DRUGS AMERICAN MYTHS : Repression Has Been a Stunning Failure : The debate has deteriorated to a choice between punishment or withdrawal. What’s missing is a sense of collective mission.

The Bush Administration’s anti-drug officials quite sensibly blast critics of their criminal-law enforcement strategy with personalized invective, because as soon as the debate moves from media histrionics to a consideration of the evidence, repressive policies appear to be a stunning failure. The 1980s was a decade of unprecedented growth in criminal punishment, with drug cases contributing heavily to a doubling of the incarcerated population, to the level that about 1 million young, poor, disproportionately minority men and women are locked up today. Meanwhile, rates of criminal violence, presumably one relevant measure of the effectivness of drug-law enforcement, dropped quickly from an unusual high point early in the decade and then gradually zig-zagged their way back up.

A tacit conspiracy, cross-cutting entertainment media, political life and superficial research, has created sensationalized images of the user desperately seeking crack with crazed violence and the street dealer casually selling from his gold Mercedes-Benz. Never grounded in the everyday realities of inner-city drug life, these popular images will probably survive the publication of highly revealing new studies.

One, conducted in New York by a research group that used methodologically trained ex-cops to gain unusual access to police information, finds that upwards of 90% of cocaine-related homicides are not commited by users driven by psychopharmacological or economic pressures to sustain use, but by users, dealers and others caught up in marketing disputes. The other study, conducted by RAND researchers, focused on incarcerated street dealers from Washington. It indicates that the average income from street dealing is closer to $700 a month rather than $700 a day; that street dealers often hold legitimate, similarly poorly paid jobs simultaneously, and that their limited drug-selling opportunities are commonly seen as too risky to be exploited too long. Observers from outside the ghetto may be shocked by the size of profits in illicit-drug marketing. But inside the ghetto, the awareness of money to be made is widespread, with the result that at the mass level of street dealing, the drugs, the profits and the personnel are all systematically and finely cut up.

Criminal punishment has obviously failed to stem the use of illicit drugs even while it has more subtly succeeded in creating a form of lay-delivered capital punishment on inner-city streets. Noting such patterns, a new chorus of voices is emerging to speak with refreshing calm and carefully articulated distinctions about “legalizing” drug use. But while their arguments initially convey great enthusiasm that a virtual panacea has been discovered, the reader can typically find in the smooth flow of discourse a quietly inserted, devastating exception for young people.

If “legalization” is to apply only to dealers and users over age 21, it will miss the part of the population most responsible for street crime, many of the pregnant women whose drug use creates unacceptable health risks and the critical stage of life when criminal records are acquired and respectable, dignified occupational life-choices become foreclosed.

Simplicity in policy and formal rationality of the sort that classical economists favor argue in favor of dropping the age limitation. But the extension of “legalization” to teen drug use takes us back to the callous indifference to ghetto realities that characterizes criminal-enforcement efforts. If we write the youth population into the plans for legalization, we write off the part of society most in need of our communal attentions.

If we won’t prohibit adolescents from using opiate and cocaine leaf products, why should we prohibit young people from convenience-store access to alcohol? If we use the criminal law to express our communal demand that middle-class young people stay out of bars, how can we make sense of condoning ghetto youths in crack houses? If, despite all the problems faced by our urban school systems, we refuse to abandon our commitment to educate all our young people, can’t we insist not only that young people attend school but also that their minds be in some conventionally accessible relationship to their bodies?

In recent years, “the drug problem” has become perhaps the major domestic myth in the United States.

For advocates of prohibition, “drugs” are so obviously the cause of so many of our problems that empirical claims need not be made. No matter that “the crack crisis” that began four years ago has had no consistent relationship to rates of crime, school dropout or inner-city poverty.

For the proponents of “legalization,” criminalization of drugs is so obviously destructive that recent history is ignored. If the huge increase in criminal-law enforcement in the 1980s did not reduce the social problems associated with drugs, neither did it produce them. In 1980, when punitive powers were half what they are today, the rate of criminal violence was even higher than it now is.

Substance abusers, whether they smoke crack, inject heroine, drink alcohol, sniff cocaine or simply overeat, typically go through three stages on the way to self-destructive habits. First, they are casual users, playing with forbidden practices. Next, they discover psychophysiological causes for persistence: new or heightened cravings, withdrawal pains, bodily annoyances that more ingestion may relieve. Then they develop ways of expanding fleeting moments of substance use into major principles of lifestyle. Often quite creatively, they organize daily routines along secret lines of deviant searching behavior. At this stage, the corporeal cravings become spiritual problems; for the abuser, quitting means not only physical suffering but also the abandonment of a life that may seem pathetic from outside but that is richly meaningful from within.

When we focus on the intermediary stage of physical craving, we miss the source of the drug problem at the individual level and we are misguided at the policy level. For 25 years we have failed to inspire poor, young, minority men to orient their lives toward the conventionally respectable center of our society. The fascination of a life of illicit action has remained constant while the drugs of choice have changed repeatedly.

As American social policies have swung from the left to the right, it seems they must always be couched as “wars,” whether the “war” be against poverty or drugs. Our dilemma is not drugs or their criminalization, but that we can mobilize ourselves to large-scale domestic policy only in a posture of negativity. As Europe, East and West, rushes with great optimism toward an uncharted future, our politicians and journalists compete to conjure up horrific images of the devilish power of drugs; we can think of no alternatives for our domestic problems than one or the other act of negation.

Now our public debate offers a choice between a punitive response or government’s withdrawal from the engagement. Until we can locate an understanding of collective mission that directs us to constructive action, the drug czars and the intellectuals will continue to exchange passions and fine points while the ghetto dealers and users continue to be fascinated with their illicit exchanges.