Pubdate: Thu, 10 May 2001
Source: Public Broadcasting Service (US)
Show:  The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Copyright: 2001 MacNeil-Lehrer Productions and PBS
Contact:  www.pbs.org/newshour/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1368
Host: Ray Suarez
Guests: Mathea Falco and Melvyn Levitsky, former assistant secretaries of 
state for international narcotics matters

WAR ON DRUGS

President Bush today named John Walters head of the White House drug 
office. Ray Suarez talks with two former assistant secretaries of state for 
international narcotics matters: Mathea Falco and Melvyn Levitsky.

RAY SUAREZ: President Bush announced John Walters as his new drug policy 
director in a Rose Garden ceremony this morning.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: John Walters and I believe the only human and 
compassionate response to drug use is a moral refusal to accept it. The 
most effective way to reduce the supply of drugs in America is to reduce 
the demand for drugs in America. (Applause) Therefore, this administration 
will focus unprecedented attention on the demand side of this problem.

RAY SUAREZ: John Walters is a conservative Republican who has held several 
posts in the Office of National Drug Control Policy, in the first Bush 
Administration as chief of staff and deputy director for Drug Czar Bill 
Bennett and briefly in the Clinton Administration as acting director.

This morning, Walters reinforced the President's theme of fighting drugs 
from the demand side.

JOHN WALTERS: We will help the addicted find effective treatment and remain 
in recovery.

We will shield our communities from the terrible human toll taken by 
illegal drugs.

And we will stop illegal drug use and the drug trade from funding threats 
to democratic institutions throughout our hemisphere.

RAY SUAREZ: In addition to nominating Walters, the President outlined a 
multi-faceted program to reduce drug use. President Bush said since 
children cite parents as the number one reason they don't use drugs, he'll 
create a parent drug corps, which will provide support to educate and train 
parents in effective drug prevention. The President said he would increase 
funding for drug free communities programs and drug-free workplace 
programs. In order to get drug treatment for the 5 million hard core users 
in America, President Bush announced $1.6 over the next five years to close 
the treatment gap and a state-by-state inventory of treatment needs and 
capacity; to advance understanding of drug abuse and addiction, the 
President has proposed significantly increasing funding for National 
Institute on Drug Abuse and National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and 
Alcoholism, and to support drug treatment for prisoners, probationers, and 
parolees, President Bush asked for a comprehensive plan to ensure federal 
prisons are drug free, expanding drug testing for probationers and 
parolees, and strengthening the U.S. system of drug courts.

After the ceremony, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Secretary of Health 
and Human Services Tommy Thompson spoke to reporters.

Ashcroft was assigned the task of developing the plan to reduce drug use by 
prisoners.

JOHN ASHCROFT: This is a comprehensive, balanced approach by the President 
of the United States. His remarks today did focus more on demand than on 
interdiction. He did not talk about problems we have with drugs coming 
across the border.

He's understood that there's been a lot of emphasis on that. Today he 
talked about how we can help people avoid the real problem of being 
dependent on drugs.

RAY SUAREZ: Thompson was asked by President Bush to report on the treatment 
programs in different states.

TOMMY THOMPSON: There's never been a commitment like this, and there's 
never been a unified organization like the President is putting on the 
field to fight drug abuse, so this President has really taken the lead, and 
he is absolutely passionate about it.

RAY SUAREZ: Now to assess President Bush's drug policy we're joined by two 
former Assistant Secretaries of State for International Narcotics Matters. 
Mathea Falco served during the Carter Administration. She's now President 
of Drug Strategies, a non-profit research institute.

Melvyn Levitsky was in the first Bush Administration. A retired career 
Foreign Service officer, he is now a professor of public administration and 
international relations at Syracuse University's Maxwell School. Mathea 
Falco, let's start with you. What do you make of the overall presentation 
made by the President earlier today?

MATHEA FALCO: Well, Ray, it's striking how the President and his new 
administration seems to have embraced demand reduction as the predominant 
priority in our drug policy.

