By Robert Whitcomb

So "the war on drugs" rages on. The United Nations recently had a conference extolling various failed strategies for battling this scourge, drug czar Barry McCaffrey has announced new initiatives, and the tough rhetoric continues from the usual politicians.

But much of the drug epidemic will continue until the military rhetoric and strategies are dropped and government officials and the public come to accept publicly what many of them must already know privately: Drug abuse is basically a medical problem, and criminalization of drug use mostly serves to create a black market in which the biggest winners are the most vicious criminals - white- collar and otherwise.

So rather than pouring most anti-drug efforts into prevention and treatment, two-thirds of anti-drug resources in America are devoted to punishment, which, rather than solving the social and economic problems of addiction, causes even more problems, such as the high cost of incarcerating individuals who are sick. (Indeed, many individuals benefit from the criminalization of drugs, including the companies building and staffing the prisons holding drug addicts.)

The latest silliness was the June 10-11 U.N. conference in New York, aimed at formulating ways to battle the global drug trade. The conference came up with such old ideas as trying to cut drug production in poor nations (whence comes much of the drugs) by encouraging peasants to plant alternative crops, or by other (sometimes bizarre) economic-development schemes, such as financing the construction of factories in drug-crop areas, and/or by throwing in a rural hospital or two as bait.

This won’t have much of an effect because the cultivation of such raw materials as poppies (for heroin) and coca (for cocaine) is so lucrative that when it is discouraged in one area, either by generous financing of alternative crops or by military or police action, it moves next door.

Money is very fungible in today’s world, and the profits to be procured from drugs are very high, to no small extent because of prices being elevated by America’s obsessive campaigns to restrict supply and punish users and dealers. Cash from the streets gets pumped quickly into the world’s banking system and moved in and out of dummy corporations.

No government has shown itself willing to take on the international bankers, lawyers, accountants and others who keep the worldwide drug-money-laundering industry well-oiled.

And it is difficult to see how effective over the long-run media campaigns against the use of illegal drugs could be in an America whose ads are constantly touting the benefits of psychotropic drugs, be they alcohol, coffee or Prozac. Everything in our "feel better fast" culture works toward encouraging drug use.

No blustering from Gen. McCaffrey, or U.N. meetings, would do nearly as much to diminish the worldwide drug industry as would drug decriminalization in America, far and away the heaviest user nation. When will a major public figure have the courage to say that?

And when will a major public figure have the courage to tout, for instance, such reasonable approaches as using methadone in place of incarceration for addicts of heroin, which is rapidly becoming the most serious drug problem again?

Methadone is far and away the best available treatment in terms or reducing illicit heroin use and associated crime, disease and death. As the National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine stated: "Methadone maintenance has been the most rigorously studied modality and has yielded the most incontrovertibly positive results. . . . Consumption of all illicit drugs, especially heroin, declines. Crime is reduced, fewer individuals become HIV positive, and individual functioning is improved." Much too reasonable, I guess.

"The Drug War" will no longer be "necessary" when heroin and other currently illegal drugs are made available to addicts on doctors’ prescriptions, while a stepped-up media campaign citing the health risks of illegal drugs discourages young people from becoming addicts. (But a caveat: Strident demonizing doesn’t work. Not only do people not believe it, such demonizing can increase the appeal of drugs to young people through the paradox of glamorization. This is probably happening now with cigarettes.)

It often seems there is too much money to be made by an unholy alliance of dealers, bankers and lawyers (and those who make money off the proliferation of prisons) to hope that such a reasonable policy can be put into place anytime soon.

But perhaps the people are ahead of the politicians. After all, voters in 1996 in Arizona backed an initiative allowing doctors to prescribe any drug for legitimate medical purposes, and mandating treatment, not jail, for those arrested for illegal drug possession. If only the people’s leaders had such common sense.