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In the wild swings of public attitudes toward drug use, it is useful to look to the way that alcohol abusers have learned to regard their addiction. They understand that the craving never really disappears; it is merely denied. An alcoholic can stay sober for years, yet he still says, because he knows it to be true, "I am an alcoholic." If the current revulsion against drug abuse does manage to banish dope back into the shadows, society could use a measure of the same honesty and self-awareness. "It seems we forget so easily," says NIDA's Schuster, "and so we have repetitions of these cycles of drug-abuse epidemics. It almost seems that every other generation has to re-establish the dangers of drugs."
Indeed, the flurry of activity and proposals in the past few months threatens to obscure the most basic fact about drug use in America: border patrols, police raids and even random urinalysis are unlikely to have a lasting impact as long as there remains a demand for drugs and a general social tolerance of their use. A true change can come only if Americans are willing to say clearly -- to their workmates and schoolmates, to their neighbors and friends, to their communities and to themselves -- that drug use is not acceptable. If that is, in fact, one result of the current frenzy over what has been a recurring crisis for successive generations of Americans, then even all the hype and excess may in retrospect be worthwhile.
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