Editor's note:  We received an unprecedented number of passionate, thoughtful responses to "Mission Accomplished" in War on Drugs?  A representative sampling continues below, the last of a three-part series.

War as Inevitable as Defeat (Mission Accomplished?)
It is difficult to talk about the Drug War without talking about war in general. I can remember driving by the Ship Channel in Houston in 1952, past row after row of tanks being outfitted with turrets at the Brown and Root plant. I was a year away from heroin addiction, and the U.S. was embarking on generations of war mentality, perhaps fostered by winning what some have called the last just war.

Brown and Root went on to become an enormous war construction enterprise, bought out eventually by Haliburton. And I went on to a lifetime involvement with drugs. The major difference is that I finally accepted the fact that I cannot win.

When Jerry Jaffe became the first drug czar, I had been "clean" for a couple of years, and Nixon was introducing the rhetoric of war into the field of drug abuse. Drug addiction was something to fight, to conquer, rather than a disease to be treated, or a condition to be ameliorated. Treatment was funded, certainly, but always at a far lower rate than enforcement of sometimes arcane laws.

It is not for nothing that the Public Health Service is a military organization, which trains its new recruits to become part of a culture that accepts the notion that a disease, a condition, a state of being outside the realm of "normal" is an enemy to be fought and vanquished.

Now, at seventy, I wonder why they don't realize that war is inevitable and it can't be won. Mankind has been fighting since history has been recorded. It is our nature.  

Maybe it is time to do away with the war metaphor and find another one. Maybe it is time to stop the war against drugs that fills our penitentiaries and kills the best of our minorities. Maybe it is time to recognize that our social structure fosters enormous drug markets, a hidden economy that becomes all too visible when adding up the cost of fighting the war.

Maybe it is time to address the fundamental problems that lead to addiction -- the socio-psychological, biological, and genetic problems that are the root of the problem.

The way to win the war is to simply walk away from it. Our best treatment programs have been teaching that for decades.

John French
NJ Dept of Health (ret.)
Heredia, Costa Rica

End of the Drug War? Not for Children of Addicts
The War on Drugs started with a bang when the managed-care industry trashed treatment, and ended with a whimper with an article in a Columbus, Ohio newspaper.

I'm glad it's over, because there's another war to be fought and won before another generation slides by. It's a war we all need to fight in behalf of children of addicted parents, an invisible mass of kids (one out of every four in this country) who needs still are not being met, even though they carry the burden of the transgenerational effects of alcoholism and other substance abuse.   

They are the group of children most at risk of becoming alcohol and drug abusers due to genetic and family-environment factors.  They live with emotional and/or physical violence, learn to not talk about it, not trust anyone.

They get neglected and abused consistently, exhibit symptoms of depression and anxiety more than other children, have more physical and mental-health problems, have higher rates of ADHD and ODD, and have trouble expressing themselves (and therefore don't do as well in school). They believe they will be failures because they think that what's happening at home is their fault, and they live with the legacy of silent shame they have inherited -- believing it because our society reinforces the shame with silence. 

I'm so ready to take this one on. And I've got the ammunition right here in my office. Anyone interested in signing up can give me a call.

Maureen McGlame, Director
COASA (Children of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse)
Boston, MA
617-227-4183

No Constituency for Being Kind to Drug Users

While nobody is declaring 'job done' in the U.K., there is a sense politically that many of the boxes around drug policy have been checked off.

The soaring rates of general prevalence in the 1980s and 1990s have definitely slowed down (although this has little do with government policy per se). And what was a wide-ranging drug strategy has been narrowed down to focus on breaking the link between drugs and crime among a relatively small group of 'prolific' offenders.

In the same way that fear of HIV/AIDS fueled the funding of drug treatment in the 1980s, so fear of crime has seen substantial funding for drug treatment during the late 1990s and beyond.

Now there is a new fear: If the drugs/crime box is checked, what will happen to drug-treatment services? There are no votes in simply being kind to drug users.

Harry Shapiro
London, United Kingdom

Previous columns in the War on Drugs/Reader Response series:

Part 1  |  Part 2