(FORTUNE Magazine) – Your servant was recently boning up on drug therapy, but not because he needs any. Friends, our studies were undertaken for defensive purposes only. We are still playing deep safety, as it were, against claims that government spending ) can solve the country's social problems, and the latest such claim was a bomb heaved into the end zone on behalf of drug therapy. Dazzling metaphor, eh? The case for lots more spending on social programs is coming at you nowadays with a new sales pitch. The pitch: If only the country tackled its domestic problems with the resolve and intensity manifested in Operation Desert Storm, then poverty, crime, and illiteracy would soon enough be on the run, just like Saddam's legions. Some PR genius talked the President into including a thought somewhat along these lines in his March 6 address to Congress. But the Desert Storm syndrome is discernible mostly among such Democratic thinkers as Bill Bradley, Mario Cuomo, and Tom Daschle. Daschle is the South Dakota Senator whose daydreams recently made it onto page one of the New York Times. In correspondent David Rosenbaum's portentous lead, ''Senator Tom Daschle has this dream: Now that the war is over, the government and the news media begin to focus on domestic problems with the same intensity they gave the Persian Gulf.'' The Times article then circles warily around various practical difficulties -- most of them budgetary -- associated with any ''dramatic initiatives.'' But the author evidently feels it necessary to give one solid example of what could be done if only those difficulties went away and Daschle got his wish. This brings him and us to the drug therapy program. Says the article: ''A recently published study of prisoners ten years after their discharge showed that more than three-quarters of those required to undergo antidrug therapy while in prison committed no crimes after they left prison.'' The study is said to have bowled over Congressman Charles E. Schumer, a Brooklyn Democrat, who has, accordingly, proposed a $150 million program to provide such treatment to all addicted federal prisoners. If the study in question demonstrated what the Times said it did, Schumer had reason to be bowled. Justice Department data show that half or more of all prison inmates have drug habits, and that a sizable majority of all prisoners released have been rearrested within three years. So a therapy program that kept more than three-quarters of those treated out of trouble for ten years would be doing something quite unprecedented, and we asked Schumer's office for more details. They turn out to be in the July 1990 testimony of drug researcher Douglas S. Lipton, appearing before the House subcommittee on criminal justice. $ It also turns out -- here we are leaping into the air in the end zone -- that the program does far less than the Times says. First, the program was not about prisoners ''required to'' undergo therapy, but about a self-selected group that elected to take therapy. Second, the ''more than three-quarters'' calculation pertains only to prisoners within this group who elected to stay in the program for nine months or more. Third, the group of inmates to whom the program was offered excluded some of the tougher cases -- e.g., characters with histories including extensive violence, arson, or sex crimes. Fourth, the period during which they are known to have remained unarrested after release was three years, not ten years. Fifth, the group studied was in New York City, where we happen to know that many a mugger remains unarrested forever. Sixth, Lipton's testimony mentions comparable-seeming drug-therapy programs with much lower success rates. We rule it an interception.