COMMENT

...Trip Gabriel, The New York Times Magazine 'There is no place in NATO that thinks about the post-arms-control environment...

...It won't even begin to go away until those in leadership positions—the President, the governor, the mayor, the pastor, the schoolteacher, the parent—do the right thing and fight racism in every manifestation...

...what drives the cost up is the illegality of the business...

...Similarly, the new auto-emission standards will penalize the average motorist...

...The promise that force of arms will somehow solve the drug problems is a lie...

...Streets and even homes are rendered unsafe for ordinary people trying to go about the business of their daily lives...

...At the same time, low- and moderate-income consumers would be protected by tax incentives and other means of stimulating energy conservation...

...it is the sordid subtext of American life...

...others seek relief in the never-never land of drug-induced mindlessness...

...It would encourage regular and predictable increases in the price of oil, coal, and natural gas—not to enrich the corporate providers, whose profits should be rigorously curbed, but to reflect the fragility and environmental impact of these sources...

...And it is not going away...

...prison costs have risen 1,720 per cent since 1970—and the drug crisis continues...

...But what is truly incendiary is the racism that pervades our society...

...Thefts and other property crimes motivated by the need to sustain costly drug habits run into the billions of dollars...

...It's so much easier, so much less troublesome, to blame the victims than to confront the social pathology that drives human beings to seek self-destructive means of relieving the stark meaninglessness of their lives...

...the Progressive Comment Phony War on Drugs 'In key ways today, the American people are in a wartime mode and sense a national emergency in the drug crisis.' —George Gallup, on a poll showing that most people view drug abuse as the most serious problem facing the country...

...Love is something you see on television...

...c) the mainstream news media say it's so...

...Our culture perpetuates the traditional trappings of religion, spirituality, selflessness, idealism—but in practice it emphasizes self-gratification and the quick fix...

...But when the actual legislative proposal went to Congress a few months later, it was a depressingly diluted document...

...The acquisition of things is the measure of success and happiness—but many of us are denied access to material wealth we are told we ought to seek...

...Oh no, not civilian goods...

...When 7,500 demonstrators tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge on August 31 and march to City Hall in Manhattan to demonstrate against the murder, police turned them back in a violent confrontation reminiscent of the brutality on the bridge at Selma, Alabama, a quarter of a century ago...

...Like every war, it had its heroes...

...William Bennet says, that the victims of drug addiction are individually responsible, personally accountable, for the damage inflicted on them by society...

...It is a lie, first of all, because the very concept of a war on drugs is deceptive...

...One immediate effect of such technological innovations will be a dramatic rise in the cost of electricity—a burden that will be borne disproportionately by low-income consumers who devote a large portion of their income to such basics as utility costs...

...These events make clear that racism is not in the filmmaker's mind...

...Some of us— apparently a growing number—find in narcotics the easiest way of coping with this contradiction...

...Bush, at least, knows better, and is willing to say out loud that ecological disaster awaits us unless we act...

...So why object to the war on drugs...

...In fact, victory has been declared more than once in the war on drugs—whenever it suited the purposes of the warriors...

...Please...

...Children who are yet unborn will graduate from college before they breathe clean air...

...The Bush program would, for example, attack the problem of acid rain by requiring substantial decreases in sulfur emissions from coal-fired generators, to be achieved by the use of such devices as scrubbers...

...Dealing with the devastating problem of addiction will be much more difficult, for here we must confront our value systems and the way we live...

...By embracing decriminalization and developing a system of controlled low-cost (or free) distribution to addicts, we could instantly dismantle the drug cartels and their kingpins, the elaborate distribution networks, and, incidentally, the expensive (and often corrupt) law-enforcement apparatus devoted to curbing the narcotics trade...

...The White House Effect George Bush is an environmentalist...

...If the most stringent and draconian border controls are instituted, they will be evaded...

...Once narcotics are decriminalized, they will lose the allure of the illicit which makes drug-use an act of "rebellion" by the disaffected, and pushers will no longer have an incentive to recruit new customers for their deadly wares...

...One major thrust of the President's program, as announced in June, was a requirement for reduced tailpipe emissions on all new autos...

...The Japanese, whose industrial practices have found so many admirers in American business, use just about half the energy we do for every thousand dollars of output...

...Failure to address these broad concerns can bring catastrophic political as well as environmental consequences...

...The Bush clean-air proposals are the only environmental specifics of any substance that have been put forward, so it is on these that the Administration must be judged...

...War" implies a contest of arms carried on for a finite period of time and culminating in victory (or defeat...

