By Kurt Schmoke (mayor of Baltimore)

THE WASHINGTON POST

OUTLOOK - Commentary and Opinion October 3, 1993

In 1988, on this page, I called for a national debate on American drug policy. Five years later, while that debate is underway, the policy is essentially unchanged and drug-related violence is worse than ever. Clearly, we can't smply prosecute our way out of crime. If we want to silence the guns, we have to radically rethink not only our drug policy, but our ideas about the sacrosanct Second Amendment.

That was the real message of the tragic shootings in Washington last Saturday that killed four people, including a 4-year-old child. The newspaper stories could just as easily have appeared in the Baltimore Sun or countless other newpapers from cities large and small. In Baltimore last year, a 2-year-old boy was hit by a bullet that came through his living-room window. By good fortune the child lived, but one 6-year-old caught in crossfire a few years ago did not. Urban violence that turns schoolyards into battlefields and living rooms into fortresses is not a Washington D.C., problem. It is an American problem.

At the heart of the plague of violence is the drug trade.

There were 335 homicides committed in Baltimore in 1992, 48 percent of which were ruled drug-related. Seventy percent were killed by a handgun. To the extent that we surrender to this ivolence by throwing up our hands and applying tried and unture formulas about gunds and drugs, then Pogo is right: The enemy is us. Instead, we should be listening to the mayors, police departments and communities throughout the United States who offer new tactics and new determination in the fight against violent crime.

One thing needed now is a serious national debate about the Constitution and crime - perhaps one final and unambiguous test of the reach of tthe Second Amendment and its provisions about the right to bear arms. How far, for example, can the government go in prohibiting the possession and sale of handguns? Should murder be a federal crime if the weapon is transported in interstate commerce? Should advanced military technology be given to local law enforcement? Are there too many procedural safeguards for criminals? Too few alternatives to incarceration?

These are difficult questions, and I canot pretend to have the answers. The experiences I had as a sometimes frustrated federal and state prosecutor are balanced by my fear of tampering with a constitutional system designed to protect the accused from loss of life or liberty without due process of law. Nevertheless, the level of random and casual violence has reached the point where the price of robust democracy is widespread insecurity. When I speak on the subject of violence, I usually start with three questions: Have we won the war on drugs? Are we winning the war on drugs? Will doing more of the same enable us to win in the future? Over whelmingly, people say "no" to those questions. That's why I have called for a new strategy, one that can greatly reduce urban violence.

The war on drugs as it is currently waged feeds the very violence it is intended to stop. Addicts who are otherwise nonviolent steal and injure to get money for drugs. Dealers wound and kill to protect turf and profits. We have to be more than tough on drugs. We have to be smart too. That means recognizing that "the drug problem" is actually three problems in one: addiction, AIDS and violent drug trafficking.

Especially at the very highest levels, drug trafficking is very much an appropriate target for law enforcement. But law enforcement has almost no impact on addiction and AIDS. These are closely connected medical problems that require public health solutions. It is worth remembering that, for all our legitimate concern about drug-related violence, AIDS is now the number-one killer of youg men and women in Baltimore - and the spread of HIV is now largely drug-related in our city. Sixty percent of new AIDS cases in Baltimore are intravenous drug users: their sposes and offspring are another 10 percent. In 1991, the National Commission on AIDS called the failure of federal agencies to address the link between drugs and AIDS "bewildering and tragic".

As a substitute for our current policy, I favor "medicalization" - a one-word description for policies that increase access to drug treatment, slow the transmission of HIV and reduce the black market in drugs and the profit-motivated violence it generates.

Here are the basic elements:

- Trained health professionals would be allowed to give drugs to addicts as part of a treatment and detoxification program.

- Methadone maintenance and other forms of treatment, such as acupuncture, would be available on demand.

- local governments would be allowed to set up tightly controlled needle exchange programs to slow the transmission of HIV.

- Drug courts, modeled after the one established in Dade Country, Fla., and touted by Attorney General Janet Reno, would require convicted addicts to go through a treatment program. A conviction could be expunged after successful completion of the program.

- Closed military bases would be used for drug treatment and to discpline and motivate young drug sellers and users to pursue more worthwhile and fulfilling lives.

