War on Wasted Energy?

What are we getting this time for our annual $19 billion investment?
(That's just the federal expense -- state costs would double that figure.)

Despite a recent, slight drop in teenage use -- not yet mirrored in Utah --
the total number of current users is over 14 million and rising. The
falling price of cocaine indicates the supply is hardly drying up. The
population of 4 million hard-core addicts refuses to decline. And there's
enough collateral damage to civil rights and the criminal justice system to
fuel protests like Initiative B.

This war plods on, getting nowhere, for a couple of good reasons. One is
the way we allocate our investment portfolio to fight it. Another is our
choice of language to describe it.

Let the money speak first. Examining how the drug-war budget is spent
offers a case study in official disregard of knowledge.

Mostly (68 percent) it's aimed at law enforcement, interdiction of supplies
and eradication of foreign crops. Preventive education gets 13 percent,
leaving 19 percent for treatment of addicts.

Now compare those numbers with the findings of a 1994 study by the Rand
Corporation on the relative cost effectiveness of various anti-drug
strategies. For every dollar we spend on eradicating crops in foreign
countries, we can get the same reduction in drug use by spending 43 cents
on cutting off the supply at our borders, or 30 cents on arresting,
convicting and jailing offenders, or a mere 4 cents on therapeutic
treatment of abusers.

Clearly, we invest excessively in the least effective approaches and almost
ignore the most effective. So what did Congress and President Clinton agree
to do last month? Ship another $1.3 billion in cash, troops and helicopters
south to Colombia to feed a civil war and defoliate a jungle. (Do the early
1960s come to mind?) It's no comfort to know that the last U.S. military
leader there is heading north to jail for complicity in his wife's cocaine
addiction.

A similar Rand study in 1999 focused specifically on cocaine and yielded
similar findings, but with a surprising twist. Preventive education
programs were rated far less effective than treatment, in fact, somewhere
between interdiction and enforcement. Here, an ounce of prevention is worth
only a quarter-ounce of cure.

The best school programs yield lifetime reductions in drug use of less than
10 percent. Most are ineffective or irrelevant. DARE, for example, is
harmless but more expensive than regular health education and no more
effective, because it mostly reaches kids unlikely to indulge in drugs. Its
popularity just shows that law-and-order folks are as susceptible to
"feel-good" solutions as anyone else.

And that behavior has a lot to do with language and how we trap ourselves
by the ways we think and talk about drugs. Metaphor is powerful.

Even federal drug czar Barry McCaffrey, no shrinking violet as a military
commander, has said it's time to stop talking in terms of "war." Warriors
often focus so narrowly on tactics they can't tell when they're losing.
Losing a war is disgraceful. In this one, breathing words like
"decriminalize" or "legalize," if not treasonous, certainly is capitulation
to the enemy.

Yet we're not even clear about identifying the "enemy." Gen. McCaffrey
assures us it's not the 80 million Americans who at some time have tried
illegal drugs, but for the most part have outgrown the practice. So we're
left to search madly for supply-side solutions, rather than deal sensibly
with the demand for drugs.

Because the social stigma of drug abuse and the legal chains in which we've
bound ourselves deter users from seeking treatment, it appears that an
effective strategy requires some degree of decriminalization. But treatment
must be guided by sound scientific knowledge, rather than ideology,
personal experience or the short-term market orientation of legislators and
the managed-care industry.

Two decades of research have shown that addiction is a complex, chronic
brain disease, subject to relapses and peculiarly sensitive to the social
circumstances in which it develops. So addiction is a long-term disorder,
like diabetes or high blood pressure, that can be managed but never cured.

Public officials, with the significant exception of one pro-business
Republican governor in New Mexico, are paralyzed by fear that
decriminalization would lead to increased abuse.

Yet criminologists who've been studying Spanish, Italian, Dutch and English
history, as well as the U.S. experience with alcohol prohibition (1919-33)
and legalized cocaine (1885-1914), have been finding it isn't legalization
that stimulates wider use, but unregulated commercialization.

Chief Greiner may be right that Initiative B is a ham-handed response, when
a little police accountability would suffice. But the need for those user
fees might just evaporate if, as a nation, we could think clearly enough to
demilitarize the War on Drugs and demand a better return on our investment.