Pubdate: Tue, 08 Aug 2000
Source: Arizona Daily Star (AZ)
Copyright: 2000 Pulitzer Publishing Co.
Contact:  http://www.azstarnet.com/
Author: Arianna Huffington
Note: Arianna Huffington's new book, "How to Overthrow the Government," is 
published by HarperCollins. This piece was distributed by the Los Angeles 
Times Syndicate

WE'RE AT TURNING POINT IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

How long do you keep the lie going? This is the unstated question in
the blossoming drug-war debate.

Speaking last week at the shadow convention in Philadelphia, the Rev.
Edwin Sanders of Nashville's Metropolitan Church was unequivocal in
his answer: "This needs to be the time when we collectively raise our
voices and say that this is the end." Sanders' speech was part of a
breakthrough day in the drug-policy-reform movement.

Speakers as varied as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, one of the biggest
cheerleaders for the drug war in the 1980s, and GOP Gov. Gary Johnson
of New Mexico, the highest-ranking elected official ever to challenge
our national drug policy, echoed Sanders' sentiment that the time has
come to declare an end to a war that has destroyed far too many lives.

In the audience, hundreds of parents, children and spouses of those
incarcerated on non-violent drug charges held placards with the
pictures and stories of their loved ones. "We have absolutely become
numb to what's going on in this country," Gov. Johnson, a triathlete
and teetotaler, told the Shadow Convention crowd. "The bottom line is,
we need a new drug strategy."

Because the fact is, we do know. We know what works - treatment. And
we know what doesn't work - incarceration.

About the only thing we don't know is how to convince our politicians
of the truth of what almost everybody else now seems to know. But
we're getting closer.

Jesse Jackson knows. He railed against our "failed drug policy whose
friendly fire is killing Americans rather than helping Americans - a
policy whose unintended consequence is to build an ugly, shameful jail
industrial complex, a policy driven by fear, race and greed."

Pointing to the 75 percent recidivism rate of drug offenders, Jackson
brought the crowd to its feet with his trademarked cadenced delivery:

"They go into jail sicker and come out slicker and return quicker and
around and around and around they go. . . . Because if you are young,
poor, brown or black or don't have a lawyer, there is no category
called youthful indiscretion."

Drug-policy reform is moving from the fringes to the mainstream. And
for every public figure who speaks out, dozens more are waiting in the
wings until they consider it safe enough to say openly what they now
dare say only privately.

Two elected officials speaking out are Rep. Tom Campbell, R-Calif.,
now running for the Senate, and Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. In one of
the unexpected alliances produced by the fight against the drug war,
they have joined forces in favor of Proposition 36 - a major policy
shift from incarceration to treatment.

Campbell offered the shadow convention crowd a stinging bit of history
from the drug war: "The street price of heroin and cocaine is less
than one-fourth of what it was in 1981. The purity of heroin available
on the street has increased more than fourfold since 1981.

"Incarceration for drug arrests has risen tenfold since 1981. The
number of drug-overdose deaths has increased more than fivefold since
1981. The proportion of high school seniors reporting that drugs are
readily available has doubled since 1981. This is not victory. This is
failure." Over at the Republican convention, Colin Powell, in the one
bit of truth shining through the phony multicultural fog, made it
clear that it was time to rethink America's drug-war policy, which has
led to more than 2 million Americans behind bars: "It's time to stop
building jails in America and get back to the task of building our
children."

It's a conclusion shared by an overwhelming majority of Americans: More 
than 70 percent are now in favor of treatment over incarceration for those 
convicted of non-violent drug charges.

And the media - in a growing number of editorials, columns and news
stories - have begun actually to shine a light on the drug war's
casualties and call for new policies.

Yet George W. Bush did not have one compassionate word to say on the
subject beyond grandiloquently promising to "tear down that wall" that
traps our citizens in "prison, addiction and despair." And you can bet
that, come next week, Al Gore will be equally silent on the subject.
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