- seventy percent of the federal drug control budget would be for treatment and 30 percent for law enforcement. Today those figures are reversed.

- Primary care physichians would be encouraged to treat addicts; medical and nursing schools would give more training in addiction treatment.

- The government would increase funding for research into substances that block the effects of cocaine and reduce symptoms of heroin withdrawal.

- Law enforcement would focus on upperechelon drug trafficking and gun importation.

- Penalties for the sale of drugs to children would be especially severe.

I know that medicalization, and alternatives to incarceration such as drug courts and military bases, may seem like a retreat from tough law enforcement. They are not. I support longer jail sentences for predatory violent criminals. That's where most of our police, prosecution and incarceration resources should go. In other words, more jail space and longer sentences for those who commit heinous, violent acts, but also more long-term drug treatment facilities- not mandatory minimus sentences-for nonviolent drug users.

In fact, this model encompasses some of the recommendations of a Working Group on Drug Reform that met in Baltimore at my invitation throughout this spring and summer. The mission of the group, made up of experts in public health, law enforcement, economics and public policy, was to propose harm-reduction policies for Baltimore that require few, if any, changes in current law.

Unfortunately, modest changes in the direction of medicalization in one city will not be enough to stop the kind of violence that Washington and other cities face. Only a change in national policy, supported by Congress and the president and accepted bu the American people, will do that.

To come up with such a policy, I have long recommended the creation of a national commission to study how all drugs-legal and illegal-should be regulated. There is a precedent for this kind of commission. In 1928, President Hoover formed the Wickersham Commission to figure out how to better enforce alcohol prohibition. But most of the commissioners concluded that alcohol prohibition was, in the words of Walter Lippman, a "helpless failure." Prohibition came to an end, and so too did an era of prohibition-related violence. Now it's time to recognize that the war on drugs is a helpless failure too. We must let our health professionals assume their proper place in fighting addiction. Otherwise we can look forward to more outbreaks of senseless violence, more funerals, more revolving-door justice, more AIDS, more taxpayer dollars wasted and more young people in state prisons instead of state universities.

All is not hopeless in our cities. Efforts we've made at community policing and working more closely with state and federal law enforcement may be responsible for the reduction in 1993 of some serious crimes in Baltimore - although not murder. But those efforts, alone, are not responsible for a more remarkable statistic: in the first three months of this year, crime in Sandtown-Winchester, one of Baltimore's poorest communities, dropped 14 percent from the same period a year ago.

Why did candidate Bill Clinton come to Sandtown? Why has Henry Cisneros, secretary of HUD, been there several times, once with Attorney General Teno? Because Sandtown-Winchester is the shape of urban policy to come-a community built through a partnership of residetns, religious organizations, the Enterprise Foundation and all levels of government. Sandtown is a big work in progress, whose pieces include 300 new homes, a federal grand for pre- and post-natal care, literacy and job trainint, family support services, recreation for young people and substance abuse treatment.

I certainly know that the Sandtown-Winchester formula- public and private financing of new homes complemented by a full array of community-inspired and run support services- is not the complete answer to urban crime. But it is an important part of the answer. Communities need to take responsibility for their own revival, but they cannot be expected to do that without private and public help. Government, especially the federal government, also needs to be flexible in the enforcement of its rules. As in wartime combat, it'S often the commanders on the ground-in this case local government, local law enforcement and residents- who have the clearest picture of the battlefield and who have come up with the most innovative tactics for success.

Will greater investment in communities, tougher gun control and a new national drug policy be enough to relegate urban violence to the history books? I think, in large measure, yes. But we should be under no illusion that investiment and good intentions alone will completely end the crisis of urban violence. The antecedent to successful new policies is new thinking. President Eisenhower understood this. He knew that transportation and education were more than just local problems. They were matters of national security. So he proposed a new role for the federal government, building the interstate highway system and signing the National Defense Education Act.

Urban violence is also a matter of national security. Congress and the president must put this problem at the top of their agendas and write or change laws, appropriate money and provide the leadership necessary to solve it. If millions of Americans living in fear of losing their healthinsurance deserve the attention of the executive and legislative branches of government, then certainly the millions of Americans living in fear of losing their lives because of urban violence deserve that attention too.