NEWS ANALYSIS : Bush Drug War Faces Bad Odds in Inner City : Drop in Casual Usage Helps to Show Progress but Hard-Core Addiction Has Defied Solutions

The nation is “now fighting two drug wars, not just one,” William J. Bennett, the nation’s top drug official, declared last week. But the battle strategy unveiled by President Bush is far more likely to show real progress on one of those battlefields than on the other.

The first of the two wars is the struggle to deal with so-called casual users, the millions of predominantly white, middle-class Americans whose involvement with drugs does not necessarily amount to addiction.

The second battle involves hard-core physiological and psychological addicts, the bulk of whom belong to the non-white underclass of the nation’s urban ghettos. This part of the problem, involving both the most viciously addictive drugs--”crack” cocaine and heroin--and a host of intractable social and economic problems has defied governmental solutions for decades.

The Bush Administration’s chances of success against the first problem are considered reasonably good because statistics suggest that war is already being won. Thanks in part to a social backlash against the drug-using excesses of the past and a decline in that part of the population in its peak drug-consuming years, casual drug use by the middle class has been declining for a decade:

The number of drug users in the nation has dropped by almost 9 million persons since 1985, from 23 million to 14.5 million. The number of people using cocaine has dropped 48% in that same period, from 5.8 million persons to 2.9 million, according to the government’s most authoritative surveys, conducted for the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Overall drug use peaked in 1980. Even total use of cocaine, which in the form of “crack” is the scourge of the inner cities, has declined since 1985.

This trend alone, many experts say, could enable Bush to achieve his stated short-term goal--a 10% drop-off in overall drug use in the next two years.

Taking on this short-term challenge, said University of Arizona criminologist Michael Gottfredson, is like fighting a “paper tiger. Drug use is down substantially, and it is going to continue to go down.”

Mathea Falco, assistant secretary of state for combatting narcotics during the Jimmy Carter Administration, called Bush’s goals “extraordinarily low. They really seem designed for the most part to capitalize on the existing drop in casual drug use.”

10% Goal Defended

Administration officials deny that their 10% goal is too easy. “I think now the declines will probably become more difficult,” Bennett said last week. “We have maybe persuaded the people who were most easy to persuade.”

Other government experts say they cannot be sure. The magnitude of the recent drug use decline took them by surprise, and they cannot be confident that it will continue.

“If someone had told me a year ago that we would have that kind of a dramatic reduction . . . I would have told them they were crazy,” said Edgar Adams, a senior official at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The decline has paralleled a drop-off in the use of legal drugs--alcohol and tobacco, for example--suggesting that more is involved than law enforcement.

Uneven Trend

The drug use decline has been uneven. Even while the number of cocaine users has plummeted, the number admitted to emergency rooms with overdoses has boomed. Hospitals last year reported more than 46,000 cocaine-related emergencies, nearly 3,000 of them in Los Angeles--an increase in both cases of roughly one-third over a year earlier.

And it is cocaine that will remain the benchmark for progress in the drug fight. Because of its extraordinary rate of addiction and the huge amount of crime associated with its distribution and sale, cocaine is the drug that the Bush Administration has decided to make its top priority.

Statistics Differ

Bush asserted in his speech that the number of frequent cocaine users has “almost doubled in the past few years.” In fact, however, the graph he displayed showed only that the percentage of cocaine users who are addicted has doubled.

Because the total number of cocaine users of all kinds--including casual users--has declined, the total number of frequent users has merely held about constant over the last several years. Roughly 300,000 Americans--about 10% of current users--are cocaine addicts. As the number of casual users has dropped, the addicts have loomed larger among the remainder.

But to tackle the problem of addiction--the intractable “second front” in the drug war--Bush will have to take his anti-drug campaign to the nation’s slums and ghettos.

Babies born to drug-addicted mothers, murders by drug dealers battling for turf, big-city street gangs exporting their activities to small-town America--these and other frightening manifestations of the addiction problem have helped raise the drug issue to the top of the list of Americans’ concerns.

Relies on Confrontation

The Administration’s strategy rests on a program of confrontation.

Street dealers and buyers would be rounded up under law enforcement crackdowns. Anyone free on bail or out on parole would be required to stay clean. Those who failed would meet with severe penalties: lengthy prison sentences to enforce abstinence from drugs.

Even those who agree with the theory question whether the Administration has provided the necessary resources. Such a get-tough strategy would require more police, more prosecutors and more jail cells, nearly all at the state and local level. But the Bush plan would provide only $200 million in new local assistance--far less than critics believe is necessary.

“Bennett has proposed a national strategy,” said Mark A. R. Kleiman, a drug policy analyst at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “And Bush has proposed a federal response.”

Others question the wisdom of any get-tough approach in tackling the problem of heavy users.

‘Harder to Reach’

“These people are going to be harder to reach, and obviously there’s going to be a need for a strategy different than ‘just say no’ or more law enforcement . . . ,” said Edgar Adams, the National Institute on Drug Abuse epidemiologist. “These people need actual treatment.”

The Bush plan does not downgrade the importance of treatment. Indeed, it suggests that although many drug addicts are beyond the reach of such efforts, as many as half of the nation’s estimated 4 million heavy drug users could benefit from treatment programs.

But the approach is largely confrontational: making treatment a condition of parole, for example, or authorizing mandatory “civil commitment” of addicts.

And critics complain that the new resources provided under the plan--although a 50% increase over current levels--would still leave the treatment network incapable of addressing the national need. Many believe the only solution is “treatment on demand” at a cost of at least $2 billion a year.

Bush has proposed a 50% increase in funding for treatment next year, for a total of about $900 million. But that would merely bring funding back to the level that prevailed 10 years ago before a series of cutbacks. Traditionally, federal spending for treatment has lagged behind outlays for law enforcement, although congressional Democrats are now clamoring for a treatment budget in excess of Bush’s proposal.

Even a substantially larger infusion of funds for treatment, say many of the critics, would fall short of providing a full solution.

“In the underclass,” said Douglas Anglin, a drug-abuse expert at UCLA, “people deal drugs to survive. It’s a product of poverty and desperation. If we don’t solve that problem, we’re going to keep generating problematic people.”

May Promote Intolerance

Some authorities are afraid that the public will be unwilling to provide the resources to solve that problem. Intolerance of drug use, they argue, will spill over into intolerance of drug users, and the nation will turn its back on the conditions that spawn the drug menace.

During a previous cocaine epidemic around the turn of the century, scholars note, middle-class drug use eventually dropped off. At that point, public opinion swung strongly against users--by then mostly poor blacks.

Typical of such feelings were widely circulated stories of “cocaine-crazed Negroes” who were said to be resistant to lawmen’s bullets.

“I anticipate a growing intolerance” that could last well into the next century, said Yale historian David F. Musto. “There’s a very strong probability we’ll write off the inner city.”