Pubdate: Mon, 27 Aug 2001
Source: Chicago Sun-Times (IL)
Copyright: 2001 The Sun-Times Co.
Contact:  http://www.suntimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/81

COSTLY DRUG WAR GOING NOWHERE

American drug policy is on automatic pilot and heading nowhere. Despite 
overwhelming evidence that the expenditure of billions of dollars has 
failed to significantly curb the drug problem in the United States, the 
same repudiated tactics are turned to year after year because, it seems, 
the idea of dramatic new thinking is unacceptable to our leaders.

No rational discourse, no poll showing the bulk of the American people 
hunger for change, seems to embolden any politician to try to seize the 
controls and head in a positive direction.

Meanwhile, the number of innocent victims of the drug war adds up, from 
tourist Kate Kaniff, who last week was awarded $129,750 for the humiliating 
strip-search she suffered at O'Hare Airport, to Baptist missionary Veronica 
Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter, Charity, killed last spring in a plane 
shot down by the Peruvian air force under the direction of the CIA.

And for every name mentioned in the media, thousands of others unnamed 
suffer from America's heavy-handed swatting at drug abuse, such as the 
1,300 African-American women who filed a class-action lawsuit claiming they 
were subjected to similar degrading strip-searches at O'Hare.

The blame doesn't lie entirely with politicians. To call the public stance 
on drugs schizophrenic is to be charitable. On one hand, record numbers of 
schoolchildren are tranquilized, Ritalin-ated and Prozac- ified, a ritual 
so embedded that laws nationwide are being passed to keep school districts 
from compelling parents to dope their kids. On the other, the proven 
benefits of medical marijuana to a wide range of sick and desperate people 
are vigorously ignored.

Glance at any aspect of the drug war, and you see reflected back a 
disturbing picture. For instance, the federal mandatory minimum sentences 
are draconian and unjust, tying the hands of judges and forcing them to 
incarcerate first-time, nonviolent offenders for decades at a pop.

All this might be barely tolerable if the country were drug-free, but the 
fact is that drugs are more available than ever--cheap and on every street 
corner and schoolyard, it seems.

"War" is an apt metaphor for our drug efforts, and we would be even more 
accurate if we thought of it as our "Vietnam War on Drugs"--an endless, 
failed expenditure of lives and money that our leaders seem powerless to stop.

We need to rethink our public policy. We need to come up with something 
that doesn't merely pack the prisons while failing to address the root 
cause of demand: drug addiction, a medical crisis that should be treated as 
the health problem it is, and not something that will be solved by sending 
in the Marines. We need to find a cure that isn't worse than the illness.

Decision a winner

The nightmare mishandling of last November's presidential election should 
never be repeated in a single precinct in America. Thus kudos to Cook 
County Circuit Court Judge Julia M. Nowicki for her permanent injunction 
allowing the use of voting machines that tell voters whether they've marked 
their ballots properly. The right to vote is sacrosanct in this country, 
and anything to make the process more transparent and error-free is to be 
applauded.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom