THE BELL CURVE:

The Pilot’s new columnist, Judge James Gray, recently offered up a pair of lucid, straightforward pieces on our drug problems and how to best deal with them. The second part, under the headline “How to win the war on illegal drugs,” included an invitation to readers to comment on the columns. I always find such invitations hard to turn down, whether or not I have any expertise in the subject. In this instance, I thought immediately about deferring to a good friend with international credentials, Dr. Joseph Pursch, who has never failed me in coming up with quotable opinions.

Joe Pursch is the psychiatrist who created the U.S. Navy’s alcohol treatment program that so well served Betty Ford and Billy Carter among a host of other public figures. He is now in private practice in Laguna Beach and sees patients and lectures at Sober Living by the Sea in Newport Beach when he isn’t carrying his message to meetings in distant countries.

So I called him, found him stateside and asked him to comment on Judge Gray’s thesis.

He immediately took issue with the headline, saying, “This is a war we can’t win and never will. We can’t stop people from doing what they know will help the misery they are feeling. We can simply put out ideas in ways that they will be listened to and hopefully acted on.”

What sort of ideas?

Pursch comes down foursquare with Gray’s emphasis on both education and treatment. “All addictions,” he said, “are the same in that they start as an experiment and slowly become a part of one’s life. It is essential to stop a victim before he becomes addicted and the family is terribly important because that’s where education starts.”

Although he acknowledges the economic and social advantages, Pursch is less affirmative about legalization, saying: “When prohibition was the law of the land, people didn’t stop drinking. And they didn’t stop when it was legalized again, either. The same thing would happen with other drugs. Once legalized, the people who use them would keep right on using drugs without the battle to get them. Nothing much would change.”

So what does he see as the best hope of preventing or halting drug addiction?

“Making addicts or potential addicts face the fact that drug addiction — including alcohol — will cause them to lose something they desire even more than the relief of drugs. An addict will stop doing drugs once his habit is detected, confronted and he is made to understand that the price of losing his job or children and family is greater than whatever he gets from the drugs.”

At the risk of flogging a dead horse, I’d like to pick up where Tony Dodero left off in solving the ongoing problem of whether to print web-based reader comments in the Pilot. This one is easy. For starters and finishers, you quite simply don’t print anything that doesn’t come with a checkable name attached.

Whether or not to print signed personal vendettas is a judgment call. But printing charges and opinions from writers who lack the guts to sign their names isn’t. It invites both libel and a bad rep for the publication. And it gives a platform to people who don’t care — or dare — to stand behind their words.

There was an excellent example in Tony’s column. The principal of TeWinkle School was bleeding from an anonymous attack that he said was based on misconceptions and myths. A TeWinkle parent called the same letter “not only false but borderline slander.”

But once it is printed, it’s out there, leaving the party attacked frustrated, angry and forced needlessly on the defensive rather than leave the false information unchallenged.

I’m quite aware that there are sometimes circumstances that require anonymity in order to make useful, even critical, information public. But without a name attached, it is impossible to check and shouldn’t be printed until it can be.

This has nothing to do with the Internet being a “rough and tumble place.” Of course it is. But that leaves plenty of room for tough, lively, legitimate comment.

Now that almost 11,000 of my neighbors in Newport Beach have decided to invest $116,000 of our money to try to force feed the location of new City Hall, I think we should consider possibilities to piggy-back on that election next February. Get more bang for our bucks.

How about voting on whether or not to require proof of residence in Newport-Mesa in order to fly out of John Wayne airport? Or maybe just deny use of the airport to all Irvine residents.

Or how about using the ballot to require Costa Mesa to hire a real city attorney?

You get the idea. If you have other, better issues on which the town hall method of governing might be used to reach a decision, send them along and I’ll air them out here.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.