President Bush should eschew the course set by his first drug czar and give highest priority to drug education and treatment. Current drug contol policy director Martinez should take the lead in this effort to refocus administration policy. Reversing the current 70 percent-30 per-cent funding disparity favoring law enforcement over drug prevention is a moral imperative.

Priorities Are in the Numbers

When all is said and done, the Bush administration's drug-fighting priorities show clearly through the budgets it proposes each year. Since the first national strategy in 1989, the administration has consistently pushed for more than twice the money for drug law enforcement than it has asked for drug treatment, prevention and education combined. Yet administration spokesmen repeatedly claim that declines in reported drug use are the result of successful education efforts. If that is the case, why doesn't the administration put its money where its mouth is?

In a time of unprecedented budgetary crisis, the administration is still advocating that more than $7 billion a year go to dubious efforts at interdiction, crop eradication and other enforcement activities. Inverted priorities lead the administration to quibble with Congress over smaller drug-budget items, such as a $100 million dollar drug treatment program that was not fully funded last year. The massive waste represented by much of the drug enforcement budget could be averted and education and treatment programs fully funded if the administration reversed national anti-drug priorities. It is time to go with what works and stop wasting taxpayers' dollars.

Every Law Enforcement Dollar Guarantees Bigger Prison Budgets in the Future

Heavy funding of law enforcement, as urged by the administration, is truly a loser's game. It is like hiring people to chase the horse after it has left the barn, rather than closing the door to prevent the horse from escaping. Taxpayers will get a better return on their dollars if our nation's top drug control priorities are prevention, education and treatment.

Refocusing the drug war is not just the right idea, it is becoming a fiscal urgency as well. If we do not act now to de-emphasize law enforce-ment, it will soon be impossible to reduce that budget. Every dollar we spend now on drug enforcement is essentially an investment in the future — of our prisons.

In each of the last three years, more than a million Americans were arrested for drug violations. Thousands will be serving mandatory mini-mum sentences of five years, ten years and more. Our prisons and jails are already overflowing, making it necessary to build more and more prisons just to keep up. In 1991 the federal Bureau of Prisons estimated that construction costs could soon approach $100 million a week. Factor-ing in operating costs for completed prisons, the BOP estimates that total prison-related fiscal obligations could be almost double the current na-tional deficit within five years.

Acknowledging the extent of the overcrowding problem, the Bush administration recently decided to fight court-ordered limits on prison populations. It takes little thought, however, to see that this barely quali-fies as a band-aid solution. Indeed, it is a dangerous idea to run most prisons at more than one and a half times their designed capacities, as the administration would like.

The only real options are to fund massive new prison construction projects or to stop flooding the prison system with small-time drug offend-ers. Funding more prisons is impractical at this time, with all governmen-tal budgets under a squeeze. Thus reducing the annual number of drug convictions is virtually inevitable. This is yet another reason to focus less on enforcement and more on non-punitive approaches to drugs where possible.

Some Immediate Budget Savings

There are some specific steps that the administration should imme-diately take in changing federal drug control budget priorities. These would be both practical and symbolic changes evidencing a more humane approach to drug abuse:

•    An immediate moratorium should be placed on new prison construction. If there is one thing the last decade of rapid expansion of prisons has taught us, it is that more prisons do not mean less crime.

•    Reserve existing prison space for violent criminals — stop using incarceration in drug possession cases and for non-violent drug offenders. We should focus on keeping extremely dangerous criminals under lock and key, while utilizing alterna-tives to incarceration for nonviolent individuals who may yet be capable of productive livelihoods. Such alternatives would include intensive supervised probation, high school equivalency programs, community service programs and job training. Put-ting masses of young people in jail makes them less productive citizens in the long run, while training and educating them offers real options for the future.

•    Reduce prison sentences for people incarcerated for possession convictions and non-violent drug offenses. As many of these people are serving mandatory sentences, the administration should ask Congress to give judges discretion to release certain inmates before their scheduled mandatory terms expire. Money saved could be used to develop other programs within the prisons, such as drug treatment, training and education.

•    The President should order home all Department of De-fense personnel and quasi-military representatives of federal agencies stationed abroad to fight drugs. The DoD is an expensive participant in the drug war, with a drug budget approaching $1 billion annually. Yet even with stepped-up participation by the military and DEA advisers, interdiction and eradication programs have remained a costly failure. We should withdraw those forces and also stop the use of DoD in drug enforcement within the United States.

These are immediate first steps that the administration should take to begin reversing funding priorities. The remainder of this report sug-gests some specific changes which need to be made on broader policy issues.