The Key Is Cutting Demand, Not Supply

A recent report by the Government Accountability Office, commissioned by Sen. Joe Biden, has come to an unsurprising conclusion: After more than $6 billion spent, the controversial drug control operation known as Plan Colombia has failed by large margins to meet its targets.

The goal had been to cut cocaine production in Colombia by 50 percent from 2000 to 2006 through eradication of coca crops and training of anti-narcotics police and military personnel. In fact, cocaine production in Colombia rose 4 percent during that period, the GAO found. With increases in Peru and Bolivia, production of cocaine in South America increased by 12 percent during that period. In 1999 it cost $142 to buy a gram of cocaine on the street in the United States, according to inflation-adjusted figures from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. By 2006 the price had fallen to $94 per gram. ad_icon

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House Panel Finds Federal Appointees Attended Many Events on Taxpayers' Dime

When Karl Rove's office requested special help for beleaguered Republican congressional candidates in the months before the 2006 elections, the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy jumped to the task. Director John Walters was called a "superstar" by a Rove aide after carrying half-million-dollar grants to news conferences with two congressmen and a senator.

Walters's visits to Utah, Missouri and Nevada were among at least 303 out-of-town trips by senior Bush appointees meant to lend prestige or bring federal grants to 99 politically endangered Republicans that year, in a White House campaign that House Democratic investigators yesterday called unprecedented in scope and scale.

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The Sept. 12 front-page story "A Tangled Story of Addiction," about Cindy McCain's victory over her dependence on prescription painkillers, was "tangled" because it left out important facts that would have helped readers make a fair judgment about her behavior 16 years ago and gave a negative impression of a courageous struggle.

The Post failed to report or make clear that:

. She voluntarily cooperated with the Drug Enforcement Administration and, after she conquered the addiction, obtained additional help at her own expense. Her conduct in doing so persuaded the U.S. attorney's office in Phoenix to agree to diversion to a treatment program without criminal charges.

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The Government's Battle Against Drug Gangs Is Deadlier Than Most Americans Realize.

MANY PEOPLE in Washington are rightly alarmed about the rising toll of military and civilian casualties in Afghanistan. They might be surprised to learn that a roughly equal number of people have been killed so far this year in a war raging much closer to home -- in Mexico. More Mexican soldiers and police officers have died fighting the country's drug gangs in the past two years than the number of U.S. and NATO troops killed battling the Taliban. Civilian casualties have been just as numerous, and as gruesome: There have been scores of beheadings, massacres of entire families and assassinations of senior officials. By the official count, kidnappings in Mexico now average 65 a month, ranking it well ahead of Afghanistan and Iraq.

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HIV infections among Latinos and African Americans in the United States are increasing at a dangerous rate. Hispanics represented about 22 percent of new HIV and AIDS cases diagnosed in 2006 -- though they were only about 14 percent of the overall population. In addition, there are fewer HIV-positive people in seven of the 15 target countries of the Global AIDS Initiative than there are HIV-positive African Americans here at home.

Locally, the situation is even more dire: A recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that Hispanics in the District have the highest rate of new AIDS cases in the country.

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The last time the House debated medical marijuana, David Krahl trod the halls of Capitol Hill lobbying against the legislation as deputy director of the Drug Free America Foundation.

Now, he's ready to lobby for allowing medicinal use of marijuana, and do anything he can to support it.

So far, no one has asked him for help, but in a recent letter to medical marijuana bill sponsor Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-N.Y.), he proclaimed that he'd reversed his position on whether cannabis can be a medicine.

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Before I retired as a police officer, I participated in drug raids in which I momentarily pointed my gun at 9-year-olds as well as dogs. The death of the Berwyn Heights mayor's dogs [Metro, July 31], the loss of a missionary shot down over Colombia in 2001, innocent pedestrians killed when drug dealers open up on each other -- these tragedies are simply the collateral damage that is necessary for Maryland to remain drug-free.

