Joining the War on Drugs

WHEN President Bush announced his drug plan on September 5, he called for an all-out war on drugs. In the nationally televised speech, Bush moved away from the simplicity of Reagan's "Just say no" philosophy and included more emphasis on decreasing local demand for drugs.

But, despite Bush's tough rhetoric, the plan is flawed because it lacks adequate funding. It is all bark with little bite. Still Bush's message--that the United States should wage a real war on drugs--is a serious one that all American citizens, including members of the Harvard community, should take seriously.

Each day drugs threaten to destroy neighborhoods, corrupt society and take the lives of people in cities across the country. The images of the drug war are powerful: a Natick women reports her son and his friends to police for smoking crack in her basement; an 11-year-old girl breaks into houses in South Boston to support her drug habit.

Even worse, drugs--and the inner-city gangs they support--kill innocent victims, such as nine-year-old Tiffany Moore, who was gunned down as she sat on a mailbox early one August evening last year. The girl's only crime was sitting in the middle of a gang war near Humboldt Avenue in Roxbury.

DESPITE the horrors of the drug war, it seems that Bush's message of total war on drugs has yet to enter the collective consciousness of members of the Harvard community. Admittedly, if Bush had allocated adequate funds for the war it would have helped.

But the fault also lies in Americans' perceptions. Many students, for example, still believe that people should be allowed to do whatever they want within the confines of their own home. This viewpoint, more or less, condones casual drug use.

Unfortunately, real life isn't so simple.

Each dollar spent on a gram of illegal cocaine is a dollar that gets funnelled to people like those who killed young Tiffany Moore. It is a dollar that can be spent on buying bullets to put into a Mac-10 machine pistol or into an AK-47 sub-machine gun. And people should realize that.

In addition, it is important for Harvard students to be just as tough on drug use within the University community as they would like law enforcement officials to be in inner-city communities.

Some students agree that it is important for drugs to be exorcized from inner cities. But if students want their attitudes to be taken seriously in inner-city communities, they should take an equally bold stand against the casual use of less dangerous drugs. Someone who says it is wrong for a 20-year-old economically disadvantaged gang member to deal crack as a way to earn money, but overlooks a privileged Harvard sophomore who buys and sells hash for his or her personal use, is being hypocritical.

President Bush's rhetoric should be taken to heart. The drug problem is gravely serious, and the University should play as active a role in solving it as it did in defeating Germany, Italy, and Japan during the Second World War.

During that struggle, Harvard played an active role in supporting the effort to defeat the Axis Powers, according Ford Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus David Riesman '31. Classes were accelerated to allow students to graduate early and join the armed forces. Harvard's president during the war, James Bryant Conant '14, played a large role in developing the atomic bomb. And the University had a special school to train administrators who helped run the American district in Germany after that country's surrender.

IF the country is truly as serious about winning the drug war as it was about winning World War II, Harvard should make an equally determined effort to help remove drugs from American cities. Members of the Kennedy School brain trust such as Lecturer in Public Policy Mark A. R. Kleiman and Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and Management Mark H. Moore have already contributed to the federal government's drug policies.

This interaction between Harvard and government authorities should continue, but on a larger scale. In an interview yesterday, Kleiman suggested the creation of a drug center along the lines of Harvard's inter-disciplinary effort to combine research and public policy questions stemming from the spread of the AIDS virus.

Harvard also should use its 81-member police force to make more of an effort to fight drugs. Currently Harvard Police make drug arrests when they find narcotics after searching suspects of other crimes or after they receive tips or when they make concerted efforts to find drugs, said Harvard University Police Chief Paul E. Johnson yesterday. But, Johnson said, the University police don't have the resources to run ongoing drug investigations.

The Harvard police force could be successful in making drug arrests if the University allocated resources to allow them to do it.

Harvard's medical area lies adjacent to the Mission Hill neighborhood of Roxbury where moderate drug activity occurs. And according to Cambridge Police, the Pit in Harvard Square is a hotbed of L. S. D. sales. These areas provide Harvard with the opportunity to put the war against drugs into action.

From the personal attitudes and behavior of students, to the creation of a special center to study drugs, to increased efforts by the university police to arrest drug offenders, the University can and should make a greater effort to win the drug war.