...What, then, is to be done...

...There are some fundamental contradictions in the scheme of our late-Twentieth Century lives: ¶ Our economy is driven by an inexorable compulsion to grow (as Murray Bookchin pointed out in the August issue), and so the machinery of mass propaganda is geared to fostering consumption...

...If domestic distribution networks are disrupted, they will swiftly be restored, for there are huge and instant fortunes to be made, and what does America value more highly than the acquisition of huge and instant fortunes...

...If civil liberties are assailed in the name of curbing the drug trade—and there are many within the Government and outside it who lust for new curbs on civil liberties—freedom may die, but the narcotics traffic will flourish...

...There is nothing inherently expensive about the drugs most commonly abused...

...Ronald Reagan's principal contribution to the cause of environmental protection was, after all, the solemn pronouncement that most air pollution is caused by trees...

...If the crops of coca and opium are destroyed, new crops will be planted and harvested, for international agribusiness and international banking have made the Third World dependent on single-crop agriculture, and growing dope pays better than growing coffee or sugar...

...Some of us find political means of coping with the frustrations of powerlessness...

...One of the white youths fatally shot Hawkins twice in the chest...

...That means some cars will actually generate more air pollution than is presently allowed...

...Leave it to The Wall Street Journal to get all uptight about winding down the Cold War...

...It would make more sense, environmentally and economically, to focus on energy conservation...

...If the Colombian drug "kingpins" are extradited, tried, convicted, and imprisoned—or if they are wiped out by troops or undercover hit squads—new kingpins will instantly take their place in Peru or Mexico or Panama or Laos or Pakistan...

...And most of the drug-related violence in the cities would come to an end, just as the death of Prohibition stopped the notorious violence of the bootlegging gangs...

...II Our political order enshrines the values of democracy and individual sovereignty, but most citizens find themselves powerless when it comes to the most important decisions of their lives...

...Ninety per cent of the companies blamed the declining defense budget...

...So long as the economic burden of environmental protection is loaded onto the backs of working-class and middle-class Americans, they will find it tempting to form anti-ecology alliances with business, resisting all attempts to institute a more rational and healthful way of life...

...Costs of Peace Favorite headline of the month: Unsettling Specter of Peace has Caused a War Among Analysts over the Possible Consequences...

...And that could well mean that no environmentalist will ever get to occupy the White House...

...The amendments to the Clean Air Act of 1970 were, it has been reported, the subject of bare-knuckles infighting in the President's Cabinet, pitting such unreconstructed Reaganites as Richard Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, against such "moderate" environmentalists as William Reilly, head of the Environmental Protection Administration...

...What's Mine Is Mine The U.S...

...An adequate clean-air program would, at the very least, strengthen the Federal Governmnent's commitment to research in alternative-energy technologies and less exotic forms of conservation...

...Three days later in Virginia Beach, Virginia, police brutally clubbed black fraternity students and shot two of them during a "riot...

...To be sure, Bush can't help but look like a card-carrying Green compared to his predecessor...

...The drug scourge is a real problem: Addiction to toxic substances is destroying the minds and bodies—the very lives—of thousands upon thousands of human beings in this country and abroad...

...Alienation and anomie are not likely to be among the terms that figure in White House press releases or Congressional debate...

...In the future, they will risk being prosecuted for theft of Government property...

...Pain is to be relieved at once...

...Department of Justice has notified Congress that it will take a tougher stance against some Federal employees who make public disclosure of confidential Government information...

...These are not the kinds of considerations the President is likely to mention when he takes to the airways to announce the latest campaign in the war on drugs...

...Government has generously subsidized the production of nonrenewable fuels, it plays only a negligible role in energy conservation or the development of renewable sources...

...it is in our streets and our communites...

...if something hurts, take a pill...

...Some cope with this contradiction by defying the dominant value system...

...b) some mainline environmentalist organizations are ready to believe it...

...smart people don't work hard...

...The bill, however, merely requires all manufacturers to reduce ' "The President's rhetoric was great, but the program he laid out doesn't match it," says Daniel Becker, a Sierra Club lobbyist...

...The use of narcotics figures heavily in the communication of AIDS and other catastrophic illnesses...

...But the time will come when George Bush, too, will find it necessary or convenient to declare victory—and with as little basis for doing so...

...In the past, such leakers have been shielded by the protection extended to whistle-blowers...

...And (3) if the answer to (1) and (2) is "the people of the United States," how can someone be prosecuted for theft if the allegedly stolen property is immediately turned over to its rightful owners...