As much as Prince George's County Sheriff Michael Jackson should be embarrassed ["Shoot First, Ask Later," editorial, Aug. 7], so should The Post, since it supports the current drug control strategy of prohibition. This strategy caused the death of the two dogs, not marijuana. And oh, we are drug-free in Maryland, aren't we?

Howard J. Wooldridge 54

Frederick

The writer is an education specialist with Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which favors the legalization and regulation of all drugs.

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In Prince George's, A Drug Bust Goes Awry

The drug raid by Prince George's County law officers on the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo last week was a Keystone Kops operation from start to finish.

Acting on a tip that a 32-pound package of marijuana had been sent by Federal Express from Arizona to Mr. Calvo's home (addressed to his wife, Trinity Tomsic), Prince George's police swung into action. Which is to say they got on the phone, calling law enforcement agencies to see who might have a SWAT team available to bust the unsuspecting Calvo family. (It seems the police department's own team was tied up.) After being turned down at least once, they finally struck a deal with the Prince George's Sheriff's Office, whose track record with domestic disputes is extensive but whose experience with drug busts is slight. And it showed.

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Disabilities Law May Protect Some Recovering Users

Q -- I know most Americans claim to have a zero-tolerance policy regarding drugs. In college, I heavily experimented with alcohol and marijuana. Later on, I tried psychedelics, cocaine and prescription narcotics. My use after college was sporadic enough that I easily passed several pre-employment urine drug screens. In the past year, my husband and I decided we needed to quit completely. It's not easy, and two times this year we both smoked pot, and he did cocaine once.

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SMUGGLING CONCERNS: Schumer Says Success Against NNY Labs Hurt By Growth Across Border

WASHINGTON - Production of methamphetamine may be down in Northern New York, but it is climbing in Canada, and dealers may be smuggling more of the illicit drug into the north country, U.S. Sen. Charles E. Schumer said Wednesday.

Mr. Schumer, D-N.Y., said methamphetamine smuggling threatens to undercut law enforcement agencies' success in recent years against drug labs in rural sections of upstate New York, primarily the north country and the Southern Tier. He said his office has asked the Canadian government, as well as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, to boost enforcement.

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"This is a difficult case," writes Judge Michael Hawkins, dissenting from a recent decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. That is not the way most people respond when they hear about Savana Redding, who was strip-searched in 2003, when she was 13, by Arizona public school officials looking for ibuprofen pills in her underwear.

Nor is it how most of Judge Hawkins' colleagues reacted. Eight of the 11 judges who heard the case agreed that Vice Principal Kerry Wilson's decision to order a "grossly intrusive search of a middle school girl to locate pills with the potency of two over-the-counter Advil capsules" violated Savana's Fourth Amendment rights.

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States Should Stop Warehousing Nonviolent Offenders.

TWO REPORTS by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics show that the rate of growth in the prison and jail populations of the United States has slowed slightly but that the country still has the dubious distinction of being the largest jailer in the world. As of June 30, 2007, the country held roughly 2.3 million people behind bars, either in local or state jails or in federal prisons.

The cost of housing and caring for inmates has been astronomical, an estimated $55 billion annual expense for taxpayers, according to the Pew Center on the States. The bloated number of inmates has been particularly painful for states, some of which have been forced to cut spending for higher education to fund corrections programs. As a result, California is considering an overhaul of its prison policies, as are Kentucky, Mississippi, Rhode Island and South Carolina.

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Forty years ago, the Kerner Commission concluded in its landmark study of the causes of racial disturbances in the United States in the 1960s: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white -- separate and unequal." Today we are still moving toward two societies: one incarcerated and one not. The Pew Center on the States released a study in February showing that for the first time in this country's history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail or prison. According to the Justice Department, 7 million people -- or one in every 32 adults -- are either incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state or local supervision.

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A more equal approach to crack-cocaine sentencing over its powder-cocaine equivalent has resulted from a December U.S. Sentencing Commission decision and a Supreme Court ruling the same month to the effect that federal judges may issue shorter prison terms than federal guidelines recommend. It is vital that equalization be properly administered. Ensuring that violent criminals do not secure release is the only way to ensure that the new policy is not "soft on crime."

