Campbell began to rethink his drug-policy position almost by accident. A former law professor interested in tort reform, he began studying research by the Rand Corp. Some of Rand's litigation-reform experts were also looking at drug policy. "I became convinced that the drug war as we know it now is a dead end. It comes down to this: Do we want to get people off drugs, or do we want them in jail? Do we want to reduce violent crime? Then we've got to take away the incentive for violence, for getting the money to buy drugs or for fighting over turf to sell it."

The Democrats, of course, have their drug reformers. John Conyers of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, last week proposed federal funding for states that seek to divert nonviolent drug offenders into treatment instead of prison. "The federal government must support alternatives to wholesale incarceration," he says. And Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont has promised that if Democrats win the Senate and he becomes chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, he'll make drug reform a priority.

But at the national level, few Democrats are as outspoken as the most prominent Republican drug reformers. The risk of being seen as soft on crime, or as a 1960s counterculture holdover, seems too great for many Democratic politicians. And they would be fighting their own president's administration: Drug czar Barry McCaffrey has fought harm reduction at every turn, even pressuring Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala into abandoning a planned endorsement of needle exchange programs.

In other words, says Vincent Schiraldi, director of the Justice Policy Institute and one of the authors of the new report: "Nixon can go to China on this one."

Going state by state, the Justice Policy Institute report contains some shockers about Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

It turns out, for instance, that when it comes to harsh drug policy, the frontier justice of George W. Bush's Texas can't hold a candle to California, which locks up a higher percentage of its citizens for drug offenses than any other state: The number of Californians incarcerated for drug crimes has gone up 25 times in 20 years, to 44,000 -- twice the state's entire prison population in 1980.

On the other hand, Texas comes off as a particularly horrifying place for racially biased drug laws. Although survey after survey shows that whites and African-Americans use drugs at about the same rate, in Texas and other states Schiraldi's team surveyed -- Hawaii, South Carolina, North Carolina, Maine and Virginia -- drug imprisonment for whites fell over the last decade while incarceration of black drug users rose two to eight times.

"That was stunning, even to me," Schiraldi admits. "We expected to see blacks going to prison in larger numbers, but to find so many places where white drug incarceration fell at the same time -- that's a new floor."

Nearly 1 in 4 people in prison in the United States, the survey finds, is there for a drug offense -- and the number of drug offenders locked up today "is roughly the same as the entire prison and jail population in 1980."

As Republicans gather in the city that gave birth to the penitentiary, here is something to ponder. In the early 1970s when Al Gore was in Vietnam, and when George W. Bush was flying planes around Texas to avoid Vietnam, the nation's prison population stood at 200,000. Back then that number was a big deal: Prison riots in New York and California made the front page, books about prison life made the bestseller list.

Today, the prison population stands at 2 million. As Schiraldi says, "We've got a population the size of Washington, D.C., locked up for drug offenses alone." The war on drugs is increasingly looking like this generation's Vietnam. But the war in Vietnam, which shaped the lives of this year's candidates, was at least debated at the conventions of 1972. About this decade's war, however, the silence inside the convention halls of Republicans and Democrats alike is deafening.

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