I must say that the record that John Walters amassed -- both during his 
public service and in subsequent speeches -- show him to be a classic, 
old-fashioned supply sider who puts interdiction and eradication in foreign 
countries above treatment here at home and who prefers prosecution to 
prevention. Now, they may all have changed how they look at the problem, 
and we can hope so. But there's a very simple way wean can measure their 
sincerity -- and that is follow the money.

The increases in budget spending that the President announced today are a 
very good first step. But they are very small increases in comparison to 
the kinds of funds that are really needed if we're going to make a dent in 
hard-core addiction in this country.

RAY SUAREZ: Ambassador Levitsky, your overview of the Bush strategy as 
announced earlier today?

MELVYN LEVITSKY: Well, I think what the President announced and I'm sure 
John Walters will follow the President's lead on this is a balanced program 
to reduce demand in this country.

The point of this supply side is to make sure that we are not flooded even 
more than we are now with cheap, widely available drugs that will make it 
harder to reduce demand and make it harder to prevent people from taking 
drugs, make it harder for us to treat people who are addicted to drugs.

I think that a billion dollars increase in the treatment side is not a 
small amount of money, as Mathea Falco has just mentioned.

It's more than a good start.

It's a, I think, a strong commitment in this administration to really go 
after this issue.

One of the problems that we faced is that from 1979 until 1992, drug abuse 
in this country went down by more than 50%. It's blipped up a little bit in 
the last eight years.

We have to get back at the source of these problems particularly in 
teen-aged drug use in which the figures are showing a quite remarkable 
turn-around from the lows of the early 1990s. We have to get at this. This 
means work with families, it means working in education and prevention. It 
means treatment.

But it also means going after the supply line. I think it's a disservice to 
John Walters, whom I know as a very dedicated, hard-working man and a 
father, to say that he's a supply sider. This simply is not true.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, there has been a renewed emphasis on demand reduction. 
The President, when he was meeting with President Fox of Mexico, made a big 
point of saying that. Is John Walters the guy to carry out that strategy, 
given what some critics find to be a persistent skepticism about the 
efficacy of treatment and other kinds of measures?

MELVYN LEVITSKY: Well, it depends what you mean in terms of treatment.

I know John very much believes that these programs should be held 
accountable; they should have results.

Treatment is not just revolving door treatment where people go in, get 
treatment, and then come back again.

So we want to try to find the most effective ways to deal with people who 
are addicted to drugs or are very heavy users of drugs.

One of the most important things I think that the President did was to 
really put emphasis on the prison system.

Study after study has shown that coerced, mandatory treatment, long-term 
treatment of people has the most... the best chance of being effective.

And, of course, we have a captive audience of people in prisons. We have 
too many people in prisons, but to get them off drugs, we're going to have 
to have good programs of treatment in our prisons.

The President is going to put money into that. And I was very encouraged to 
hear that.

RAY SUAREZ: Ms. Falco, how out about that? In many of his published 
article, in some of his testimony on Capitol Hill, Mr. Walters has said, 
oh, yes, by all means treatment but treatment where we control the ground, 
we control the terms.

MATHEA FALCO: Well, Ray, prison is the most, lea effective way to reduce 
drug abuse problems.

And the experience of the past 20 years has demonstrated that over and over 
again.

We now know that treatment works.

It can work in the community far more effectively and cheaply than it can 
in prisons. And more important, we haven't talked about the treatment gap 
out there in our communities. Only one in three addicts can now get 
treatment, and that treatment gap has not changed in the last eight years, 
ten years. That's the gap that has to be closed.

So that when President Bush announces this increased spending, we're really 
only talking out about a 10% increase in the treatment budget for each year 
because this increase will be spread out over a period of five years.

Contrast, for example, how much we're putting into our foreign drug wars, 
for example, into Colombia, where the Administration is considering 
investing another billion dollars on top of the $1.3 billion that we 
already have there for U.S. military assistance, high-tech helicopters, the 
international war, which Mel Levitsky thinks has made a difference in 
supplies has not. Over the last two decades we've invested $35 billion in 
trying to reduce the supplies of drugs coming into this country and yet 
heroin and cocaine are more available at cheaper prices now than ever before.

