THE DRAFT AGE IS DROPPING IN THE  WAR ON DRUGS

Sixteen-year-old Jonathan Kollman had been clean for several months - a struggle but he was hanging in there. Then he ran into this babe in a red sports car who offered to buy him a fix. For a fragile teenager holding on by his fingernails, it was one temptation too many. He made the buy and ten minutes later he was back in the jaws of the dragon with heroin in his veins.

But what of the Dragon Lady? Who was this evil temptress? Turns out she was a cop - an undercover narcotics officer from the Plano, Texas, police department who needed an informant. Playing on the kid's vulnerability, she reintroduced him to his habit, and once he was re-hooked she was able to use him for half-a-dozen drug buys.

If you believe the end justifies the means, this little operation would have to be considered a resounding success three dozen people busted for selling or holding heroin, including Kollman. But a lot of the folks in Plano are uneasy about this business of using kids as offensive weapons in the drug war. The boy's parents, for example having just waged a titanic battle to free their son from addiction are understandably dismayed that it was the police who turned him on again. But for all their trauma, Jonathan Kollman's parents are lucky. Chad McDonald, Jr.'s mother would probably trade places with them in a second. When her son's badly damaged young frame was found in an alley south of downtown L.A. last month, it was revealed that he, too, had been lured into the service of the law. A few weeks earlier, police in suburban Los Angeles had captured McDonald with half-an-ounce of methamphetamine and they apparently saw in him the makings of a useful snitch.

The Brea police offered Chad and his mother a deal, and the pressure must have been intense because they went for it in spite of the obvious danger. Rather than treat his addiction, they dropped this high-school student unprepared into the boiling pot of cutthroats who populate the illegal drug trade. Since these guys are often facing ten or twenty years if they're caught, they disdain informants a fact they underscored by torturing the kid before killing him, and then raping and shooting his girlfriend and leaving her for dead in the San Gabriel Mountains.

Undoubtedly this is an arrangement that everybody involved wishes they had to do over again, but the truth is, we're likely to see more of this kind of thing in the future, not less. Consider the problem from the cop's viewpoint. Here you have a bunch of high-school kids dealing drugs to each other in private. How do you break into this closed circle? That s the intractable nexus of the war on drugs, the thing that has driven our ongoing assault on the Bill of Rights for over eighty years. In a drug deal, there's no complaining witness.

Most other criminals have somebody chasing them - the rapist, the robber, the ax murderer all have victims or survivors demanding justice. But when there's nobody to call the cops, the lawmen have little choice. To break up what is essentially a private transaction, they inevitably have to resort to some subterfuge that will trample the Constitution, whether it's turning your kid into a junkie, or splintering your front door without bothering to knock, or proning you out on the pavement because you happen to be a black man in an expensive car.

It is the nature of the drug war itself that creates this ethical quagmire, not the perversity of the police. Brea Chief Bill Lentini was simply trying his best to carry out the impossible task we ve handed him. Our hands are hardly clean on this issue. The latest polls show that seventy percent of the American people think the drug war is a failure and that we should keep at it. As President Clinton himself pointed out, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.

Like a man who has set his hair on fire and is trying to put it out with a hammer, we will continue to pulverize our principles and devour our young until the drug war violence and corruption finally reaches every nook and cranny of our lives. Only then will we face the fact, as we did with alcohol prohibition in 1933, that the problem is not what's in the bottle, but how we've chosen to deal with it.

Mike Gray

Los Angeles

Mike Gray's latest book, "Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out, " was released by Random House this June 15. Mr. Gray was an Academy Award nominee for the screenplay of The China Syndrome. He lives in Los Angeles.