...Labor is to be eased or eliminated...

...And in the long run, any effective clean-air policy would have to address Americans' wasteful and poisonous dependence on the private automobile for commerce and recreation...

...Reagan paid special tribute to his wife, Nancy, "who helped so many of our young people to say 'no' to drugs...

...others escape from it—or seek to resolve it—by illicit and antisocial means...

...American "advisers" are already on the job, scouting the landscape for openings to wage "low-intensity conflict"—not just against the narcotics cartels but against various national insurgencies...

...If we double and redouble the prison population—well, that is what we have been doing, and to no effect...

...The murder rate in the big cities has soared because of the drug trade...

...So long as there is a hugely profitable market, a demand, a craving even unto death for narcotics, there will be suppliers plying the trade in defiance of governments and their sanctions...

...When Bush announced his intentions last spring, it was reasonable to conclude that Reilly had won...

...Because it is a lie...

...Though the U.S...

...Experts in the West are in the midst of a free-for-all over the tricky, seldom-explored questions of the social, economic, and political costs of gearing down for peace," wrote reporter John Fialka in The Journal of August 31...

...Babies are born addicted, and children fall into addiction before they learn to read...

...The aspect of the drug crisis that lends itself most readily to solution is the crime and violence directly attributable to the huge profits to be made in the narcotics trade...

...A crowd of about twenty white youths, many wielding baseball bats or golf clubs, surrounded Hawkins...

...But it's the nature of the action called for by the President and, more to the point, the course of action he won't pursue that should alarm the earnest environmentalists who are now all too eager to give him the benefit of the doubt...

...Barely a year later, Reagan's successor was describing the drug crisis as a disaster of unprecedented dimensions...

...2) Who owns Government information...

...Racism, 1989 Spike Lee's film, Do the Right Thing, which depicts the rawness of race relations in Brooklyn, was criticized in some quarters as being incendiary...

...A few days later, when sixty to seventy marchers went to Bensonhurst to protest the killing, they were taunted by a crowd of whites yelling racial slurs and obscenities...

...We know because (a) he told us so...

...the President's rhetoric thrilled jaded environmentalists...

...Potentially productive lives are squandered...

...Which raises these questions: (1) Who owns the Government...

...But the war on drugs will create, and already has created, new opportunties for U.S...

...Government and promoted with fervor nearing mass hysteria by the news media, is primarily a propaganda war designed to bamboozle the public with empty slogans and to divert attention from real problems that cry out for real solutions...

...In the United States and, to a lesser (but growing) extent, in the Soviet Union and other industrial nations, more and more people find their lives so painful, so empty, so devoid of purpose, that they seek to anesthetize themselves against the harsh intrusion of reality...

...if your life isn't like that, you're at fault...

...But the most significant failure of the President's program lies not in the details but in the conceptual framework: What is totally missing is any commitment to the need for conservation and any concern for the economic impact on ordinary Americans...

...The societal costs are enormous...

...In the age of mass communication, many of us find it extraordinarily difficult to reconcile the way it is with what we're constantly told is the way it ought to be...

...Young men and women, particularly in the urban ghettos (though older and more affluent Americans are by no means immune) are wasting away in the thrall of narcotics...

...It is a lie to say, as "drug czar" (why not "drug field marshal...

...The "war on drugs," declared by the U.S...

...Urban planning and mass-transportation do provide viable alternatives...

...In his 1988 State of the Union address, Ronald Reagan proclaimed the war on drugs to be almost over...

...One day in August, Yusuf Hawkins, a sixteen-year-old black youth, went to the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn with three of his friends to buy a used car...

...The economic impact of the defense-industry shakeout will be severe," he fretted, noting that a survey of top defense contractors "shows that almost half are planning to switch more of their production into civilian goods...

...military meddling in the Third World...

...But before we join in the general jubilation over what The New York Times has called "the greening of the Presidency," we need to take a hard look at the Bush Administration's environmental program...

...But until they become part of the public dialogue about the difficulties that beset us, the notion that we're doing something serious about drugs will continue to be a lie...

...The law-and-order solution so sonorously invoked by politicians is a lie...

...it was, he said, "an untold American success story...

...The apparatus of the State often seems wholly unresponsive to the demands and needs of the populace...

...Energy that could be channeled into movements to fashion better communities and a better country are dissipated instead in drug-induced euphoria or stupor...

...We have left it to the left wing and the Russians to do that.' —Uwe Erlich, research director for West Germany's Foundation for Science and Politics the average emissions of the models they produce...