Not Exactly the Way to Attack Drugs

How convenient if the world were as simplistic as federal drug czar William Bennett seems to think it is. In his latest pronouncement on the nation’s so-called “war against drugs,” Bennett said that children in some neighborhoods that are infested with drugs should be rounded up and placed in orphanages. In resurrecting a variation of a half-baked idea from the 1960s that was supposed to save ghetto children, Bennett has again reinforced an erroneous and dangerous notion: that the “drug war” could be won if only the good guys could crash the crack dens, throw the users in jail and scoop up the innocents.

That’s a rip-roaring scenario for a movie, but in real life difficult and multi-tiered problems are not so easily solved. Bennett’s idea is at its worst in its assumptions about the true nature of the drug problem in the United States. And if the problem is wrongly defined at the outset, misdirected policies to attack it naturally follow. Going gangbusters into crack neighborhoods, either to rescue children or to arrest thugs, is no way to root out the source of drug abuse.

Just where are these neighborhoods where Bennett would have children removed from their homes? Many Americans mistakenly believe that the drug problem, particularly crack cocaine, is concentrated in black neighborhoods. But citing government and private statistics, Times writer Ron Harris reports that blacks make up only 12% of the nation’s drug users; moreover, whites sell most of the nation’s cocaine and account overwhelmingly for most of its consumers.

Yet, law enforcement officers admit, black drug users and other minorities are arrested most often because they make the easy targets. For example, blacks, because they are more often poor, are easier to spot making a buy on an urban street corner than are middle-class users, more often white, making buys inside a suburban home or office tower.

Nearly three-fourths of the President’s $9.5-billion drug program emphasizes law enforcement. The consequence of an anti-drug effort that stresses law enforcement--and encourages the assumptions behind the latest Bennett proposal--is that the government program is “in operation anti-black and anti-underclass. Not in plan, not in design, not in intent, but in operation.” Those words from a former University of Chicago Law School dean are echoed by scores of other experts, including cops on the beat.

Drug treatment programs and education don’t make for dramatic pictures on the evening news. But if Bennett and others are truly committed to saving the innocents in all American neighborhoods from the evils of drugs, treatment centers and schools offer long-term solutions not available in orphanages.