US MA GE: Column: Just Think About Drugs;
Then Say 'No' To US Policy

''We believe the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself.''

Under that banner headline in a double-truck ad of the June 8 New York Times, an astounding array of prominent and accomplished world citizens appealed to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for a major shift in drug-fighting worldwide.

Fully one-twelfth of all international trade involves traffic in illegal narcotics, it is claimed. And while no one can be sure of the scope of the drug economy, the number could be right on the button. And it is also inescapable that governments worldwide routinely fail to contain the worsening social deterioration that accelerates despite ever-harsher methods.

The criminalization of drug use imprisons many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of sniffers, snorters, swallowers, injectors. As an inevitable byproduct of the into-your-bloodstream-with-a-rush economy, the drug trade also corrupts law enforcement, governments, and the judiciary. Meanwhile, drug suppliers grow fabulously wealthy, and insulate their criminal conspiracies from punishment. The United Nations estimates that more than $1 billion a day goes for illegal drugs worldwide, and the $400 billion-per-year estimate seems low to some.

''Every day politicians endorse harsher new drug war strategies,'' said the letter, coordinated by the Lindesmith Center of New York. But those who call for alternatives to the current consensus of failed policies ''are accused of `surrendering,''' and the wasteful spending on searches and suppression increases as drug use spreads.

The signers of this public petition include some impressive achievers: Walter Cronkite is nobody's fool. There are ''formers'' such as ex-senators Claiborne Pell and Alan Cranston, ex-presidential adviser Lloyd Cutler. ex-US Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, and ex-Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach.

There are influential big-city mayors such as Willie Brown of San Francisco and Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore and San Jose's Susan Hammer. There are prominent professors from across the continent, an array of academics such as Harvey Cox, Cornel West, Andrew Weil, Herbert Gans, James Vorenberg, Mathew Meselson, and Stephen Jay Gould.

There are some big-time Georges, such as philanthropist George Soros and former US Secretary of State George Shultz, and big-time preachers such as the Revs. Leon Sullivan, Floyd Flake, and Calvin Butts 3d.

There's Lani Guinier and Lester Grinspoon, the American Civil Liberties Union's Ira Glasser and the venerable and very conservative economist Milton Friedman, cheek-by-jowl alongside various CEOs and federal judges ( Denver's John Kane, New York's Robert Sweet and John Curtin,), and Irish cops such as Patrick Murphy, once police commissioner of New York, and Joseph McNamara, once top cop in Kansas City.

These serious and accomplished individuals have dared put their names on a petition for which, if they were running for office in the vast majority of US jurisdictions, they'd be pilloried. Because in the current political climate of mindless mimicry of the failed policy of interdiction, of search-and-destroy, of lock-up-the-little-guy-while-the-kingpins-live-high-on-the-hog, it can be hazardous to a politician's health to point out how badly the drug war is lost.

''We are all deeply concerned,'' says the letter, ''about the threat drugs pose to our children, our fellow citizens and our societies.'' And the signers from other countries are more impressive in their scope than the US signatories.

People who ran governments in the Netherlands, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, writers such as Germany's Gunter Grass and Ivan Illich, Italy's Nobelist Dario Fo, Canada's Jane Jacobs, signed the petition.

There's a plethora of Nobel laureates, top cops from Jamaica and Scotland Yard, the lord mayor of Melbourne, the former UN chief, Peru's Javier Perez de Cuellar, parliamentarians and professors galore, from New Zealand to the Arctic Circle, and some civil rights campaigners who made the long march in other causes, such as South Africa's Helen Suzman.

The criminals coining wealth on the backs of drug users get away with more than murder. The letter points out the obvious: They ''corrupted governments at all levels, eroded internal security, stimulated violence, and distorted both economic markets and moral values.''

But there's an additional point: ''These are the consequences not of drug use per se, but of decades of failed and futile drug war policies. In many countries, drug war politics impede public health efforts to stem the spread of AIDS, hepatitis and other infectious diseases. Human rights are violated, environmental assaults perpetrated and prisons inundated with hundreds of thousands of drug law violators.''

The letter does not point out that in the United States, there are 1.6 million Americans behind bars, many of them for drug-and-alcohol related crimes. ''Scarce resources better expended on health, education and economic development are squandered on ever-more-expensive interdiction efforts. Realistic proposals to reduce drug-related crime, disease and death are abandoned in favor of rhetorical proposals to create drug-free societies.''

Now comes the crusher, endorsed by all these accomplished and intelligent individuals from across the planet: ''Persisting in our current policies will only result in more drug abuse, more empowerment of drug markets and criminals, and more disease and suffering. Too often, those who call for open debate, rigorous analysis of current policies, and serious consideration of alternatives are accused of `surrendering.' But the true surrender is when fear and inertia combine to shut off debate, suppress critical analysis, and dismiss all alternatives to current policies.''

Sadly, most of the official titles born by the distinguished signatories are prefaced by the bland ''former.'' Many of them could not have voiced such sentiments while they held power, because of the pressure of public opinion, which militates against experimentation, innovation and change. Can you imagine how swiftly CBS would have dumped Uncle Walter if the beloved anchorman had opened a broadcast with these views?

Kofi Annan, the world's top bureaucrat, is just a mail drop for this cause. The effective decriminalization of illegal drugs would take much of the corrupt money out of the system, and rationalize the treatment of the addicted, who are among the most forlorn of humans. Real improvement requires real, and risky, change. Most American politicians cannot summon the intestinal fortitude to do anything but mouth meaningless platitudes about ''cracking down'' on what is at bottom a chemical dependency masquerading as a weakness in human nature. The smugglers, the middlemen, the mules, the vein-poppers, the snorters, will always stay one step ahead of the law. We even have out-of-control drug problems in some of our major prisons. If you cannot interdict narcotics in a maximum security federal prison, what chance have you on the streets of America? The war is lost. Demand creates supply. So the demand must be channeled, treated, controlled; it cannot be simply eradicated by fiat.

Until we make this momentous shift in global public policy, society will continue to rot from the pernicious, ineradicable spread of illegal drugs.

© Copyright 1998 Globe Newspaper Company.