DRUG WARS HEAD BACK TO THE SOURCE : THE POLITICAL RHETORIC HAS BEEN ENCOURAGING, BUT THE REALITY IS SOMETHING ELSE.

Byline: Paul B. Stares

BARRY R. McCAFFREY, America's new drug czar, made his first foray last week into the wonderful world of international drug control where hope springs eternal despite little ever being accomplished.

As a participant in the newly created U.S.-Mexican High Level Contact Group, which is aimed at improving law enforcement efforts against drug trafficking, he should have no illusions about what he is up against or the likelihood of success.

To think that this latest initiative will make a real difference - other than to help sooth Mexico's wounded pride after its drug control efforts barely received a passing grade to qualify for further U.S. aid - would be to ignore the meager results of a decades long U.S.-Mexican war on drugs.

More importantly, it would reflect a failure to appreciate the constantly evolving nature of the problem.

Drugs are now a $7 billion industry in Mexico, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Other estimates - including one from the Mexican Prosecutor-General's office - put it as high as $30 billion.

Either way, in a country where the United Nations classifies some 30 percent of the population of 91 million as living in poverty and real wages are expected to fall about 20 percent because of the recent economic crisis, the allure of the drug trade is not going to diminish.

We should be less than sanguine, therefore, about what will be accomplished by the latest anti-drug campaign, with its emphasis on dismantling the powerful Mexican cartels. As Colombia is now discovering after capturing or killing the leaders of the infamous Medellin and Cali drug cartels, there are plenty more where they came from.

We should be even more skeptical about stemming the flow of drugs across the border by increasing the number of guards, building higher fences and fielding ever more sophisticated surveillance equipment, as the Clinton administration has proposed.

President Richard Nixon learned in 1969 that trying to seal a 2,000 mile-long border from drug smuggling is like trying to crush mercury with a hammer. The ill-fated, quickly-aborted Operation Intercept, which required every person and vehicle coming into the United States from Mexico to be searched, brought cross-border traffic to a standstill, wreaking economic havoc on those dependent on trade.

Today, with the North American Free Trade Agreement, it would be out of question to even try. On any given day about 5,000 trucks cross over into the United States from Mexico. Of those, only about 200 can be searched thoroughly by customs. Last year, tens of millions of private vehicles and over 200 million people legally entered the United States from Mexico.

How the Clinton administration plans to strengthen border defenses will certainly make it harder for drug traffickers. Some will doubtless be caught. But if there is one lesson to be learned from past drug campaigns, it is that the traffickers will recover, adapt and even get better at what they do - if not along the Mexican border, then somewhere else.

Remember that Mexico's current prominence in the cocaine trade was the direct result of increased law enforcement in South Florida and the Caribbean. And after new radar systems made smuggling with light aircraft and boats more difficult, the traffickers switched to high volume tractor trailers and containerized shipping to blend in with legitimate trade.

In a world growing more borderless, America must rethink how it confronts the drug problem, both at home and abroad. Rather than rely overwhelmingly on punitive control measures to deter illicit drug production, trafficking and consumption, we should switch to reward-based or ``positive'' control measures.

In practice this would mean trying to limit drug production by offering viable alternatives to those whose only way to make a decent living is by growing drug crops.

Not an easy task when the incentives are so great. Nevertheless, the success of drug crop substitution programs in Thailand and parts of Bolivia that were carefully integrated into larger regional development programs are examples of what can be achieved. Debt relief and debt swap schemes can also be employed to encourage poor countries to do this.

With the smuggling opportunities already enormous and growing bigger each year, we should think more in terms of cooperative arrangements with trade and industry to limit their use by parasitical drug traffickers.

One example is preferential handling for commercial cargo carriers and airlines that openly cooperate with customs inspectors.

Ultimately, however, the Mexicans are correct in saying that America has to deal with its voracious drug habit before any of these supply-reduction measures make much of an impact.

Drugs simply have to made less appealing at home. Again, the logic of using positive incentives should apply. This should included a reinvigorated public education and mass media campaign that stresses the benefits of healthy drug-free lifestyles, and more treatment programs that offer addicts the hope of breaking free of their chemical dependence.

These programs exist but they have been carried out halfheartedly, haphazardly, and with insufficient funding.

Positive control programs are not the type of quick, headline grabbing responses to the drug problem that politicians seeking instant impact prefer - but they do represent the only rational and humane way of making a difference over the long haul.

MEMO: Paul Stares is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of ``Global Habit: The Drug Problem in a Borderless World.''

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Photo: (Color) Heading to Mexico: Barry R. McCaffrey, Ameri can's new drug czar.

Associated Press