DRUGS & THE WISDOM OF OWL

President Clinton should remedy the unequal balance between prevention and enforcement in the nation's drug war.

Illegal drugs poison the final decade of the 20th century in this, a nation where social progress once was regarded as an inevitability. The human costs are incalculable.

For the taxpayers, however, it's a time to take a dispassionate look at drug-control policies. By any measure, these have amounted to hideous failures that nonetheless drain tens of billions of dollars from the nearly empty treasuries of local, state and federal governments.

The squawks and chirps of public debate are characterized by Peter Reuter, codirector of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center in Santa Monica, as coming from hawks, owls and doves.

When doves talk of legalization, he says, nobody listens.

Hawks dominates the last decade and "massively increased funding for the punishment of drug users and dealers, expanded the scope of efforts to detect them and intensified the severity of penalties." The federal government spent nearly $7 billion last year waging the war on drugs. More than 70 cents of every drug-control dollar is spent on enforcement rather than on prevention. National drug arrests nearly doubled in the decade of the '80s.

And today, drug-related murder and mayhem are worse than ever. Courts are jammed. Prisons are filled. In spite of multibillion-dollar enforcement campaigns, the ugly truth is that anyone with $50 might need up to 25 minutes to find a connection in San Francisco for rock cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine or almost anything else. In the law-abiding suburbs and farm country, such a search might take a few mintes longer. Just ask.

Here come the owls, who "accept the need for continuing prohibition but stress the importance of prevention and treatment." We note with cautions approval that the Clinton administration may choose to transfer the ineffective czardom of national drug control policy from the White House to the Health and Human Services Department. Anything to end the posturing.

Drugs are clearly subject to laws of supply and demand. The latter, according to the owls, shuld get priority. It's a wise move.

Prevention should get at least 50-50 split with enforcement, which hasn't proved any sort of cure.