Pubdate: Fri, 30 Mar 2001
Source: Detroit Free Press (MI)
Copyright: 2001 Detroit Free Press
Contact:  http://www.freep.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/125
Author: Leonard Pitts Jr.

TIME TO ADMIT WAR ON DRUGS IS A TOTAL BUST

His afternoons were for mowing the lawn or tinkering with the car. But 
mornings were for coffee and blues.

Mornings were for sitting in his favorite room in the early sun, sipping 
his cup and listening to hundreds of 45s gathered over 60-something years 
of living. Mornings were for plain-spoken old songs about cheating women 
and cheated men, for pain sermons and joy testimonies from Blind Lemon 
Jefferson, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Snooky Pryor 
and Big Mama Thornton.

Anyone who knew the old man knew how he loved those mornings.

Then his son stole his records and sold them to buy crack cocaine.

It was -- for me, at least -- an eye-opener. The day the son took from his 
father something he knew to be precious and irreplaceable was the day I 
understood -- as much as you can without feeling it yourself -- the power 
of a drug craving.

More to the point, it was the moment my doubts about the war on drugs 
hardened to a certainty: We're fighting on the wrong battlefield and our 
weapons are inadequate.

Movie Is Making A Difference

If recent newspaper reports are to be believed, many members of Congress 
appear to be coming to a similar moment of clarity, courtesy of the movie 
"Traffic," which won four Academy Awards on Sunday.

The film tracks the intersecting lives of soldiers on both sides of the 
war: the American drug czar, his cocaine-addicted daughter, the Mexican 
cop, his U.S. counterparts and, of course, the dealers. The film's 
unmistakable conclusion -- that the war has been an abysmal waste -- is 
said to have had a profound impact on a number of U.S. lawmakers.

Patrick Leahy, a Democratic senator from Vermont, told a reporter that he 
was struck by a moment when the movie's drug czar asks how it's possible to 
fight a war on drugs when the "enemies" are drug users in our own families. 
Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain said the film "caused me to rethink our 
policies and priorities."

It's a rethinking that's as welcome as it is overdue. The war on drugs has 
been obscenely expensive -- $18 billion a year, according to one report. 
The mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines have triggered an explosion in 
the prison population.

Yet the war has produced anything but a decisive victory. After years of 
decline, drug use among people 12 to 17 is trending up. Small wonder a new 
study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press finds that an 
increasing number of us consider the war on drugs a failure.

More Treatment, Less Punishment

For years, we've seen that failure reflected in the disruption of our 
communities, the loss of mothers, brothers, sons.

We've been treating a sickness with a prison term. Emphasis has been on the 
punishment of users and dealers, and it's time to admit that this by itself 
will not work. Time to balance the stick of incarceration with the carrot 
of drug treatment and addiction prevention.

I say this, thinking of an old man whose blues records were lost to crack 
hunger.

I used to be a music critic, one of the benefits of which is a sizable 
music library. So when I heard what happened, I recorded some tapes and 
sent them to him. I'm told he sits in his room and sips his coffee, 
listening to the blues as he did before. But I suspect his mornings will 
never be the same.
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MAP posted-by: Beth