Article: DRUG PROGRAMS WITH SPECIFICS THAT DON'T MATCH GOALS

Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist. WASHINGTON - It is emotionally and politically helpful to portray drug dealers as vermin feeding off the weakness and illness of the young.

It is more useful to see them as largely rational, evil people who have responded rationally to the lurches of federal law enforcement policy in the 1980s. That policy, rivaled only by Prohibition 60 years ago in its uselessness, is not about to be reversed by President Bush. The mindless pursuit of the chimera of interdiction will continue at the expense of the education of potential addicts and the treatment of actual ones.

The just-announced prime target of drug czar William Bennett for his program ...

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