Going to War With Ourselves : Drugs: Like some sci-fi potboiler, the crusade seems to be a search for a convenient enemy in the wake of a diminished communist threat.

After living in Southeast Asia for several years, I have recently returned to a nation at war. Every night the television networks are filled with sober images of battle-dressed correspondents venturing into the lair of the enemy. President Bush has told the nation that it must mobilize its resources to meet the threat. Even Nancy Reagan, accompanied by Los Angeles police, has visited the front lines.

From the look and sound of things, the war on drugs, complete with evil Colombian cocaine suppliers and menacing black crack dealers, is the equivalent of a global conflict. And it’s a great one for consensus, too, because, as with World War II, the Bush Administration and the news media seem to have found in drugs an issue that brooks no dissent. The only question is how much to spend and where to fight.

But having seen real war and real crisis, I am having a little trouble with this one. Beginning with the cover-up during the Reagan Administration of the relationship with Panamanian leader and drug lord Manuel A. Noriega and ending with the disclosure that President Bush’s handlers had cynically arranged a drug buy across from the White House for a televised speech, the tone of the campaign is overblown hype. Like some grainy 1950s science-fiction potboiler, the real purpose seems to be the search for an evil. It’s them--outsiders, non-Americans and nonwhite Americans.

The drug war is Washington’s crusade to find an enemy, an excuse. We are making friends with the Russians and have lost the effort to overthrow the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. We need a convenient enemy. But if we find that enemy in our own cities, in the despair of a long-neglected underclass, America risks going to war with itself.

I listen to rap music for clues to the drug war. Listen to the groups Public Enemy or NWA, rappers whose rage explodes right onto the surface, youngsters who say they don’t take drugs but sell them to affluent customers in exchange for access to the good life. Then listen to Bush. These people are barely inhabiting the same planet.

Americans take drugs in massive amounts--alcohol, crack, cocaine, speed, heroin, marijuana, pills to lose weight, pills to get smooth. Just add that insatiable demand to a poor, urban population that has had most government programs and opportunities curtailed or eliminated since the Reagan Administration, and the roots of the current “war” are obvious.

We should be honest with ourselves and realize that the answer to the crisis presented by the illegal drug industry is not going to be found in more prisons and larger police budgets. If only Americans could look at themselves and the consequences of past failures, we might find that instead of a drug war, we need a period of reconstruction and recovery from the damage already wrought by a social war of neglect that has left the nation dismembered and confused, divided more than ever by a great gulf of class, race and opportunity.

If we believe the typical profile of the affluent drug customer, he or she seems to be the kind of younger person who has benefited most from the pro-business climate of the last several years: the high-achieving, fast-track, get-it-quick success story. What a strange symmetry that the suppliers, the street dealers in the cities, seem to be the exact opposite: those left behind and locked outside the brave world of success at any cost.

As long as that profile continues, the symbiosis between the user and the supplier will likely continue. We won’t get anywhere standing in the ring and screaming for the drug lords to come out and fight mano a mano.

So, yes, I have come home to a nation at war. But I would hope that Americans can resurrect the wisdom of Walt Kelly’s Pogo: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”