It's official U.S. policy, and the topic of a multi-million dollar promotional campaign, but "a drug-free America" is neither a reasonable nor a desirable goal. What we need, rather, is a society -- people and government -- able to understand the values and costs of drug use in a rapidly changing world. PNS associate editor Walter Truett Anderson, author of "Evolution Isn't What It Used To Be" (W.H. Freeman), is a political scientist who writes widely on technology and global governance.

Of all the vapid slogans that have ever been paraded through the public dialogue, none has been quite as misleading as "drug-free America."

Although millions and millions of dollars are being expended to popularize those three words, they are pure hokum. There has never been a drug-free America and never will be. In fact there is every reason to expect that Americans in the future will be using more drugs than they do now.

There are many kinds of drugs that nobody -- not even those most intensely engaged in pushing a "drug free America" -- really mean to eliminate.

Certainly the slogan does not promise an end to the use of drugs in psychotherapy. Antidepressants, tranquilizers, and all varieties of psychoactive medications generate enormous profits, and laboratories all over the world are busily developing new ones. Any stranger observing American society must find it odd to note that millions of dollars are being spent to convince people they should not use drugs to solve their emotional problems just as millions of other dollars are being spent to convince people that they should use drugs to solve their emotional problems.

In addition, many of the drugs used in conventional medicine -- as anesthetics, to control pain, to treat disease -- are chemically related to street drugs. All too frequently, they end up being used by hospital personnel, by patients addicted to drugs prescribed by permissive doctors or dentists.

These things happen because the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate uses of legal drugs tend to leak. So we cannot ever have a drug-free America unless we outlaw medical uses of drugs.

We should also, unless the slogan is to be quite meaningless, go back to prohibition of alcohol -- arguably the most troublesome drug of all -- and the performance-enhancement drugs used by athletes and the increasingly popular "smart drugs," that are supposed to sharpen memory or cognitive abilities.

There is also an enormous industry based on nonprescription drugs -- we can't permit those in a truly drug-free America.

Then there are all the substances that most of us don't think of as drugs -- even though they are psychoactive, addictive, and/or harmful in sufficient quantities. Can we have a drug-free America with coffee houses, vending machines dispensing sugar- and caffeine-laced soft drinks, billboards touting the joys of smoking? How about demon chocolate?

We would also need to eliminate the use of peyote by Native Americans and forbid sacramental wines.

The list goes on. It goes on because people all over the world have always used biochemicals, and because we live in a global economy which makes all drugs available to anyone willing to go to the trouble and expense of obtaining them.

The groups pushing a "drug free America" hasten to explain they don't really mean to prohibit all drugs -- just the bad ones, or wrong uses, or access by the wrong people.

The slogan -- adopted as public policy by Congress in 1988 -- turns out to be another emperor with his pants off, another glitzy handful of words tossed about because they sound reassuring and make people feel they are doing good. And because very few people are prepared to stand up and say that the situation is far more complex.

Instead of a "drug free America," what we have now and will have in the future is a world in which governments and individuals must make many different kinds of decisions about what drugs should be used, by whom and for what purposes -- a world where values change and new chemicals come along continually.

What we need is a chemically literate society able to manage with some sanity the enormous cornucopia of substances that nature and science make available.

That won't be easy, of course. In fact it will be terribly difficult. But it's far better to acknowledge a terribly difficult goal than to spend a fortune on a comforting lie that is itself a kind of verbal narcotic.