
                         THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
                 Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, June 7, 1994                    TAG: 9406070012 
SECTION: FRONT                     PAGE: A14    EDITION: FINAL  
SOURCE: Short 
DATELINE: 940607                                 LENGTH:

THE FAILING DRUG WAR\

{LEAD} That outlawed drugs are still widely available in the United States is a truth universally acknowledged. Still, many may have been surprised by the report that a death-row inmate at Mecklenburg Correctional Center recently overdosed on heroin.

He was the second condemned man known to have obtained narcotics and a syringe inside the maximum-security prison within a year. Prison officials could not say how he obtained them.

{REST} Investigators may yet find the answer. That knowledge might plug another drug conduit through the walls of Mecklenburg.

Iron bars and stone walls are as unsuccessful as just about all other barriers, physical and human, to drug trafficking. These barriers stop some of the flow, not all.

We aren't the first to raise this question, nor will we be the last. What does it say about the odds of ridding the streets of America of banned drugs when prisoners - even killers awaiting execution - can get them? It might be time for some major rethinking on how the drug war is fought.

by CNB