Our Off-Balance Drug War

Last week police busted Noelle Bush, the 24-year-old daughter of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, for allegedly forging a prescription for the anti-anxiety drug Xanax. The offense is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Gov. Bush, realizing that punishment alone would be of little help, paid $1,000 to bail out his daughter and probably will send her back to one of the treatment centers she reportedly has been in before.

That’s good. And what’s good for a famous parent’s daughter should be good for America. In fact, the nation’s $20-billion-a-year war against drugs might stand a chance if the governor’s brother, President Bush, would urge Congress to correct the imbalance in anti-drug funding, which directs only four cents of every dollar to prevention and treatment. The remaining 96 cents go to what former Health Secretary Joseph A. Califano Jr., now a drug abuse expert at Columbia University, calls “shoveling up the wreckage of substance abuse and addiction in hospitals, welfare agencies, foster care programs and prisons.”

President Bush--whose daughters Jenna and Barbara both have been charged with underage drinking and who himself was arrested in 1976 for driving while intoxicated--has impressed Califano and other drug policy experts. Bush recognizes, as he put it in one Rose Garden speech, that “the most effective way to reduce the supply of drugs in America is to reduce the demand for drugs in America.”

Oddly, though, the president’s newly appointed drug czar, John P. Walters, has historically favored punishment over treatment. Last year, he called the notion that drug sentences are too long one of “the great urban myths of our time.” Fact is, heroin and cocaine are cheaper than ever, the annual number of heroin overdoses has doubled since the early 1990s and the percentage of teenagers admitting to having been drunk at some time is rising. The United States may be winning battles abroad, but it’s losing the domestic war on drug abuse and the backward thinking of key strategists such as Walters is one reason why.

Bush and Congress need to correct the imbalances that result in so little federal money for treatment. Legislators should also reverse an outrageous law passed in 1998 that bars federal drug czars from spending even a penny on ads that mention the most commonly abused drug of all, alcohol. Specifically, Bush should press lawmakers to pass HR 1509, by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard (D-Los Angeles) and two Republicans, that would add underage drinking to the federal anti-drug campaign. In 1999, Rep. Anne M. Northup (R-Ky.)--who received $121,418 from the alcohol industry from 1996 to 2000--led a successful congressional effort to defeat a similar Roybal-Allard bill. Even as alcohol was killing 6.5 times more young Americans than all illicit drugs combined.

Adults today send a strange mix of messages to kids, permitting seductive TV advertising, for instance, that promotes the virtues of mood-altering prescription drugs like Xanax, Ritalin and Prozac, while funding school-based seminars in which police officers tell students to “just say no to drugs.” And if impressionable youths end up turning to the wrong drugs, we lock them up. This must be confusing for young Americans--Noelle, Jenna and Barbara included.