On Monday, federal authorities released the first of an estimated 20,000 federal inmates convicted on crack-cocaine charges now eligible for sentence reductions, 3,800 of whom could be released within the next 15 months. Monday's approach is problematic because it is too indiscriminate: It entails "retroactive review" of released inmates, which means that offenders will be released without adequate prior case-by-case screening. This is certain to mean that too many violent criminals will be released. This is the reason Attorney General Michael Mukasey is heard this week criticizing the policy.

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What's been heralded as a "showdown" -- the appearance of baseball pitcher Roger Clemens before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform tomorrow-- is more likely to be a show. The purpose is to scour for more information regarding the " Report to the Commissioner of Baseball of an Independent Investigation into the Illegal Use of Steroids and Other Performance Enhancing Substances by Players in Major League Baseball." In the lingo of dugouts and bullpens, they want to get the dope on doping.

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Lawmaker Wants To Eliminate Bias In Crack Cases And Boost Treatment

WASHINGTON -- The tough-on-crime crackdown of the 1980s and 1990s is getting a second look in Congress.

Some lawmakers, including Houston Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, are questioning whether the soaring incarceration rates brought about by changes in federal sentencing laws have actually deterred crimes.

Jackson Lee and other lawmakers argue that the sentencing-law changes enacted during the crack cocaine epidemic of the Reagan years have become a financial burden to taxpayers and a societal cost in lives lost behind bars.

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Candidate Barack Obama frequently promises to soar above partisan politics. But the theatrics of such declarations keep bumping into the reality of Mr. Obama's left-liberal record in Washington and the left-liberal record in Illinois state politics which preceded it. The latest reminder: As recently as 2004, Mr. Obama supported decriminalizing marijuana, opening relations with Communist Cuba and providing health care for illegal aliens.

In a little-noticed 2004 video featured today in The Washington Times, Mr. Obama sounds quite comfortable voicing his leftist leanings. "I think we need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws," Mr. Obama told a Northwestern University audience as he campaigned for the Senate in 2004. "But I'm not somebody who believes in legalization of marijuana." Fast forward to the fall of 2007, and Mr. Obama can be found hedging these views -- meekly raising his hand at a Democratic presidential debate to oppose decriminalization. Wrongly, it turns out. Mr. Obama still supports it, according to a spokesman.

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Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) and Rep. Jose E. Serrano (D-N.Y.) should be congratulated for accomplishing last year what many said was impossible, repealing the federal ban prohibiting the District from spending its own money on syringe exchange programs to reduce the spread of HIV-AIDS, hepatitis C and other infectious diseases. Because of their leadership, thousands of lives will be saved. If Congress takes the next step and repeals the national syringe ban, hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved.

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"I'm a spray man myself," President Bush told government leaders and American counter-narcotics officials during his 2006 trip to Afghanistan. He said it again when President Hamid Karzai visited Camp David in August. Bush meant, of course, that he favors aerial eradication of poppy fields in Afghanistan, which supplies over 90 percent of the world's heroin. His remarks -- which, despite their flippant nature, were definitely not meant as a joke -- are part of the story behind the spectacularly unsuccessful U.S. counter-narcotics program in Afghanistan. Karzai and much of the international community in Kabul have warned Bush that aerial spraying would create a backlash against the government and the Americans, and serve as a recruitment device for the Taliban while doing nothing to reduce the drug trade. This is no side issue: If the program continues to fail, success in Afghanistan will be impossible.

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District inmates held in federal prisons are now eligible to have a year shaved off their sentences for completing an intensive drug-treatment program.

Inmates, their families and advocacy groups had complained that D.C. inmates were the only federal prisoners not to have sentences reduced after completing the 500-hour program, largely because of their unique status -- the District is the only jurisdiction in the country in which all felons are sent to federal lockups.

The D.C. Council tried to end the inequity when it passed legislation in 2005 that brought city law into compliance with federal law, in effect making D.C. inmates eligible for the provision. But federal rules had to be rewritten and approvals were needed at several levels of government.

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