"We found that the nation lacks the necessary information to gauge the effectiveness of current (drug) enforcement activities. For a program of this magnitude, that is simply unconscionable." - Charles F. Manski, chair of the National Research Council committee of the National Academy of Sciences, April 13, 2000

Recently, I repeated Mr. Manski's remark to the state Little Hoover Commission, which had invited me to testify on California's drug problems. I have spent more than 30 years in policing, rising through the ranks at the New York Police Department to become director of crime analysis, then to the positions of police chief of Kansas City, Mo., and San Jose. During those years, as a gung-ho cop, administrator and parent of three children, I developed not only a healthy respect for the danger of drugs - even aspirin kills 7,000 Americans a year - but also a decided skepticism about the successfulness of the nation's war on drugs.

Behind this skepticism, as I told the Little Hoover panel, is that California's drug-control policies, like those of other states, mirror federal policies - and deserve the same label of "unconscionable."

To put it as plainly as possible, the nation has spent hundreds of billions of dollars and locked up millions of Americans in pursuit of the drug war - all without adequately measuring the war's impact on production of illegal drugs, the flow of drugs into the country, the price of drugs, the level of drug use, and the harm that drug use and drug enforcement impose upon society.

Evidently, in a jihad, or holy war, it is not necessary to know how you're doing, or to win. It is sufficient simply to fight "evil."

NO CLARITY, NO GOALS

My message seemed to resonate with some of the Little Hoover commissioners, who had found state drug-law enforcement officials seemingly unable to provide either clarity of goals or the means used to measure success of the state's drug-control efforts. One commissioner lamented that there seemed to be no political potential for efforts to decriminalize use or possession of small amounts of drugs - even though eliminating those arrests could free up funds to make voluntary drug treatment more available, allowing police throughout California to concentrate their resources on serious crime and to respond to dangers of terrorism.

But calling for drug-war resources to be reallocated to fight terrorism doesn't get far with drug warriors who now argue that drug use supports terrorism. It's very difficult for me to think of Noelle Bush in Florida as a terrorist. I view her more like her uncle in the White House and his rival, Al Gore. Many people, when young, engage in reckless behavior which they abandon as they get older. It doesn't make them terrorists any more than those of us who use gasoline are supporters of Saddam Hussein. And no one claims that terrorists have profited from Prozac, Valium, Vicodin, Percodan or other powerful, mind-altering drugs. The vast illicit black-market profits are limited to drugs prohibited under criminal law by the government of the United States.

A more sensible view is that keeping young people out of the criminal justice system, unless they are prone to violence or repeated felonies, is much more likely to help them grow into mature citizens than jailing them "for their own good." Our jails and prisons are filled with many career criminals and the threat of violence. Young people confined in these highly regulated but nevertheless violent places do not learn self-control and job skills. Jail for most of them means a lifetime stigma, an end to their education or employment, and separation from families and friends who could help them, and does irreparable damage to their potential for future achievement. Yet California misdemeanor juvenile drug arrests (primarily for marijuana) increased by 70 percent over the last decade, while total juvenile arrests decreased by 1.6 percent.

Treatment is not a panacea, but it is a lot cheaper and far more humane than incarceration. Unfortunately, a recent federal study showed that California has more than 500,000 people who need drug treatment for whom it is unavailable. It is zany policy to have a counselor tell a drug user seeking help to go get busted, so a judge can "sentence" you to treatment - otherwise you'll have to wait six months to a year.

A lack of common sense is also evident in other parts of the drug war. In 1972, total annual federal spending for drug enforcement was roughly $100 million. Now it annually totals approximately $20 billion. Committing to fiscal increases of this magnitude without bothering to measure the impact might well be described as irrational, as well as "unconscionable."

The fact that 2 million Americans are in confinement, and approximately 6.5 million are under supervision of criminal justice agencies, illustrates the grave likelihood that Americans will be in more danger of becoming their crime victims in the future. Certainly violent, dangerous people need to be punished and separated from the general public in the name of safety. Furthermore, career criminals and others who commit dastardly but nonviolent crimes should be jailed. But the unnecessary incarceration of individuals can create career criminals and often turn nonthreatening offenders and their offspring into menaces. Surveys show most drug prisoners have no history of violent offenses.

creating a black market

A rational view of our drug laws would quickly conclude that they create crime by producing an illegal black market whose huge, prohibition-generated profits are engines of crime, corruption and violence.

Such rational views have circulated for more than a half-century. Former Los Angeles Police Chief August Vollmer, often referred to as the father of professional police administration, wrote this in 1936: "Stringent laws, spectacular police drives, vigorous prosecution, and imprisonment of addicts and peddlers have proved not only useless and enormously expensive as means of correcting this evil, but they are also unjustifiably and unbelievably cruel in their application to the unfortunate drug victims. Repression has driven this vice underground and produced the narcotic smugglers and supply agents, who have grown wealthy out of this evil practice and who by devious methods have stimulated traffic in drugs. Drug addiction, like prostitution, and like liquor, is not a police problem; it never has been, and never can be solved by policemen."

Perhaps the combination of the high cost of the drug war, California's fiscal crisis and some goading from the Little Hoover Commission will lead lawmakers to reach bold conclusions about the wisdom and efficacy of the state's drug policy. One of my fellow critics of the drug war, Orange County Judge James P. Gray, notes that although drug decriminalization now seems unlikely, vast changes such as the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Union were also not anticipated.

Such a vast change cannot come soon enough. In 1914, the federal government changed the social and medical problems of drugs into a massive crime problem by establishing criminal prohibition of certain drugs. Eighty-eight years later, the government's continuing claims of progress in controlling drugs cannot be validated. The magnitude of this massive interference with liberty cannot be justified by the mere claim that the drug problem would be worse if the government had not attempted prohibition.