Nadelman is a professor at the Woodrow Wilson Institute of International Affairs of Princeton University. His article was published on the Los Angeles Times and then quoted by the International Herald Tribune of 8 September, where we took it from.

ABSTRACT: the criminalization of occasional consumers is a foolish, costly, counterproductive and immoral objective. To believe that more police and more prisons are the solution for drug problem means ignoring the lesson that history teaches us. The author maintains that a policy on two fronts is needed: the controlled legalization of drugs and greater financial resources to allot to the treatment and prevention of drug abuse.

The national strategic plan for the control of drug abuse of the "drug czar" William J. Bennett, announced by President Bush this week provides for the allotment of greater sums of money for the treatment and the prevention of drug abuse.

This is a good thing. It recognizes that illegal drugs cannot be kept out of the country by means of stricter prohibition measures. It also admits that the efforts made to eradicate drugs in other countries can do little to keep cocaine and heroin out of the U.S. borders. It also acknowledges that the pursuance of such initiatives can be a weapon on the hands of the anti-U.S. of the countries that produce drugs. Bennett is not the first representative of the federal government to recognize such limits. His good will in taking note of these aspects - even if he continues to squander money in that direction - left some hope for the future.

But Bennett also wants to prosecute occasional consumers, especially marijuana consumers, with an unprecedented force in the past two decades. This represents a gross - and costly - negation of the lesson offered by the story of drugs.

Seventeen years ago, the Shafer Committee, established by President Nixon, recommended the depenalization of marijuana. In the same year, the Le Dain Committee of the Canadian government did the same. Ten years later, a research group established at the Academy of Sciences reached the same conclusion.

In the eleven states which, during the seventies, depenalized marijuana, the consumption levels have been equivalent to those relative to the states that did not depenalize. A 1988 research carried out by Michael Aldrich and Tod Mikuriya for the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs underlines that the 1976 depenalization law of California made the state save half a billion dollars for arrest expenses. In the Netherlands, where cannabis was depenalized in 1976, consumption among the young has dropped.

There is plenty of evidence that pursuing the objective of punishing marijuana users is not only foolish but also costly, counterproductive and immoral. Most marijuana consumers are not drug addicts, but responsible citizens who have a legal job, pay taxes and love their family. And yet, they are the ones who would be more likely to test positive in anti-drug tests. They can be arrested by the police, which presumably has more important things to do.

Bennett also seems to believe that more police and more prisons are the main answer to the drug problems of our cities. Once again, he seems to ignore history's lesson. Over the past decade, the expenses for the repression of drug use have more or less tripled, and the number of Americans in jail has doubled. The expenses for the construction and maintenance of the prison system represents the most rapidly increasing item in many state budgets. No other country of the West (except for South Africa) has a higher percentage of citizens behind bars. And yet, despite this increase in repression, many aspects of the drug problem in U.S. cities are getting worse.

The experience of the U.S. cities during the eighties suggests that stricter penalties and more police actions cannot dissuade the young from undertaking profitable activities connected to the drug trade. More repression will not stop the guerrilla warfare between rival trafficking gangs, and it could even boost it. More police actions will not convince pregnant women that the use of crack causes serious damage to their children.

What we need in the cities is a different policy, focusing on two fronts:

1. The government needs to mine the vitality of the black market and to destroy the distorted structures of promotion which attract so many youngsters in our cities and initiates them to the use of drugs. Decades of attempts to obtain this by means of penal measures have proven the failure of such approach. The only solution now is a policy of controlled legalization of drugs. The government should regulate and submit it to taxation, but it should also make the more dangerous drugs available to the adults who want to use them. There is no other way to keep the traffickers out of this type of business.

2. Greater financial resources, coming both from the taxation of the drugs which are now illegal and tax-free, both from the billions saved for not having squandered money in further measures of penal enforcement, should be allotted to the treatment of drug users and to prevention. With the growing involvement of drug users in the AIDS epidemic, all this is even the more necessary. It is equally important, however, to plan investments in preventive measures - not so much information on drugs but Head Start programs and prenatal and neonatal treatment. The existing experiences show that a dollar invested in preventive measures such as these guaranties higher interests than a dollar invested to imprison yet another traffickers or consumer.

The United States do not need another crusade against drugs or drug users, nor does it need a drug Czar. What it needs is a courageous leader, ready to give up rhetorical stances and pursue a more sensible policy.