A Sane Drug Policy.

George W. Bush's little problem with putting to rest allegations of past cocaine use does not concern us much. But what does concern us a great deal is the destructiveness of U.S. drug policy. The war on drugs is taking a terrible toll on our society. It's time to admit that prohibition is not the answer and to implement a policy based not on moralism but on public health.

The U.S. government is spending an enormous amount of money to wage this war--a figure that has exploded in the last two decades. In 1981, the federal drug control budget stood at $1.5 billion. By 1991, it was $11 billion. Today, it is $17 billion. And the lion's share of that cost goes not to drug prevention and treatment but to imprisonment.

More than any other single element, it is the war on drugs that is fueling our prison-industrial complex. Sixty-three percent of federal prisoners and 21 percent of state prisoners are drug offenders. All told, in 1997, there were 271,000 people in state or federal prisons strictly for drug offenses, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, ten times the number in 1981. More than 100,000 of those were there for mere possession.

As a nation, we are not solving the problem of drug abuse. We are warehousing it. We are not treating the patient; we are throwing the book at him.

People who are convicted of drug crimes are receiving penalties that are grossly disproportionate. "The laws of at least fifteen states now require life sentences for certain nonviolent marijuana offenses," The Atlantic Monthly reported in April 1997. "In Montana, a life sentence can be imposed for growing a single marijuana plant or selling a single joint." The article, by Eric Schlosser, noted that "in 1992 the average punishment for a violent offender in the United States was forty-three months in prison. The average punishment, under federal law, for a marijuana offender that same year was about fifty months in prison." And the situation has gotten worse since then, as more states have passed laws imposing mandatory sentences and longer terms for drug offenses.

The war on drugs is a war on minorities. While illegal drug use does not vary much by race, incarceration for illegal drug use sure does. In 1997, more than five times as many blacks as whites were in state prisons and jails for drug offenses, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. And since whites outnumber blacks in the general population by 6 to 1, blacks are imprisoned for drug offenses at thirty times the per capita rate of whites. The figures for Hispanics are not as lopsided but are still disturbing. Hispanics outnumber whites in state prisons and jails on drug charges by 51,200 to 43,200 even though whites outnumber Hispanics in the general population by more than 6 to 1.

This crackdown on minority drug users explains much of the growth in the prison population. "From 1990 to 1994, incarceration for drug offenses accounted for 60 percent of the increase in the black population in state prisons and 91 percent of the increase in federal prisons," according to an article in the January/February issue of Public Health Reports.

Why this racial discrepancy? "Law...