My brain tends to go numb when the numbers get up that high, so I try to think of things a little more concretely. If we take off the zeros, what this study tells us is that for every person in our country who dies each year from abusing illegal drugs, there are 33 who die from the use of alcohol and cigarettes. These figures do not include any of the deaths each year due to overdose or misuse of prescription drugs. Even over-the-counter drugs like Tylenol, Advil and aspirin cause an estimated 7,000 deaths every year.

Which drugs are the problem? Which problem is it we're after? We could say that our policy is to attack those drugs with no medicinal value -- but then to be consistent, we'd have to ban cigarettes and legalize marijuana. We could say we want to protect people from mind-altering substances -- but then of course we'd have to ban alcohol, from the oldest and most sophisticated wine or scotch to the rot-gut sold on the corner. And what about the mind-altering substances our doctors prescribe for us? I suspect we would see a lot of hands go up if we asked for a show of how many had used Prozac or its cousins, Xanax or its cousins, sleeping potions in all their infinite variety, designed to close our busy minds down for us because we're unable to calm down enough for sleep.

My point here is not to equate Prozac with heroin; there is a difference between necessary medicine and substances we use for recreation. But the difference is not as stark as we like to pretend. These substances are on a continuum, with something like aspirin at one end and something like crack or heroine at the other. We know some things about this spectrum. We know that even innocuous drugs like aspirin can be overused and can cause damage or death. We know that even strong hallucinogens have been used by people without causing them lasting harm or turning them into addicts. We know that millions of people use alcohol without becoming alcoholics.

Abuse of any drug is always a possibility. We must be willing to admit it is not the only possibility, or we will keep ourselves in a box of denial and we will not be able to find a coherent way out. Aldous Huxley, who experimented with mescaline and then wrote about it, once said, "The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is a principle appetite of the soul. When, for whatever reason, men and women fail to transcend themselves by means of worship, good works and spiritual exercises, they are apt to resort to religion's chemical surrogates."

If we look with more honesty at our attitudes about drugs and see the contradictions, then we will also begin to look more honestly at the problem of addiction. That shift in perception has already happened in what we've learned about alcoholism. We don't moralize about it, scorning the alcoholic as a person of weak will or corrupt values. Instead we have learned to name alcoholism an illness, and we recognize that through treatment, compassion and support, an alcoholic can find a way back to the land of the living. But when it comes to marijuana, cocaine, crack or heroin we are still trapped in the limited universe of morals. We speak about all of these drugs as though they were in the same realm of danger and damage, even though they affect people in vastly different ways, and we moralize about them, equating their use with evil.

In her 'Just Say No' campaign against drugs Nancy Reagan was fond of saying, "If you're a casual drug user, you're an accomplice to murder". When he was still the Los Angeles chief of police, Daryl Gates told a Senate panel, "Casual drug users should be taken out and shot." We haven't yet adopted that policy, but we have created a legal system in which drug dealers often receive longer prison sentences than people who murder or rape.

This is how we got lost in a war on drugs: through seeing the drug and the user as an enemy to be destroyed. In the essay I used for our reading, Walter Wink writes, "[We must] switch from regarding addiction as a legal matter to regarding it as a medical matter. It should be treated as a public health issue, not as grounds for punishment. The correct moral position is to quit moralizing about drugs and instead to regard addicts with compassion."

The current drug war began in the early 1970s with Richard Nixon. But in that era both the language and the actual policies had a lot more to do with compassion and treatment than they do today. During Nixon's administration fully two-thirds of the budget dedicated to the war on drugs went to treatment programs; today it's less than two-thirds. Every year government language and focus have turned further from the model of disease and treatment, to embrace ever more radically the metaphors of war. The metaphors beget the reality we now have, complete with enemies, prisoners, casualties, guns, bombs and military personnel. Today, one of the most glaring and inhuman dimensions of our drug policy is that while we pour our resources down the rat-hole created by the war metaphor, nearly two-thirds of the addicts in our country who seek treatment cannot find it.

I actually tested this out in a tiny and uncontrolled experiment on Friday. I opened up the New Haven phone book and looked in the yellow pages under 'drug abuse and addiction'. I called the first six programs listed and asked whether they had a program available for someone without insurance and with limited resources. After long periods on hold listening to Musack, two of them said 'no'. The others said they had a sliding scale available but they didn't know what it would cost. None of them had immediate openings for such a person and none of them had an estimate of how long it would take. They all confirmed that there was no such thing as a central drug addiction hot line in our area, through which a person hitting rock bottom could learn, easily and immediately, where to go for treatment.

