FACE IT, PROHIBITIONISM OF NARCOTICS ISN'T WORKING

by Anthony Lewis

The Herald Tribune, February 7, 1996

BOSTON - When Bill Clinton named General Barry R. McCaffrey to "lead our nation's battle against drugs at home and abroad," he said General McCaffrey would need, to succeed, "a force far larger than he has ever commanded before - he needs all of us." What General McCaffrey really needs is a quality that has been lacking in White House drug czars and other leaders of American drug policy for decades. That is an open mind: the ability to look at the policy of drug prohibition and appraise, realistically, what good and what harm it is doing to society. An honest appraisal, looking coolly at the results, would have to conclude that 80 years of prohibition have been a disastrous failure. Drugs are as plentiful as ever on the streets. Prisons are crowded with nonviolent drug offenders. And the costs of the losing war are bleeding society, not just in money but in ravaged cities and ruined lives. More and more people who have opened their minds are concluding that prohibition is not the solution; it is the problem.

As in America's "noble experiment" with alcohol, prohibition creates a criminal market for the outlawed product and corrupts the law. The conservative magazine National Review comes out against drug prohibition in its current issue, dated Feb. 12. It is an impressive issue, including comments by seven people who have studied the problem. The editors themselves say: "It is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources and that it is encouraging civil, judicial and penal procedures associated with police states." Anyone who criticizes prohibition as a drug policy is likely to be attacked as a radical, a friend of narcotics and so on. It is hard to say that of National Review's editors. Indeed, they deplore the use of drugs. Their judgment is a practical one. William F. Buckley Jr., the conservative guru and founder of National Review, says: "The cost of the drug w is many times more p

ainful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education ... We have seen substantial reduction in the use of tobacco over the last 30 years, and this is not because tobacco became illegal but because a sentient community began, in substantial numbers, to apprehend the high cost of tobacco to human health." Steven B. Duke of the Yale Law School quotes the previous drug czar, Dr. Lee Brown, as saying that drugs are behind much of the crime we see on our streets today." The statement would have been correct, Professor Duke says, if it had started with the words "Prohibition of." He writes of the war on drugs:"If its purpose is to make criminals out of one in three African-American males, it has succeeded. If its purpose is to create one of the highest crime rates in the world - and thus to provide permanent fodder for demagogues who decry crime and promise to do something about it is achieving that end. If its purpose is de facto repeal of the Bill of Rights, vi

ctory is well in sight ... If its purposeis to destroy our inner cities by making them war zones, triumph is near." Another commentator, Ethan Nadelmann of the Lindesmith Center in New York, shows the cruel results of drug enforcers' zealotry. Doctors, afraid of prosecution, withhold opiates that could ease the pain of terminal patients. Victims of multiple sclerosis and glaucoma are denied the marijuana that would help them, as are patients for whom it would reduce the nausea that results from chemotherapy. In this election year, it is hardly necessary to say that no leading politician in Washington will look honestly at the cost of drug prohibition - not President Bill Clinton, not congressional leaders. They will all assume their tough-on-drugs pose. Nor does there seem to be much hope of fresh thinking from General MeCaffrey. Shortly before his appointment, he told the conservative Heritage Foundation: "This isn't a tough problem like AIDS or racism or poverty. We know where the drugs are grown, we know

where they're moved ... " In other words, go on with the interdiction efforts that have failed so dismally. It would be nice if the next time a drug official talked to the Heritage Foundation - or any audience someone had the courage to point out, like National Review, that the policy has no clothes.