President Bush dramatized the drug scourge in his prime-time address with the story of a six-year-old boy named Dooney, who until recently lived in a crack house. Life was so bad at home with his addicted mother that he begged to sleep at school, and he feared he would "probably have to" end up selling drugs.

"Well, Dooney does not have to sell drugs," the president declared. "No child in America should have to live like this."

No child should. But what does the president offer as an alternative? What deliverance from the nightmare the American dream has become for masses of poor children, plagued by bad housing, bad neighborhoods, bad schools, and, in many cases, bad parents?

A president who was serious about helping children like Dooney would propose a massive effort to rehabilitate inner-city schools and child-welfare programs, to give them all real educational opportunity and to give neglected and abused children the nurturing they don’t get at home.

But such a program would cost tens of billions of dollars. Candidate Bush vowed to be the "education president"; now he wants to cut real federal spending for education. His call to arms on drugs betrays his real priorities: "We can pay for this fight against drugs without raising taxes or adding to the budget deficit"-instead, he wants to take money from programs to help poor people.

What the president offers poor children like Dooney is no real hope for a share in the bounty of American life, but rather the threat of repression if they step out of line.

We’ll start by taking away your driver’s license, he says; then we’ll throw you into boot camps or prison; "and for the drug kingpins, the death penalty."

These are rather empty threats-the same old medicine, prescribed with so little effect by the Reagan administration and others before. Never mind, the administration says. We’ll search, seize, wiretap, bug, urine-test, interdict, confiscate, jail, and execute. We’ll do almost anything but raise taxes.

Bush seems in tune with the electorate, which is not in the mood to do much for poor people beyond locking them up when they commit crimes.

Thus the Democratic opposition, paralyzed by the public’s allergy to taxes and by the failures of the 1960s’ war on poverty, barely pays lip service these days to the need to strike at the root causes of drug abuse.

The Democrats’ emphasis on helping the drug users who want treatment but can’t get it makes more sense than Bush’s lopsided allocation of resources to punishment.

But with no constituency for a genuine attack on poverty, the drug debate often seems a contest for ownership of the word "tough," repeated by both sides like a mantra. "Tough . . . tougher . . . toughest," says Bush. "Not tough enough," replies Sen. Joseph Biden Jr. (D-Del.), the Democrats’ drug czarlet.

In this barren soil, some dangerous ideas have taken root. Polls show a big swing in public opinion toward curtailing liberty to fight drugs. Large majorities now support mandatory testing of workers and students, random searches of cars and student lockers, and getting the military into domestic drug enforcement. A smaller majority supports warrantless police searches of homes of suspected dealers. So much for the Fourth Amendment.

This demand for quick police measures, combined with indifference to the poverty that breeds drug abuse, manifests the same blinkered pursuit of short-term gratification at the expense of long-term well-being that underlies our budget deficits.

A drive to create opportunities for ghetto children offers the best long-term hope for rescuing the cities from drug abuse and other ills. But the billions invested would not pay immediately visible dividends because the program would not reach the current generation of drug abusers and sellers.

A surge of law-enforcement activity, on the other hand, can sometimes produce quick, impressive-seeming results: so many kilograms of cocaine seized, so many drug kingpins extradited, a temporary clog in the cocaine pipeline, a housing project purged of drug dealers by targeted police action. But such gains typically prove as transitory as cocaine-induced euphoria, leaving poor neighborhoods as wracked by violence as before.

There will always be more cocaine, no matter how many troops and planes President Bush sends to Colombia; the borders cannot possibly be sealed; homegrown chemical substitutes are available; hundreds of young drug entrepreneurs are ready to replace every jailed kingpin; dealers chased out of one housing project will turn up in another.

The story of the much ballyhooed South Florida Task Force is instructive. Created by President Reagan under Bush’s direction, it poured extraordinary manpower, ships, and planes into interdicting drug imports. Reagan boasted seven years ago that it had "been highly successful in slowing the flow of illegal drugs into the United States."

Now the Bush administration admits that the effect was to divert some of the cocaine influx to other entry points; overall importation soared to unprecedented heights, cutting the 1989 street price to one-third the 1981 price.

The new tack is to go after midlevel pushers and drug users. This is. largely a rehash of the failed strategies of President Richard Nixon and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller in New York two decades ago.

Casual, middle-class drug users may respond to the administration’s threats to take away student loans and jobs and hammer them with fines, forfeitures, and brief stints in jail. The trend in casual drug use is already downward.

But casting aside civil liberties in an all-out law-enforcement attack on street-level drug sales and use would not reach the heart of the problem because it would not deter the despondent poor, who have little to lose.

Tightening Screws

The danger is that as each turn of the screw fails to deliver the promised victory in the war on drugs, the government will grasp for ever more power to finish the job, shredding the Bill of Rights and herding minor offenders who endanger nobody into costly and overcrowded prisons.

Bush laid the groundwork for such an escalation of police-state measures with the unrealistic claims he made for his drug strategy and the overheated rhetoric he used to describe the problem.

The modest increase in drug-fighting resources he proposes for the broken-down criminal-justice system, which can lock up only a tiny fraction of those who commit serious crimes, mocks his blustering that "the rules have changed" and that "if you sell drugs, you will be caught" and will do time.

The president’s assertion that "the gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs" is like telling a patient with a brain tumor that the gravest threat to his health is headaches.

Our gravest domestic problem is poverty, and the self-perpetuating culture of poverty that drags down children born into it. Drug abuse is but one of poverty’s terrible pathologies, along with teen-age pregnancy, illiteracy, unemployment, lawlessness, disorder, racial conflict, poor health, and lack of hope or opportunity. If all illegal drugs could be eliminated tomorrow, the pall of despair that has settled on our inner cities would remain.

"If you don’t use drugs, you can be anything you want to be," President Bush said in his televised talk last Tuesday to young people. His words had a hollow ring to the many for whom going straight promises little opportunity beyond a career sweeping office floors or flipping burgers at a fast-food joint.