ABROAD AT HOME / By ANTHONY LEWIS

The Noble Experiment

BOSTON -- Practicality has been a feature of American life from

the start, and a reason for the country's success. Americans on the

whole eschewed ideology. We judged ideas by whether they worked. When

they didn't, we tried something else.

A strange contemporary exception to that tradition is the war on

drugs. By any rational test it is an overwhelming failure. Yet our

leading politicians persist in calling for ever more stringent

measures to enforce the policy of total prohibition, doing their best

to prevent even a discussion of alternatives.

In 1980, the Federal Government and the states spent perhaps $4

billion on drug control; today the figure is at least $32 billion. The

number of people in prison on drug charges has also multiplied by

eight: from 50,000 to 400,000.

Yet the use of forbidden drugs remains a reality of American

life. Supplies are plentiful despite costly attempts to stop the

production of drugs in other countries.

The human cost of the drug war is worse than the financial cost.

In 1996, for example, 545,000 Americans were arrested for possession

of marijuana, giving these mostly young people a criminal record for

use of a drug as accepted in much of their culture

as alcohol in ours. Thousands -- many thousands -- of people are

serving long terms in prison for a first, nonviolent drug offense.

But is there an alternative way of dealing with the grave human

and social problem of drug abuse? Yes, there is. It is explored in the

new issue of Foreign Affairs, in an illuminating article by Ethan A.

Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center in New York, a drug

policy research institute.

The alternative is to acknowledge what Americans came to

understand about alcohol after 14 years of the noble experiment,

Prohibition. That is, as Mr. Nadelmann puts it, "that drugs are here

to stay, and that we have no choice but to learn how to live with them

so that they cause the least possible harm."

The harm-reduction approach to drugs is in growing use throughout

Europe. That includes a country as bourgeois and conservative as

Switzerland.

In 1994 Switzerland began an experiment allowing doctors to

prescribe heroin,morphine or injectable methadone for 1,000 hardened

heroin addicts. The results, reported last July, showed that

criminal offenses by the group dropped 60 percent, illegal heroin

and cocaine use fell dramatically, health was greatly improved, and

stable employment rose.

Swiss voters overwhelmingly support the policy. In a national

referendum in September, 71 percent of voters voted for it.

Another policy adopted in much of Western Europe, Australia and

Canada is to allow exchange of used needles for clean ones. This has

had an important effect in reducing H.I.V. infections. In the United

States, despite proposals for needle exchange by commissions starting

under President Bush, the White House and Congress have blocked the

use of drug-abuse funds for that purpose. The result, Mr. Nadelmann

says, has been the infection of up to 10,000 people with H.I.V.

Similarly with marijuana, the practice in much of Western Europe

is not to prosecute for mere possession. In the U.S., a commission

appointed by President Nixon proposed in 1972 that possession of up to

one ounce of marijuana be decriminalized. The proposal got nowhere, and

White House intransigence is unchanged. After Californians voted to

allow medical use, the White House drug czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey,

hurried to warn that Federal law still made it a crime for doctors to

prescribe it.

"Most proponents of harm reduction do not favor legalization,"

Mr. Nadelmann writes. But "they recognize that prohibition has failed

to curtail drug abuse, that it is responsible for much of the crime,

corruption, disease and death associated with drugs and that its costs

mount every year."

A good many Americans, including police chiefs and doctors, believe

that it is time for a change in our failed drug policy. It is our

political leaders who are afraid to change. It will take someone with

the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes -- someone like

Senator John McCain -- to end our second, disastrous noble experiment.