Elders has done her homework

AN OFF THE CUFF remark last month landed Joycelyn Elders, the surgeongeneral, in conspicuous trouble. In response to a question about drug legalisation and its possible effectiveness in reducing violent crime, she said the issue ought to be studied. Bill Clinton thought otherwise. It was quickly made clear that the president was firmly against legalising drugs and "is not inclined in this case even to study the issue." Officials and pundits poured scorn on the idea, and on Dr Elders for suggesting it. If that was not embarrassing enough, her 28 year old son was then arrested and charged with selling cocaine.

Yet instead of shutting up, Dr Elders last week chose to amplify her message. On January 14th she told an audience in New York that she had been doing her homework and that after reading many studies "I realised I probably made a more honest, above board statement than I knew I had made." If the government refused to do solid research on drug legalisation, she would probably try to persuade big foundations or universities to do it instead.

Dr Elders did not become the first black surgeon general by being afraid to speak her mind. She has the toughness that comes from having fought her way from sharecropper origins in rural Arkansas (with a fivemile walk to the bus to her segregated school) up through medical school (with its segregated canteen) and on to head the Arkansas health department (where her support for abortion and condom distribution in schools earned her labels such as "condom queen" and "director of the Arkansas holocaust"). Stirring controversy, as she is nowdoing in Washington, is nothing new.

If she does succeed, despite the weight of opposition, in provoking a serious debate on drug legalisation, she will be putting her largely exhortatory job to good use. Prohibition has failed before in America, and many believe that the war on drugs is failing now. Champions of legalisation, including this newspaper, argue that if it is done properly governments could take the world's largest untaxed industry out of the hands of criminals and start to exercise workable controls.

Whether Dr Elders's original remark on legalisation was as tentative as she now claims is open to doubt. A couple of months earlier the president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, Eric Sterling, had written her a memo on the public health aspects of the drug problem. It catalogued the costs of prohibition: violence between drug traffickers; crime caused by addicts having to pay prohibition inflated prices for their habit; overdoses and poisoning from contaminated illegal drugs; the spread of HIV and other infections through contaminated needles; overcrowded jails.

The memo concluded that "many thoughtful observers" had argued for legalisation as the only alternative to prohibition, though detailed proposals were lacking. Dr Elders, it seems, would like to know what a detailed proposal might look like. Will Mr Clinton inhale that curiosity?