Pubdate: Wed, 07 Jun 2000
Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA)
Copyright: 2000 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
Contact:  PO Box 120191, San Diego, CA, 92112-0191
Fax: (619) 293-1440
Website: http://www.uniontrib.com/
Forum: http://www.uniontrib.com/cgi-bin/WebX
Author: Lionel Van Deerlin
Note: Van Deerlin represented a San Diego County district in Congress for 
18 years.

DRUG CZAR CHALLENGES CALIFORNIA VOTERS

We've all heard the familiar rap against generals -- that they tend to 
fight every new war with weapons and tactics from the last one.

As an enlisted man, I never was positioned to second-guess a general. And I 
surely would hesitate to argue with a czar  -- the lofty title, Lord help 
us, now borne by retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

But the longer we watch Czar McCaffrey's stumbles in America's fight 
against drugs, the clearer it becomes that this is just another general 
waging the wrong war.

On June 1, the California secretary of state validated a record number of 
citizen signatures on a proposed initiative radically overhauling our drug 
laws. This strangely named proposition, the Drug Treatment Diversion 
Program, needed just over 400,000 signers to qualify for the November 
ballot. Its sponsors came in with 713,849.

As if shot from a Civil War canister cannon, McCaffrey was in California 
within 48 hours. He denounced the new ballot proposal as "a poison pill" 
that would dismantle the present system for handling narcotics offenders.

Poison pills aside, the dismantling Czar McCaffrey fears is precisely what 
those petition-signers had in mind. McCaffrey thinks the drug laws he 
oversees are doing the job. He seems undisturbed that one-half of the 
nearly 2 million Americans now behind bars were put there on drug or 
drug-related offenses.

But the horde of Californians who deplore this -- and who signed petitions 
seeking change -- would fill the Los Angeles Coliseum eight times over. It 
could be that people are out of patience with McCaffrey and others, in and 
out of government, whose outdated weaponry seems useless against a rampant 
social problem.

In their chain of command, generals (much less, czars) are not easily 
attuned to democracy. But there is a certain fatheadedness in civilian 
leaders who cannot or will not heed what the people are telling them. In 
the last two general elections, California and a half-dozen other states, 
plus the District of Columbia, voted to legalize marijuana for medicinal 
use under a doctor's prescription.

Yet almost nowhere has state or local law enforcement permitted the drug to 
be dispensed without considerable harassment. In Arizona, moreover, voters 
had to approve their statewide initiative a second time when the 
Legislature moved to void the initial vote.

And for a half-million residents of Washington, D.C., who are still wards 
of the federal government, the conflict with authority was drawn even more 
sharply. Under orders from congressional overseers, district officials were 
barred from even tabulating the votes in a local referendum empowering 
physicians to recommend pot smoking for patients with certain illnesses.

(Media "exit polling" had shown the vote at 80 percent in favor.)

The principal purpose of California's new ballot initiative is to treat 
drug users for their possible addiction instead of just locking them up. 
Persons convicted on first or even second "possession" offenses would be 
placed on probation, under supervised health care.

Backers of the measure insist that dealing with drug victims outside prison 
walls would cost less than one-fifth what we're spending under the harsher 
methods McCaffrey favors.

The revised statute would show no leniency toward persons producing or 
selling narcotics, or with a record of violent crime.

But generals (and especially those advanced to czar status) don't give up 
easily. This one is not about to fall on his sword.

If you think the proposed new approach will work, then "you obviously don't 
understand the nature of the addict's brain disease," McCaffrey asserted in 
his hastily mounted campaign of opposition.

Ever the deferential enlisted man, I won't challenge a general's right to 
practice medicine without a license. But some might think McCaffrey's 
expertise in trench warfare and close-order drill does not qualify him to 
lecture us on brain disease. Or much else.

Does it seem illogical, moreover, that doctors today are free to prescribe 
the highly addictive narcotic morphine for easing pain, but not the far 
milder derivatives of marijuana?

An eminent trio of public servants, starting with William Bennett, has 
accepted this oddly un-American designation, "drug czar." All have been 
longer on rhetoric than on delivering the solutions one might expect of czars.

Other than jampacked prison cells, of course.

Perhaps the people of California, come November, will have shown us a 
better way.

Van Deerlin represented a San Diego County district in Congress for 18 years.
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