Pubdate: Sat, 01 Feb 1997 Source: Duluth News (MN) Author: Paul Bischke Why do Americans see the failings of New Deal liberalism on every issue but drugs? Even as the Clinton administration is implementing states-based welfare reform with its right hand, its left hand is plotting expanded drug prevention and anti-gang efforts -- more big government. California and Arizona's recent state-level mandates to reform some obvious flaws in America's drug policy (prison crowding and the withholding of medical marijuana) have drawn a stern federal rebuke. Does Uncle Sam really know better? Some years ago, Americans, optimistic about the War on Poverty, cringed at the suggestion that the growing welfare bureaucracy might actually be creating problems despite its sincere efforts to solve them. There's a parallel here. Instead of expanding our notoriously ineffective drug control bureaucracy, we'd do better to reform it based on insights we've gained from welfare reform. Eighty years of bureaucratic drug interventionism has resulted in more social problems, not fewer. Per capita non-medical drug use in 19th-century America was about the same as today. But there was no gang violence because the market was legal. Drugs of low potency were popular; the druggist on Main Street had no need to concentrate the drugs for compactness in smuggling. No big money changed hands. Unhappily, some troubled souls became addicts. An imperfect but undramatic situation prevailed. Big government changed everything. Just as welfare failed to eradicate poverty, criminalization failed to eradicate or even reduce drug addiction in the long run. Whereas inter-generational dependency is welfare's unintended consequence, drug prohibition has unintentionally produced an omni-present black market in drugs. Escalating criminalization and demonization pushed users into unhealthy social margins, attracted thugs into ultra-lucrative wholesaling, and lured poverty-stricken kids into profitable retailing. It's addiction to money, not drugs, that's produced the ugly inner-city drug scene of today and we have our drug prohibition bureaucracy to thank. For, in trying to jail drug sellers, it guarantees their fantastic profits. The more welfarism tried to fight poverty with blanket entitlement, the more it created dependency; the more prohibitionism tries to fight addiction with blanket criminalization, the more it creates black-market pathologies -- violence, corruption, property crime, strong and tainted drugs equally available to kids and adults. When New Deal liberalism heroically attempts to create a "poverty-free," or "pollution-free," or "drug-free" society while ignoring unintended consequences, it fails: bureaucracy multiplies, promises fade, and the bills pile up. The federal drug control budget (adjusted for inflation) rose from about $500 million in 1970 to about $40 billion in 1992. Yet as the prohibition budget soared, drug problems increased. While criminalization spawned violent gangs, the self-serving temptations of bureaucracy have degraded drug education. Prohibitionism and drug education are not inseparable. Arguably, they are at odds. The intolerant criminal-justice emphasis of prohibition conflicts with the public-health approach to drug education, whose truthful, detached, and empathic manner is more likely to succeed with kids. Given the clear failure of the prohibition-minded approach, drug education must be re-designed so it truly helps kids deal with the complex interactions humans have always had with mood-altering substances. Indeed, bureaucratic wars cannot eradicate poverty or addiction. If done properly, welfare reform will stem the tide of inter-generational dependency without cruelly allowing poverty to expand. Constructive drug reform would thwart black markets without permissively allowing addiction to expand. But drug-abuse figures must no longer be the sole criteria for successful drug control. The vast social toll of prohibition's unintended consequences must be recognized and remedied. Neither welfare reform nor drug policy reform entail pulling the plug completely: with welfare, we must strip away the blanket entitlement that fosters dependency while leaving a safety net for human need; with drug control, we must strip away the blanket criminalization that spurs black-marketeering while leaving a rational system of civil regulation, treatment, and public-health-based education. To thwart gangs, Clinton should begin dismantling the drug prohibition system on which they thrive. To help kids, let's reform and de-politicize drug education. Our children will be no better served by drug prohibition as we know it than by welfare as we know it. Paul Bischke is a writer, social worker, and Co-Director of the Drug Policy Reform Group in St. Paul, Minnesota.