That is a picture of the United States and its drug policy. By any rational test the war on drugs, with its use of the criminal law and harsh sentences to solve the problem, is a costly failure. The number of Americans in prison for drug offenses has multiplied by 10 since 1980, from 41,000 to 458,000. But drugs are more available than ever, and more young people are using them.

In the face of this political and social disaster the Republican and Democratic parties offer: silence. Their leaders are evidently afraid that even discussing different approaches might get them labeled as soft on drugs.

But the silence is about to be broken. In tandem with the Republican National Convention starting Monday in Philadelphia, and later with the Democrats, there will be shadow conventions that discuss the failed war on drugs and two other issues that the major parties have not solved: campaign finance and the gap between rich and poor.

Senator John McCain and other politicians brave enough to break with their parties' wishes will participate. Senator McCain will be the keynote speaker tomorrow, talking about the idea that makes him anathema to so many other Republicans: ending the scandal of campaign money and influence.

The shadow conventions are the brainchild of Arianna Huffington, the columnist and gadfly. She has moved from the political right toward the left -- or perhaps to a position of dislike for all evasive politicians. The shadow conventions will have participants from all camps.

Representative Tom Campbell of California, the Republican candidate for Senate against the incumbent Dianne Feinstein, will talk about the failed drug war. So will another Republican brave enough to challenge the policy, Gov. Gary Johnson of New Mexico, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Walter Cronkite, the greatly respected former broadcast newsman, has made a 10-minute video special for the shadow convention on the cost of the drug war.

The staggering figure mentioned above -- that 10 times as many Americans are in prison for drug offenses today as in 1980 -- comes from the Justice Policy Institute in Washington. It has just issued a report that shows, in fresh ways, some consequences of the war on drugs.

The 458,000 men and women now in U.S. prisons on drug charges are 100,000 more than all prisoners in the European Union, whose population is 100 million more than ours. The annual cost of incarcerating them is $9 billion.

Nearly 80 percent of drug arrests in 1997, the most recent year for which figures are available, were for possession. Of those, 44 percent were for possession of marijuana.

Blacks are overwhelmingly more likely than whites to be imprisoned for drug offenses, a study by Human Rights Watch showed. Just 13 percent of regular drug users in this country are black, but 62.7 percent of drug offenders sentenced to prison are black. Evidently juries and judges treat offenders less seriously if they are white.

The Justice Policy Institute report found that in 1986, 31 out of every 100,000 young people in America were put in state prisons for drug offenses. By 1996 the figure had nearly quadrupled, to 122 per 100,000.

The institute studied states with higher rates of imprisonment for drug offenses to see whether that had a deterrent effect. It found, to the contrary, that states with higher incarceration rates also had higher rates of drug use.

There are already signs around the country of unease with the human cost and practical failure of our drug policy. Perhaps the shadow conventions will move more political leaders to face the reality recently stated by The Economist of London: "That misguided policy has put millions of people behind bars, cost billions, encouraged crime and spread corruption while failing completely to reduce drug abuse."

Ralph Nader has chided me for saying that he has paid little or no attention as a candidate to the civil liberties record of the major parties. In fact he has called the Clinton administration's record "abysmal."

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company

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