The Clinton administration, so it's said, will shift direction of the federal "war" against drugs, turning - at least beginning a turn - away from tough enforcement and interdiction and more toward treatment and education.
It may be reading too much into a policy that hasn't even been announced, but the trial balloons cut loose from the White House have even encouraged a round of renewed wacko speculation that the happy day of drug "decriminalization" may be coming, at least brought back for discussion.The speculation of a drug policy shift was helped along by the White House, which has encouraged reporters to read the message of change into recent events.
First President Clinton named Lee Brown, a former New York City police commissioner, to be the new White House drug "czar," an office that Clinton had skeletalized soon after his inauguration and left conspicuously empty.
Then it was said that Brown would "place more emphasis on treatment and prevention" programs and that his office, small as it has become, would be elevated to Cabinet status.
The next suggestion of a drug policy shift that will soft-pedal the law-and-order emphasis of the past decade came from Attorney General Janet Reno, who's become the reigning hero and authority on nearly everything.
In the weird atmosphere of a presidency that's sinking in public favor, Reno has become a lone bright light, all by claiming personal responsibility for one of the worst tragedies in law enforcement history, the disaster that claimed an estimated 80 lives at Waco, Texas.
So when a new-policy drug czar comes aboard and the heroic attorney general forecasts change from drug interdiction and enforcement and when the bible of the Washington establishment, The Washington Post, editorializes in favor of "A Common-Sense Drug Policy," we should all be on warning that the drug "war" will be fought another way.
And helpful advice is already being delivered, some of it from the "decriminalization" movement whose basic teaching is that the trouble isn't with the tons of illegal drugs that flood the nation or the murderous organizations that distribute the drugs or the millions of users and addicts with all the health and criminal problems they bring with them or the crushing costs in lost lives and property.
The trouble, it's said, is in the legal prohibitions against drugs. Drop the laws and the prohibitions and - presto - the American drug problem will become a simple problem of supply and demand.
It's not yet explained how "decriminalization" of drugs will decriminalize the criminals and how vast networks of criminal operations - networks now delivering billions of dollars in profits spread among hundreds of thousands of criminals - will simply disappear.
The myth of "decriminalization" is that government order can be brought to a drug culture and a maze of criminal networks that thrive on constantly widening markets, even into elementary schools, all of the structures protected by murderous gunmen.
That won't just go away, certainly not with "decriminalization" and not with relaxation of enforcement.