By Courtland Milloy
Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The year is 2012.

A staggering loss of jobs, income, homes and health insurance has left America feeling depressed and insecure. How do you get relief?

Mexican drug gangs have an answer. Pick a drug, any drug.

After brokering a truce a few years earlier, the former rivals organized a cartel. And with tons of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine in the pipeline, they have geared up to bring America to its knees.

This is not some farfetched "scared straight" scenario, but a way to imagine how the current socioeconomic and political climate could lead to the next big drug epidemic in America. And what we can do to prevent it.

"Once the drug-related violence in Mexico subsides and the business environment stabilizes, I think the drug gangs will come together and significantly gear up production and distribution to the U.S. to make up for lost time," Eric E. Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation in Washington, told me recently. "On the demand side, there has been a dramatic change in the community of potential users. There's a tremendous amount of despair in the country. You've got hundreds of thousands of people out of work, many willing to sell drugs if it means putting food on the table."

During the next few weeks, I'll be writing about some of the efforts to deal with this emerging national security threat -- from the inside out, through decriminalization and improved treatment and drug-prevention initiatives.

On Monday, Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, unveiled a plan that would train physicians to speak frankly but sympathetically with patients about their drug abuse and to provide treatment options without judgment. A small step, but one with huge implications as doctors spearhead the effort to teach the nation that addiction is a disease, not a crime, and that people who suffer from it should be treated with dignity and not stigmatized as degenerates.

It won't be easy. Even after 30-plus years of failed drug policies -- of thinking we can arrest, jail, confiscate and eradicate our way out of the drug problem -- we continue doing the same things and expecting different results.

Well, this time we just might end up with different results -- results much worse than anything we've experienced before. And unlike the heroin scourge in the 1960s and the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s, this one won't be confined largely to poor black neighborhoods.

"Take a once-depressed neighborhood like the H Street corridor in Northeast Washington, one that we think of as coming back," Sterling said. "If you add a significant increase in drug addiction in the neighborhoods around it, new businesses are in jeopardy."

Shoplifting, mugging, panhandling and solicitation for sex go hand in hand with any drug epidemic.

Over the years, billions in federal funds have been spent on a futile effort to stop the flow the drugs into the country. Relatively little funding went to improve drug education and prevention programs.

In the nation's capital, a decades-long arrest and incarceration binge was supposed to have swept drug dealers off the streets. Yet look at drug use among children. According to the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 11 percent of District children ages 12 to 17 reported using illicit drugs --including cocaine, heroin and prescription pain medication. That's up from 7 percent in 2000. Almost half of high school seniors had smoked marijuana.

As the budget crunch worsened, treatment programs and mental health clinics were the first programs to go. Under the stress of an ongoing economic crisis, the "Obama bubble" finally burst. Disillusionment set in.

Little wonder that so many of yesterday's drug experimenters become tomorrow's drug addicts.

"Up with hope, down with dope," Jesse Jackson used to say.

Whether that slogan resonates into the future or fades with the past is up to us.

E-mail: milloyc@washpost.com