Children in the Streets : The Big Picture

There will come a time when America’s war on drugs is viewed as the tragic equal of its war in Vietnam, both of them dragging on hideously long after their basic premises proved foolhardy, inhumane and divisive. The premise successfully attacked in these three new and diverse books is that the police power of the state can solve a problem rooted in social deprivation and human frailty.

The best of the three is Reckoning: Drugs, the Cities, and the American Future by Elliott Currie (Hill and Wang: $25; 405 pp.), a sociologist with the Institute for the Study of Social Change at UC Berkeley. Currie’s work is academic, but his prose is straightforward, his chapters well-organized. Like a trip to a war memorial, “Reckoning” is at once awful and absorbing.

America, Currie writes, has two very separate drug problems. One is an epidemic of abuse among the affluent. While it has its share of tragedies, this is a group with the resources for recovery: opportunity, jobs, money. Indeed, drug use among the “haves” has been declining since the mid-’80s.

But drug abuse among the poor is an intractable crisis. Not only is it getting worse, Currie says, it is by now entrenched, consigned to the inner city by racism and poverty, nourished by the nation’s high tolerance for its people’s hardships. Drugs are the symptom; inequality is the cause.

America’s problem is unique among developed nations. Currie cites a study that divides countries into categories of high, medium and low drug use. The United States is the only advanced nation in the worst ranking. The others--13 in all--are relatively poor, and most are “also authoritarian and intolerant, often dictatorial”: Afghanistan, Burma, Bolivia, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Malaysia, Pakistan, Peru, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.

“Zero tolerance” was the Reagan-Bush strategy. In the past decade, as drug arrests have gorged prisons and jails, the nation’s inmate population has doubled to 1.1 million. America has the world’s highest incarceration rate. California has been no slacker. According to Currie, more men are now in California prisons for drug offenses than were behind bars for all crimes in 1980; drugs figure in almost two-thirds of the state’s parole revocations.

America now has a prison-industrial complex. “California alone built nine new prisons between 1982 and 1990 and claimed to need another 38 by the year 2000 simply to maintain an ‘acceptable’ level of overcrowding--defined, in rather Orwellian fashion, as averaging no more than 125 inmates in space designed for 100,” Currie writes. Nationwide, violent criminals--even rapists--are often released early to make room for drug offenders.

Who are these criminals? A common assumption is that they are traffickers. But, as Currie points out, more than twice as many people are arrested for possessing heroin or cocaine than for manufacturing and sale. Of those who do deal, most are small fry, addicts who risked jail time rather than a day without crack. The police take them away in “sweeps,” like so many empty soda cans.

Much of this is owed to racial fear. Drug arrests are the master’s new bullwhip. In 1989, nearly three-quarters of all jail inmates charged with a drug offense were African-American or Latino, Currie writes. In some state-prison systems, the proportion now exceeds 90%. One in four African-American men in their 20s is either in prison, jail or on probation or parole. A generation has been depleted by the drug war, fodder for the cameras on “Geraldo” specials and “COPS.”

War is expensive. Since 1986, the federal drug budget has increased five-fold to $12 billion. Some 70% goes for law enforcement, financing the high-speed chases, the high-tech surveillance, the high body counts of those neighborhood sweeps. The smaller part goes to the neglected stepsisters, prevention and treatment. Addicts are routinely sent away from overcrowded drug programs and put on waiting lists; the system just says no.

So what is there to do? Legalization is no answer for Currie; that would lead to more abuse, as we have seen with tobacco and alcohol. He favors instead a reduction in sentences for all but the most serious drug offenses--and no jail time for use or small-scale sales. He supports community policing.

But even those measures are too timid, he says. “No amount of tinkering with the courts or the treatment system will do the job.” The endemic cause--inequality--must be remedied. His final chapter is a Utopian wish list meant to address social deprivation: public-sector employment, job training, health care, housing. He wants the prosperous to uplift the poor, and his passion is so admirable that one hesitates to tell him he is a dreamer.

A moderate such as Bill Clinton, of course, would be more apt to consider suggestions from someone who sees hope in “tinkering”: incremental changes in policy, rather than any grand redistribution of wealth. Ideas for that are available in a sensible book, The Making of a Drug-Free America: Programs That Work by Mathea Falco (Times Books: $22; 254 pp.). Falco is a former drug official in the Carter Administration; her book jacket carries a blurb from Al Gore.

After a decade of “zero tolerance,” she writes, more Americans have serious drug problems than ever before. Drug prices have gone down, not up (crack is barely more costly than beer). Only treatment is scarce. It is available for less than 15% of the nation’s 5.5 million drug abusers.

The book begins with a breezy history of drugs in American life. Among the choice nuggets: In 1898, the Bayer Co. introduced Heroin, a new cough medicine. Coca-Cola substituted caffeine for cocaine only after its hometown, Atlanta, prohibited the drug’s sale without a prescription in 1903.

Falco recommends that America look at what works, as she did in four years of research. By her light, promise exists in early interventions with high-risk children, drug counseling on the job, community efforts to root out dealers--efforts that “focus on reducing harm rather than passing judgment.”

Mike Tidwell’s In the Shadow of the White House: Drugs, Death, and Redemption on the Streets of the Nation’s Capital (Prima Publishing: $19.95; 341 pp.) is an interesting, if uneven, book that gives some voice to those rarely heard from, the drug abusers themselves. In 1989, Tidwell, a jobless writer, found work counseling addicts in recovery at a halfway house on one of Washington’s most drug-saturated streets.

“I offer myself as proof of how little this city and this country care about drug recovery,” he writes. “I was hired on the spot with no substantial counseling experience whatsoever because at $6 an hour--the most the D.C. Coalition for the Homeless could afford as starting pay--you can’t get anyone experienced, trained, and professional. For the first few months, I literally did not know what I was doing.”

He did know enough to fill his notebook with anecdotes, some of them unforgettable. In one, a dealer fingered the lapel on a heavy coat worn by a dead-broke crackhead. The addict was begging for a free rock, but he did not want to surrender his only warmth. The dealer walked on. “The addict caught him again. The dealer touched the lapel a second time, and this time the addict began slowly unbuttoning his coat on that frozen sidewalk.”

Tidwell knows what too few understand as they pay taxes for more nightsticks and prison cells: Among addicts, each drug purchase is a cry of pain.

In the 1980s, America’s good sense and common decency was tested by a drug epidemic. History will show that it responded with a war on its people.