This war overseas does not work. It also can have very tragic consequences 
for the countries themselves, for the region, and as we saw very recently 
in the shoot-down of the missionary plane in Peru. I mean, these are all 
consequences of an ever-deepening drug war where our focus is on 
eradication and military assistance.

RAY SUAREZ: Ambassador Levitsky what's the right balance between all these 
approaches?

MELVYN LEVITSKY: Well, in the first place that's a skewed picture of the 
way the drug war is being fought.

Keep in mind that it's only the federal government that works on the... can 
work on the supply side particularly overseas. So naturally you're going to 
have a higher percentage of the budget spent on the supply side in overseas 
countries because only the federal government does it. A lot of the effort 
that goes on in the United States in prevention and in treatment goes on at 
local and state levels. The second thing I would say about this is that it 
is critically important to our country to - that we help governments like 
Colombia who are trying to seize control.

Half of Colombia is outside the control of its own government. And the 
effort to provide assistance to the Colombian Government, to help it cope 
with a combination of vicious guerillas and vicious drug traffickers and 
terrorists to me seems to be something that is in our national interest.

Now you can argue over how much we should put in and we'll have to see how 
effective this is, but I think that in terms of national interest, this is 
an important, smart thing to do. After all, we have forced drug growth out 
of Peru and out Bolivia. A lot of it has gone to Colombia. But if you're a 
military strategist and you saw that you now have a concentration of the 
poison that we're dealing with in Colombia, it would certainly say to you, 
well, here is an opportunity. It's a problem but it's also an opportunity 
for us to work with the Colombian Government to go after this trade.

And I think -- the other part of this I think that's important is that, 
sure, drugs are cheap and they're widely available.

Well how much more widely available or how much cheaper would they be if we 
gave up e supply side effort?

I think it's important to do it and I think that our government is going to 
continue to do it but I think again in this war, the main effort has to be 
on the home front, and I was very encouraged to hear both the President and 
John Walters acknowledge that and say that we have to do a better job at 
home. That is an absolute truth.

RAY SUAREZ: Mathea Falco, how do you respond?

MATHEA FALCO: Well just to take your point about the success in Peru and 
Bolivia and reducing cocoa production, in fact, production is coming back 
up again in those countries.

And as many law enforcement leaders have noted in recent years, there's a 
kind of balloon effect.

You have an impact in one place and it comes up in another.

In fact, in Northwest Washington, DC, we can grow enough opium poppy to 
supply the entire heroin market in the United States for an entire year. So 
that just gives you an idea of how little area is actually needed to do 
this. So it's my view-- and I think increasingly the evidence 
demonstrates-- that we are not going in any way to make a dent on the 
supply side through these foreign wars. Now, turning back here at home, two 
million people are now behind bars. This is an extraordinarily high number 
of incarcerated prisoners.

Why is this, the great boom in prisoners?

It's because of drug abuse.

Many of them are there for violation of drug laws and many others are there 
essentially because they have serious drug problems.

Now, if we had adequate treatment in the community, we wouldn't have to be 
looking to prisons as the sort of institution of final resort to treat people.

Prisons have become the kind of catch-all in this country for people who 
can't get help anywhere else. And it's a tragic situation, which we need to 
address immediately. If you're going to close the treatment gap in America, 
you have to make funding for treatment, prevention, education, a top priority.

Under the Bush budget, as under the Clinton budget, law enforcement and 
incarceration, foreign drug wars, get two-thirds of the almost $20 billion 
we spend annually.

Even with the increase announced today, those percentages won't change 
because certainly I'm sure at there will be even larger increases I the law 
enforcement side, in the interdiction side.

RAY SUAREZ: Mathea Falco, we're going to have to break it off there. 
Ambassador Levitsky, thank you both for being with us.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jo-D