Pubdate: Fri, 18 May 2001
Source: Sacramento Bee (CA)
Copyright: 2001 The Sacramento Bee
Contact:  http://www.sacbee.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/376
Author: Ariana Huffington

TWO-FACED POLICY ON THE DRUG WAR

The Drug Czar Isn't Listening To What The President Is Saying

When George W. Bush introduced John Walters as his new drug czar last week, 
it was the strangest example of being of two minds since Ray Milland and 
Rosie Grier shared the same torso in "The Thing With Two Heads."

Talk about your mixed messages. There was the president, making a huge 
shift in national drug policy by pledging to close the nation's massive 
"treatment gap" while announcing the appointment of a man who is on record 
deriding the idea that "we need to embrace treatment." Silly me, I always 
thought presidents were supposed to appoint people to their Cabinet who, at 
least roughly, agree with them.

Instead, reading over Bush's and Walters' statements on the drug war, you 
can almost picture them manning opposite sides of the desk on a rancorous 
episode of "Crossfire." "The most effective way," the president said at the 
Rose Garden ceremony marking Walters' nomination, "to reduce the supply of 
drugs in America is to reduce the demand for drugs in America. Therefore, 
this administration will focus unprecedented attention on the demand side 
of this problem."

I half-expected Walters to leap from his seat and begin lashing out, as he 
has done so often in the past, at this "manifestation of the liberals' 
commitment to a 'therapeutic state' in which government serves as the agent 
of personal rehabilitation."

To which the president would no doubt have replied: Huh?

Despite the fact that study after study has shown money spent on treatment 
to be far more effective in cutting drug use than interdiction and 
eradication, Walters has steadfastly clung to the bellicose, 
testosterone-fueled policies he championed as a lieutenant serving under 
drug warriors William Bennett and Bob Martinez in the late '80s and early '90s.

A big fan of "punishment and prisons," he was instrumental in creating the 
first Bush administration's Andean Strategy, a disastrous gift that keeps 
on giving: Without it we would never have seen Roni Bowers and her infant 
daughter murdered in the skies of Peru or the multibillion dollar debacle 
now unfolding in Colombia.

And despite the tens of billions of dollars and the lives we've wasted 
prosecuting our failed drug war, Walters still feels that the answer to the 
crisis lies in flexing our military and law enforcement muscle just a 
little more. As he put it during the White House ceremony: "Our efforts 
rest on the knowledge that when we push back, the drug problem gets smaller."

What planet has this guy been on? Surely not the one where drugs are purer, 
cheaper and more available than they've ever been, even while we've devoted 
incredible resources to "pushing back."

I wonder if his musty, Ramboesque rhetoric was lost on the president, who 
only minutes before had promised a "humane and compassionate response to 
drug use." Is he showing early signs of political schizophrenia? Or just an 
advanced case of rampant hypocrisy -- the latest manifestation of the 
administration's penchant for talking one kind of game while actually 
playing another?

Why else would the president overlook the fact that Walters, whom he called 
"the right person to lead America's anti-drug efforts," recently mocked the 
very notion that drug addiction was anything other than a lapse of moral 
character? "The therapy-only lobby is alive and well and more dogmatic than 
ever," Walters wrote in an op-ed entitled "Just Say No ... To Treatment 
Without Law Enforcement," scoffing at bleeding hearts who think that 
"addiction is a disease, not a pattern of behavior for which people can be 
held responsible."

You know, bleeding hearts like his new boss who, in January, said that 
"addiction to alcohol or addiction to drugs is an illness" and that "we've 
got to do a better job of ... helping people cure themselves of an 
illness." If that's the case, then how, exactly, is a person who 
contemptuously ridicules this belief "the right person"?

And treatment is far from the only facet of drug war policy on which the 
two men have been reading from different talking points. For example, Bush 
has expressed a willingness to reconsider the effectiveness of mandatory 
minimums: "I think a lot of people are coming to the realization that maybe 
long minimum sentences for first-time users may not be the best way to 
occupy jail space and/or heal people from their disease."

Walters, on the other hand, has called the idea that "drug and criminal 
sentences are too long and harsh" one of the "great urban myths of our 
time." He should tell that to the 460,000 nonviolent drug offenders 
currently languishing behind bars. Sadly, it's no myth -- just a nightmare 
- -- that the average federal sentence for a drug offense is 78 months, over 
twice the average sentence for manslaughter. That's manslaughter -- as in 
killing someone.

Walters' appointment is like the clock that strikes 13: Not only is it 
wrong itself, it throws into question every hopeful, pro-treatment 
statement Bush has made since assuming office. Heightening these suspicions 
is the amount of money Bush has allocated for treatment: $320 million a year.

With around 3 million addicts who are not getting treatment, that works out 
to roughly $100 a year -- or 30 cents a day -- for each of them. Hardly 
indicative of a policy Bush claims is "a high priority." Especially when 
compared to the $1.8 billion that's been earmarked for Colombia or the $19 
billion budget Walters will be overseeing.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager