Pubdate: Wed, 06 Feb 2002
Source: Concord Monitor (NH)
Copyright: 2002 Monitor Publishing Company
Contact:  http://www.cmonitor.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/767

BUSH FAMILY'S HOMEFRONT DRUG WAR

Last week the police busted Noelle Bush, the 24-year-old daughter of 
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, for allegedly forging a prescription for the 
anti-anxiety drug Xanax. The offense is a felony punishable by up to five 
years in prison. Gov. Bush, realizing that punishment alone would be of 
little help, paid $1,000 to bail out his daughter and probably will send 
her back to one of the treatment centers she reportedly has been in before.

That's good. And what's good for a famous parent's daughter should be good 
for America. In fact, the nation's $20-billion-a-year war against drugs 
might stand a chance if the governor's brother, President Bush, would urge 
Congress to correct the imbalance in anti-drug funding, which directs only 
four cents of every dollar to prevention and treatment. The remaining 96 
cents go to what former Health secretary Joseph Califano Jr., now a drug 
abuse expert at Columbia University, calls "shoveling up the wreckage of 
substance abuse and addiction in hospitals, welfare agencies, foster care 
programs and prisons."

President Bush - whose daughters Jenna and Barbara both have been charged 
with underage drinking and who himself was arrested in 1976 for driving 
while intoxicated - has impressed Califano and other drug policy experts. 
Bush recognizes, as he put it in one Rose Garden speech, that "the most 
effective way to reduce the supply of drugs in America is to reduce the 
demand for drugs in America."

Oddly, though, the president's newly appointed drug czar, John Walters, has 
historically favored punishment over treatment. Last year, he called the 
notion that drug sentences are too long one of "the great urban myths of 
our time." Fact is, heroin and cocaine are cheaper than ever, the annual 
number of heroin overdoses has doubled since the early 1990s and the 
percentage of teenagers admitting to having been drunk at some time is rising.

The United States may be winning battles abroad, but it's losing the 
domestic war on drug abuse and the backward thinking of key strategists 
such as Walters is one reason why.

Bush and Congress need to correct the imbalances that result in so little 
federal money for treatment. Legislators should also reverse an outrageous 
law passed in 1998 that bars federal drug czars from spending even a penny 
on ads that mention the most commonly abused drug of all, alcohol. Even as 
alcohol was killing 6.5 times more young Americans than all illicit drugs 
combined.

Adults today send a strange mix of messages to kids, permitting seductive 
TV advertising, for instance, that promotes the virtues of mood-altering 
prescription drugs like Xanax, Ritalin and Prozac, while funding 
school-based seminars in which police officers tell students to "just say 
no to drugs." And if impressionable youths end up turning to the wrong 
drugs, we lock them up. This must be confusing for young Americans - 
Noelle, Jenna and Barbara included.
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