This drug war is getting kind of expensive.

When it comes to health, safety, and environmental regulations, conservatives like President George Bush are acutely attuned to the danger of unforeseen harmful consequences, of costs outweighing benefits.

But little is heard these days about the non-economic costs of mobilizing ever more government regulation for Drug War III, the Bush sequel to the wars declared by Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Among these costs are the incipient wreckage of the federal court system, the dismantling of the Sixth Amendment right to counsel, the decline of the presumption of innocence, the demise of the Fourth Amendment, the dilution of property rights, the blighting of entire lives for youthful mistakes, the litmus-testing of public officials, and the entrenchment of the escapist fantasy that such police-state methods can cure our national maladies.

The federal court system is already so overwhelmed by drug cases that it is hard-pressed to discharge its traditional responsibilities of protecting civil rights and civil liberties, resolving complex antitrust disputes, and the like.

Morale in the federal judiciary is low and sinking lower, in part because many judges now spend more than half their time processing routine drug busts. The number of drug cases filed in federal District Courts jumped 270 percent from 1980 to 1989. In each of the last two years, the number rose more than 15 percent. This tidal wave is swamping not only the courts but public defenders, prisons, and probation offices as well.

It will get worse. At the urging of the Reagan and Bush administrations, Congress has increased the number of assistant U.S. attorneys by more than 50 percent in a little over a year, mainly to throw new bodies into the drug war.

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."