GARY CONDIT AND the missing intern. Shark attacks. Madonna’s "Drowned World" tour. We may never have cared about them, but in the media world that existed before September 11, they were all we had.

Now it’s all substance, all the time. But even with the media getting serious and pouring resources into covering the war against terrorism (see "Don’t Quote Me," News and Features, October 26), they still seem unable to do more than one thing at a time. It’s no surprise that stories lacking a terrorism angle are getting little or no attention.

Yet as we’ve learned all too many times before, what’s going on out of view is often more important than what’s taking place on television or on the front page. With that in mind, here are five important stories that have been overlooked since September 11.

The war on drugs. It’s an open-ended military operation that has already cost the United States $1.3 billion and that has brought us into a symbiotic relationship with some of the worst human-rights abusers in the world, many of whom are also notorious drug profiteers. In short, it is a recipe for disaster.

Known as Plan Colombia, this all-but-invisible conflict is a misbegotten effort begun by the Clinton administration, and enthusiastically supported by the Bushies, to wipe out Colombia’s coca crop, which supplies a reported 90 percent of the cocaine that comes into the United States. Plan Colombia draws us into the midst of a 40-year civil war in which there simply is no right and wrong. Anyone seeking to draw analogies to the quagmire of Vietnam should look not to the mountains of Afghanistan, but rather to the jungles of Colombia. This is a war we simply can’t win (see "Catch-22," News and Features, October 13, 2000).

The idea is to eradicate coca and encourage farmers to grow something else. But in order to do that, the US must work with the Colombian army, which has been fighting for decades to wipe out two Marxist groups, the larger and better funded of which is the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC — a terrorist group whose arsenal includes murder and kidnapping, and that raises money by forcibly taxing coca growers.

That puts us on the side of the good guys, right? Wrong. Because it turns out that the army works closely with paramilitary organizations that are every bit as vicious as the FARC is, and that are equally tied up in the drug trade. So, in order to fight left-wing narcoterrorists, we’ve formed an alliance — once removed — with right-wing narcoterrorists. To make matters worse, according to the Web site NarcoNews.com, the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo recently reported that the paramilitaries have received money sent through a Miami bank account, apparently to buy weapons and uniforms.

Meanwhile, according to NPR, more than 600 Colombians disappeared last year at the hands of both government and rebel forces, and Human Rights Watch has criticized the US for its role in fomenting the violence. And the Washington Post reports that, thanks to the collapse of the global coffee market (caused, ironically, by a glut of cheap coffee from Vietnam), the number of Colombian farmers growing coca is actually on the increase.

Oh, what a lovely war.

Welfare-reform reform. When Bill Clinton first ran for president in 1992, he promised to "end welfare as we know it." He did. Many hail the welfare-reform law passed in 1996 as one of his signal accomplishments, and it is often cited as Exhibit A in explaining Clinton’s largely successful effort to move the Democratic Party back to the political center.

Moreover, the law itself appears to have been a striking success. According to statistics compiled by the federal government, the number of families on welfare dropped from an all-time high of more than five million in 1994 to just a bit more than 2.1 million in March of this year, the most recent figures available.

Given that record, it’s easy to forget that welfare reform was implemented during a time of plenty, in the midst of an economic boom so pervasive that almost any law aimed at moving people from the welfare rolls to the work force, no matter how misguided and draconian, would have looked like a brilliant piece of social legislation.

"Employers were taking anything that walked through the door, quite frankly," says Steve Collins, executive director of the Massachusetts Human Services Coalition, a liberal advocacy group.

Now comes the rest of the story. The country is already in a recession, fueled by the dot-com excesses of the late 1990s and exacerbated by terrorism. And we’re about to find out just how effective — and cruel — the welfare-reform law really is.

Given the new reality, it’s instructive to re-read an article that the Atlantic Monthly published in March 1997, before anyone knew that the economy was about to shift into hyperdrive. In the piece, titled "The Worst Thing Bill Clinton Has Done," former Clinton-administration official Peter Edelman offered evidence that the law would push some 2.6 million people, including 1.1 million children, into poverty. Moreover, Edelman argued that the five-year limit on benefits made no sense given that some 30 percent of recipients (according to one study) were women caring for disabled children or who were disabled themselves, and that 36 percent (according to another study) had learning disabilities that made even simple jobs, such as operating a cash register, almost impossible to master. Senator Ted Kennedy, Edelman noted, had gone so far as to describe the law as "legislative child abuse."

Fortunately, Congress — and Massachusetts officials — will soon have a chance to set things right, as both the federal and state welfare-reform laws come up for reauthorization in 2002. Unfortunately, there’s no sign yet that elected officials get it. Collins, for instance, says he’s pleased that Governor Jane Swift wants to include education in the work requirement — but disturbed that she wants to increase the number of hours that recipients must work, calling her proposal "the usual good thing/bad thing."

In a July op-ed piece for the New York Times, Harvard Kennedy School professor William Julius Wilson and Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin reported that women who had moved from welfare to work were more likely than not to be living below the federal poverty line, with many lacking health insurance for themselves and their children. "We have received a lot of information about the good news of welfare reform," they wrote. "Americans need to be aware of its limitations as well."