editorial comment A thinking politician! paraphernalia predicts a short career.....

A proposal by a state House member should give us all cause to take a hard look at America's war on drugs.

The state legislator, Rep. Alice Bordsen, D-Alamance, is suggesting that non-violent youthful offenders who have committed felonies be given an opportunity to have their charges reduced to a misdemeanor or expunged once they've completed their sentence.

Bordsen plans to introduce a bill to that effect when the General Assembly comes back into session in January.

While the debate is over how to have teenagers who have a brush with the law get back on the right track, perhaps we should also look at how we approach the problem with drugs in our society.

Should we continue to focus on drugs in our society as primarily a legal problem or should we look at it as a health problem?

To say it another way: Should we continue to put people who use or sell drugs in prison or on parole? Or should we try to prevent drug abuse in the first place and help those who abuse drugs get off of them?

Focusing on the legal aspect of the drug war is costing immense amounts of taxpayer dollars. Of the 36,401 people in North Carolina prisons, 5,098 are listed on the Department of Correction Web page as being inmates because of drug convictions. Thousands more are on probation.

Police across our state have entire vice units primarily dedicated to sniffing out drugs and those who sell them and use them. Such efforts are costly and time consuming, not to mention the burden that drug cases place on our court system.

Wouldn't it be better if we focused on keeping people in our state from abusing drugs?

Treatment for drug abuse and addiction is expensive, too, but not as expensive as hiring corrections officers to guard offenders in our prisons.

Yet this is not a request for more state money to be thrown into drug treatment. Instead, it's an appeal for families to encourage their children not to abuse drugs, for friends to help friends in a time of need, for churches and other religious organizations to get involved in the lives of their members so that they don't see a need to abuse drugs. And it's a desire for businesses and non-profit groups to encourage their employees and neighbors to not abuse drugs.

Bordsen has offered an interesting proposal for helping youthful offenders get their lives back on track. Ironically enough, her idea grew out of an undercover drug bust that resulted in the arrest of about four-dozen teenagers in the Alamance-Burlington schools.

Drug abuse can destroy lives. Yet our efforts to win the war on drugs by throwing those involved in its sale or abuse in prison hasn't work.

It's time to consider focusing our fight to get rid of drug abuse on the front end rather than through the legal system.

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