Avoiding Nostrums and Illusions in the War on Drugs

Dealing with America’s complex and costly drug-abuse epidemic must be one of the new Adminstration’s domestic priorities. The Reagan Administration had limited successes in its war against drugs--raising the drinking age to 21 and the “Just Say No” campaign, for example, but its biggest investment--law-enforcement efforts to stem the flow of drugs--has failed. And the past political campaign netted two feeble ideas: creating a drug czar to coordinate federal drug efforts and expanding the use of capital punishment.

These nostrums are unlikely to produce any better results. We can’t “kill” the problem, and however imaginative an administrator William Bennett, President Bush’s designated drug czar, turns out to be, he must have adequate resources and good programs to administer.

The new Administration must avoid prevailing myths and faulty policies in developing a new approach. Intelligent people, fed up with escalating drug-related crimes, have been attracted to the idea of legalizing drugs as a way to cut crime, reduce public expenditures and increase revenues by taxing the sale of illegal drugs. We believe it is a self-deceptive strategy, purporting to solve a problem by defining it away.

Increasing the availability and social acceptance of drugs not only condones but inevitably increase its use. Since the major costs of drug abuse are not law enforcement, but health, safety and productivity costs, making drugs more available inevitably increases society’s burdens. If any evidence is needed for this self-evident conclusion, recall our experience with two legal drugs: alcohol and tobacco. Substantial tax revenue is raised and there is no significant illegal market for these drugs. But tobacco and alcohol are the leading causes of preventable death and illness in the United States, costing the nation more than all illegal drugs put together.

A focus on curbing the drug supply is also illusory policy. Interdiction (the label for this approach) calls for getting tough with supplier nations such as Colombia (cocaine and marijuana) and Burma (heroin). President Nixon had notable success in getting Turkey out of the opium business and President Ford had similar, but more limited, success in curbing the supply of heroin from Mexico.

But the idea is not as simple as it sounds. First, U.S. relations with other nations are always complicated by the interplay of competing interests, some of which inevitably conflict with the drug issue. Second, international drug traffickers easily adapt to changing conditions in one growing area or even in one nation, since drug-producing crops can be grown worldwide. We could build a Chinese wall around the United States without slowing the supply of drugs--with $100 billion (according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration) a year coming from inside the wall, there would be countless tunnels.

We can’t even interdict domestic suppliers. Taking out of the illegal market one or two drug-producing areas, confiscating a handful of labs or filling a prison full of sellers will not cut the supply of drugs so long as extraordinary financial incentives continue. Furthermore, partial supply reduction raises the cost of drugs, and thus contains the seeds of its own destruction: the higher the cost of illegal drugs, the greater the incentive to the suppliers. We must emphasize law-enforcement efforts but we cannot rely on them to solve the problem.

An idea that enjoys wide public support is the imposition of tough criminal penalties for drug sellers. This approach will make only a dent in the problem: Tough penalties applied to a tiny percentage of drug sellers (the few who are caught) are not effective in deterring people driven by the more certain and immediate lure of billions of dollars.

If cutting off the supply of drugs, giving drugs away cheaply or Draconian sentences are futile strategies, is there an alternative? We think there is: We would focus resources on cutting demand of the casual as well as the hard-core drug abuser. The hard question for the 1990s is how to reduce that demand.

An effective policy must include two features: identification (police work and private testing) and prevention (punishment and treatment). Drug users must be identified at early stages, given compelling reasons to quit and offered help in achieving that goal. Tough prevention methods, private and public, are required.

A big push in ensuing years is likely to come from employers and employee groups (including unions) working together to identify drug use and to provide effective treatment. This will mean far wider, though not universal, drug testing, and treatment to fulfill the promise of such testing. The central fact is that users, including users with paying jobs, need someone who cares enough to say “no more.” If Ricky Gates, the Conrail engineer who admitted smoking before the Chase, Md., accident two years ago, had been identified by a random drug test before that accident, many lives would have been spared.

In addition to using punishment to deter drug use, selective and carefully administered drug testing is essential to catch offenders and to police the problem. Testing is controversial, but it can be done within appropriate, balanced legal boundaries. Permitting widespread illegal drug use is not humane: it is called “enabling.” It flows from decent impulses but has devastating effects on families and social policy.

The four battlegrounds for carrying out this policy (along with an invigorated criminal justice system that focuses on users as much as suppliers) are the workplace, the schools, the highways and the home. The most important social institution in drug-abuse prevention is the family. Parents must be educated to identify and to stop youthful drug and alcohol use. The drug problem is not found exclusively in broken or poor or dysfunctional families or with bad or troubled kids. Parents will need help from treatment programs that have proved successful.

All pushers should receive severe sentences. But for users, what is needed is a far more measured and moderate, but widespread and certain, application of less severe punishment. Brief incarceration should be linked with drug testing on release and withholding benefits (drivers’ licenses, for example) from users of illegal drugs. Publicly and privately funded treatment is essential for an effective national drug abuse prevention program, and, to be fair, it must be available to hundreds of thousands of people.

Users of illegal drugs have to be convinced through graded punishments that their use is unacceptable. A tough anti-drug approach needs to be balanced with a firm commitment to help drug users and their families overcome the devastating effect of drugs. This means a substantial increase in funding for treatment.

These efforts will need federal leadership but most of the work will come from the private sector, building on such proved models as: the 12-Step program, particularly Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous; the 28-day in-patient Minnesota model program, plus therapeutic communities involving outpatient and residential services. A new program, Adult Children of Alcohlics, is targeted at the 24 million Americans who have grown up in families troubled by drugs.

Only by investing in a long-term combination of tough and realistic techniques for cutting demand can we radically reduce the drug problem. That way the next generation may have a chance to grow up without using drugs. And we all may be able to live in cities and towns unmarred by the fallout of the drug-abuse epidemic.