It's no secret that the war on drugs has failed. Despite billions of dollars spent on the effort to stop the drug trade, dangerous drugs are just as available and, in some cases, less expensive than they were when the government began its current anti-drug crusade in the early 1970s. Yet our political leaders, trapped in a "get tough" mentality, largely ignore evidence of failure as they continue to throw more troops, cops, judges, and jailers into the drug war.
This issue's cover story ("Busted Policy," page 19) proposes a new way of looking at the drug problem. The authors, Professor of Political Science Kenneth Sharpe and political analyst Eva Bertram '86, draw their argument from their recent book, Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial, co-authored with Peter Andreas '87 and Morris Blachman of the University of South Carolina. In it they propose that the United States abandon the unattainable goal of stopping all drug use and adopt a more realistic policy of addressing and ameliorating the disastrous public health consequences of drug abuse.
This is not an argument for the free-market legalization of drugs. The authors recognize that drug use is more than an "individual" problem, that its effect on families and communities calls for control of drugs, treatment of users, education of the young, and punishment of crimes committed by drug abusers-though not of most drug use itself. Their reasoning is tempered with a humane approach untainted by the moralistic attitude that has informed American drug policy for much of this century.
Can a book by four academics (or an article in an alumni magazine) change a policy that has such deep roots? Probably not-at least not immediately. Yet ideas like those in "Busted Policy" don't exist in a vacuum. When Ken Sharpe came to me last winter to propose this article, he asked about the circulation of the Bulletin. I told him it's only about 22,000 but asked him to consider the quality rather than the quantity of our readers. Many Swarthmoreans are leaders in those professions directly engaged in the drug problem-politics, law, medicine, education, and social work-and they have a habit of mind that doesn't easily accept the conventional wisdom, that likes to ask the more fundamental questions.
To effect change we need energy and commitment, but we also need ideas. By asking the right questions, we can often arrive at fresh answers to old problems. Academia is often criticized for its disengagement from real-world problems, but at a college like Swarthmore we see how easily the line between theory and practice can be crossed.
-Jeffrey Lott
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