Attacking Drug Abuse by Taking the Glamour Out

I recently attended an Orange County Board of Supervisors’ budget hearing where Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. James Enright, Sheriff Brad Gates and Supervisor Bruce Nestande expressed concern about the proliferation of drugs in the county and the crime and corruption that usually accompanies those drugs.

Now we have President Reagan officially launching his war on drugs. It seems that politicians are finally realizing that merely going after the producers and distributors of something is not always, if ever, the most effective route.

To merely go after the pornographer, the prostitute, the bookie, or the pusher and ignore the consumer has not been successful.

The weak attempts to attack the consumer have usually been limited to those areas where that consumer has had little or no influence with the power structure of a particular community. If we want to be effective in combating drugs, or most other crimes, we must go after those figures that glamorize it for the rest of us.

We must refocus the attention of the justice system on those people in our society who many of us look to as role models. When two sports figures die while in the commission of felonies (cocaine use) we should not eulogize them as fallen heroes but as a couple of druggies who overdosed.

In Orange County the attention of law enforcement should be directed at the swank discotheques and yacht clubs as well as the barrios and ghettos, but politicians do not get elected and police officers do not stay police officers when they tangle with the wealthy and well-connected.

And so the raids will continue on “rock” houses, and kids will be marched from their fourth- and fifth-grade classes to view videotapes featuring Nancy Reagan and receive coloring books proclaiming “Nope on Dope” only to find out later in the day that their favorite rock star or athlete has checked into a fashionable clinic to treat his or her “chemical dependency” while one of their friends has checked into County Jail as a drug addict.

GEORGE P. WRIGHT

Santa Ana

George P. Wright is an instructor in the criminal justice department at Rancho Santiago College in Santa Ana.