Hearts and Minds

SAN FRANCISCO — Some soldiers came back to the Presidio on Monday, two years after the historic old fort at the foot of the Golden Gate was decommissioned and turned over to park rangers. Once again, if only for a day, the officer’s club was filled with comrades freshly arrived from a common front. They assembled under the wrought-iron chandeliers to swap war stories and kick around tactics and also to listen to the rallying cries of their top leaders.

“We can do this,” the troops were admonished at lunch.

“We are in this together,” they were reminded in the late afternoon.

The tone sometimes seemed to border on the defensive, for these soldiers are engaged in a war no longer as popular as it once was. An absence of victory will do that. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, only mounting costs and collateral damages. The hearts and minds of the citizenry have begun to wander. The soldiers have come to feel isolated, abandoned.

“We are listening for the bugle of the cavalry,” one of the generals said grimly at lunch, “and we will try to hold it together for as long as we can.”

*

The speaker was Thomas Constantine, head of the nation’s Drug Enforcement Administration and, thus, the current occupant of what might be called the Westmoreland Chair in this, the nation’s never-ending War on Drugs. He was joined at the Presidio by Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the White House drug czar, and a couple hundred police chiefs, prosecutors, narcs, judges, doctors and drug treatment specialists from across the West.

The specific topic was methamphetamines, described as the most alarming new front in the prohibition wars. Blown-up photographs of exploding houses and charred corpses were displayed, documenting the carnage created by the crude chemistry used to manufacture the drug. Sad stories were told of toddlers found in these dangerous factories, and also of the power of the drug to transform simple farm country folks into, as one speaker put it, “Mansons.”

In their workshops and speeches, the soldiers discussed the need to sound the alarm to the public, to educate politicians, to adjust criminal codes, to root out meth with random testing in schools and workplaces alike. What was needed, it was said again and again, were “resources,” ever more resources. Without them, one general warned, meth would be “the next crack cocaine.”

This was a phrase rich in double-meaning for anyone dubious about going to war against drugs. For before crack, it was powdered cocaine. Before that, heroin. Before that, LSD. Before that, marijuana. Before that, bathtub gin. And what has become of all these battles? Underground economies that have made street thugs wealthy and street cops susceptible to corruption. Absurd competitions among politicians to draft laws ensuring the longest sentences for the greatest number of dealers and even users. An unparalleled prison buildup that in some cases, such as California, has all but devoured government budgets. Open gun battles among drug traders, who deal in substances that would have relatively little value if not for the fact that they are illicit.

And finally, a populace weary of it all.

*

That weariness, it can be argued, was on display last November when voters in California and Arizona passed initiatives to soften marijuana laws. These were not mandates for a stoned citizenry. Rather, they were pleas, shouted through the only bullhorn available at the time, for a sober reexamination of the drug war paradigm and all its collateral damage.

That the ground is shifting is not lost on the drug warriors. Tellingly, they brought with them to the Presidio doctors and drug counselors. They heard from their generals that treatment and education are as crucial to the cause as AWACs and prisons. One strategy paper even proclaimed: “The phrase ‘war on drugs’ must be replaced with more persuasive language that portrays anti-drug efforts as balanced.” Nice, but more is involved here, of course, than a slogan.

Just as in Vietnam, the courage and conviction of the drug warriors are not at issue. The war itself is. From criminal court judges to conservative ideologues to old hippies--an unlikely coalition has cobbled itself together to challenge the effectiveness of criminal prohibition, to raise what until quite recently were politically taboo questions:

What poses the greater threat, decriminalization or the drug war itself? Isn’t the implied message that, without the restraints of prohibition, the nation collectively would indulge itself to death, become one giant junkie-land? In that case, why bother? How much of the country will be destroyed in order to save it?