Thinking the Unthinkable

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Neat little packets of marijuana, coke and even heroin nestling against the vitamins at the neighborhood drugstore? And selling at a low Government-set price with a guarantee of purity? It sounds like a black comedy or perhaps a gaudy hallucination. In fact, it is the extreme version of a new policy course being advocated in dead seriousness by a growing number of those frustrated by the futility of the drug war. The 74 years of federal prohibition that have passed since the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 have been a costly and abject failure, they say, and the effort is doomed. It has mainly served to create huge profits for drug dealers, overcrowded jails, a distorted foreign policy and urban areas terrorized by bloodthirsty gangs. So why not end all these problems in a way that would save money, perhaps even raise it, and free more resources to treat addiction and abuse? Why not just make drugs legal?

Those who have begun to take this question seriously do not in the least want to condone, let alone encourage, drug use. The swelling chorus includes conservative scholars, police officers and city officials who would love to see a dope-free nation. But they feel that the best way to curtail drugs is to treat them as a public health problem rather than a criminal one. In the process, the Government could take the drug market out of the hands of the gangs that have turned large sections of major cities into shooting galleries, in more ways than one.

, Such talk horrifies many critics equally bedeviled by the drug dilemma. To them legalization is an immoral and dangerous policy that would vastly increase the number of addicts and turn the U.S. into a "society of zombies," in the words of New York Republican Senator Alfonse D'Amato. If drugs were freely available, what is now a nagging but contained problem could end up tearing apart the nation's social fabric.

Whether it is inspired or insane, drug legalization has become the idea of the moment. That in itself shows the intensity of the national frenzy that has erupted once again to do something -- anything -- about drugs and related crime. Polls show drugs emerging as the hottest issue in the presidential election. In a New York Times-CBS News survey last week, 16% of those questioned called drugs the nation's No. 1 problem. It has direct political consequences: respondents thought Democrats would do a better job than the Administration in fighting drugs. They favored Michael Dukakis over George Bush, reinforcing a trend that first appeared in a TIME poll five weeks ago.

Campaigning in New Jersey, Dukakis sought to capitalize on this advantage: he walked with a hand-held microphone among 500 students at the Pine Brook Junior High School in Manalapan to preach an antidrug sermon. At a later press conference, he once again criticized the Reagan Administration for cutting funds for antidrug programs.