THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 25, 1996 TAG: 9608260644
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 61 lines
Responding to last week's report by a federal agency that drug use by teenagers has soared by 105 percent since 1992, Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole promised ``to make the drug war priority No. 1 once again'' if voters send him to the White House.
What does he mean by that? Does he mean that as president he would demand greater federal funding than President Clinton has for the continuing, futile effort to check the tide of forbidden drugs flowing into the United States and to arrest, prosecute and imprison more drug traffickers and seize more illicit-drug money? Or does he mean increasing by several million dollars the budget of the office of the ``drug czar,'' which is more symbol than substance?
Federal spending on the drug war has actually increased under Clinton - it now runs about $13.5 billion a year, a big chunk of which goes to the military for drug-trafficking detection and drug interdiction.
Would appropriating still more billions of dollars for the federal war on drugs appreciably shrink the market for officially prohibited mood-altering and mind-bending substances, marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines among them? Not likely. In 1994, 1.35 million drugs users were arrested, most of them by local police, but that obviously didn't keep teens' drug use from rising. If the possibility of arrest doesn't scare teens into steering clear of drugs, what could? Teens aren't supposed to drink alcohol, either, but millions of them do - and that too presents many dangers.
The Council on Crime in America estimates there are more than 4 million casual users of cocaine in the United States and 2.2 million heavy users. The number of Americans who have smoked marijuana may be as high as 80 million. Open-air drug markets are all too common in metropolitan areas.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, a political conservative with impeccable credentials, pleaded with President Nixon not to initiate the drug war in the 1960s. Friedman prophesied that the projected antidrug crusade would be costly and unwinnable.
Friedman was right. Prohibition backed by harsh penalties drives up drug prices, ensuring that trafficking is an attractive option for any number of Americans and foreigners willing to defy the law. Illicit drugs retail for as much as a hundred times the cost of their production. Drug trafficking in turn accelerates street violence and the decay of inner cities, corrupts police and boosts expenditures for law enforcement from precinct to prison.
Stiff sentences for breaking drug laws send many nonviolent, drug-addicted offenders to penitentiaries where they contribute to overcrowding and occupy space that could be better used to confine violent criminals for longer periods. Chasing drug peddlers and their customers strains crime-fighting resources to the detriment of public safety.
Candidate Dole blames the rise in teen drug use on President Clinton. He implies he could do better. Overall, drug use is declining, but it also waxes and wanes as it goes down. It falls for much the same reason as does cigarette consumption: More and more Americans appreciate drugs' hazards. Consumption of alcohol also is declining.
The better, more-effective way to deal with the social and health problems of drug use and abuse would rely less on prohibition and more on regulation, education and treatment. But the topic of drugs - and of drugs and children even more so - stirs such strong fears that the prospect for less-destructive public-policy responses to the challenge is dim while the outlook for harmful demagogic responses seems as bright as ever. Unfortunately. by CNB