Dragon in Our Own Back Yard

No one except the most hopeless Democratic partisan will be happy if President Bush’s war on drugs, escalated this week by the President to the tune of a $10.6 billion program, turns out to be a flop. But no one will be particularly surprised. While Bush proposes some new money, he is mainly relying on old ideas.

The federal emphasis on law enforcement will remain--with a bundle of new money for the military to get involved against traffickers. The basic formula of 70% for law enforcement and 30% for drug treatment and education will not be tampered with. This means that the war on drugs will be fought as if it were a conventional war. So it’s impossible not to fear an end result similar to other wars where Washington has tried and failed to employ conventional methods against an unconventional enemy.

The sincerity of the President’s abomination of the drug plague is not in doubt: Drugs ruin family life and erode the fabric of society. The President’s drug czar, William Bennett, has brought a great deal of welcome energy to the problem. But not even the best of intentions and Olympian bolts of energy will matter in the end if the plan is fundamentally flawed.

It’s true that cocaine-exporting countries like Colombia, Bolivia and Peru need to be helped to crack down on their exporters, and the Bush program is very good on that score. It’s true that drug centers like Los Angeles, Miami, New York and Houston need more federal money, as the Bush program plans to provide. It’s also true that the Bush Administration is not oblivious to the need to deal with the demand side of the drug problem--the huge national craving for narcotics without which the drug problem would scarcely exist. The plan calls for an intensification of drug-treatment programs in prisons (a very good idea) and pilot programs for drug-treatment campuses where addicts would be able to choose from an array of programs (another very good idea).

What’s missing is the understanding that the main cause of the drug problem is America’s appetite for drugs. American buyers provide the market for the product; without this relentless demand, the problem would scarcely exist at its current magnitude. To make a dent in the economics of this billion-dollar trafficking, the country needs to make a dent in its own voracious demand for dope. The U.S. military could firebomb one exporting Third World nation after the other back into the Stone Age and still miss the target here at home: The U.S. market is so lucrative that other nations would want to rush in to pick up the business.

There’s some evidence that demand may be cooling a bit in the United States. This is why the Bush drug plan would be better advised to alter the law-enforcement (supply)/treatment-education (demand) expenditure formula from 70/30 to 50/50 as rapidly as possible. What will ultimately slay the nation’s addiction dragon are steady increases in the number of people who swear off drugs entirely and decreases in the quantities that the remaining users consume.