It is clear from every study we have available that the medical lens is the one to which we must return if we want a clear view of the problem. The medical lens shows us illness, not moral failure. The medical lens zeros in on the demand side of the drug problem, and calls for hot-lines, treatment programs, out-patient follow-up and support groups so that treatment on demand could become a reality. The medical lens would lead us to decriminalize most dimensions of drug possession so we stopped the ludicrous practice of filling our prisons with nonviolent offenders. It would lead us to needle exchange programs and other dimensions of harm reduction.

Nine months ago, when the Clinton administration first proposed its enormous aid package to Columbia in the name of the drug war, a proposal came up to take $100 million of this amount -- less than 10% -- to use for treatment of U.S. addicts. This proposal was shot down, and one of the loudest opponents was Barry McCaffrey, the 'drug czar'.

This rigid march down a losing path is so dramatic that it forces us to ask: What else might be going on here? What's going on when the top people in drug policy argue against money for treatment? What other motivations, conscious or unconscious, must be operating in order to keep us on this failing campaign? This is the second area to which I think we need to turn our attention. Our leaders are not fools. They can study the statistics as well as we can. They know we absolutely cannot win with these tactics. So what else is driving this addiction to the drug war?

One possible answer was spoken by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He said, "We are choosing to have an intense crime problem concentrated among minorities." It's very difficult to disagree with these chilling words. Think about our minimum sentencing laws, so radically skewed toward harsher penalties for drugs more often used by blacks. The minimum sentence is 100 times more severe for possession of crack than powder cocaine. Think about the gutted public funding for prison drug treatment, and the dwindling numbers of treatment programs for those without insurance, despite all we know about the cost effectiveness of treatment. Think about the racial profiling that leads to proportionally more blacks being searched for drugs than whites. Think about the color of our prison populations, and remember that nearly half a million residents of our prisons are there on drug charges.

The question, "What's really going on here?" can't stop with the domestic policies. What's really going on with our military aid to Columbia? Few of us would have cause to know that when 'Plan Columbia' was being drafted, some of those pushing most fiercely for the huge military package were companies with nothing at all to do with drug policy. They included oil companies and weapons manufacturers, like Occidental Petroleum, Enron Corp., BP Amoco, United Technologies Corp. and Bell Helicopter. They have an interest here -- but it doesn't have to do with curbing the drug trade. It has to do with profits.

Columbia is now the third largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world, topped only by Israel and Egypt. What's the setting into which this money is being poured? Columbia has been engaged in a civil war for the last forty years fed by the extreme inequities in wealth and land distribution. Unemployment in the country is 20%, and more than half of the people live below the poverty level. For the last ten years Columbia has had the worst human rights record in the hemisphere, in the form of kidnappings, massacres, murders and disappearances. Right-wing paramilitary groups work closely with the Columbian army, and according to a U.N. study these groups are responsible for the worst human rights offenses. Every year around 3,000 people are killed and as many as 300,000 are displaced by the fighting. Both the entrenched guerilla army and the Columbian military benefit from the profits of the drug trade.

This is the setting into which our country is now committing massive amounts of military aid and at least several hundred military advisors. Last month a New York Times article said, "Secretary of State Colin L. Powell is preparing to make the case not only for a sustained project in Colombia but for vastly increasing aid to its neighbors.... This is needed, the logic goes, because as military pressure builds in Colombia, the war could spill over and destabilize the region." Our government scoffs at comparisons to Vietnam, but the parallels are glaring -- and we should not ignore them.

As I said in the beginning, our current war on drugs is a many-headed hydra, which makes it difficult to see clearly, much less challenge and change it. But a central tenet of our religious faith is that we are agents of choice in our world, not passive observers. Our denomination has chosen to grapple with U.S. drug policy as one of our study issues this year. We owe it to ourselves to take the time and apply the energy to shift our collective focus back toward something that looks a little more like sanity. Sanity is what I hear in Walter Wink's words from our reading: "It is high time we addressed the problem of illicit drugs not as a war to be won, but as an epidemic to be checked, a disease to be curbed, and an opportunity to see ourselves in the faces and mutilated veins of our addicted brothers and sisters." AMEN.