Pubdate: Mon, 13 Jul 1998 Source: Suck Contact: Website: http://www.suck.com/ Author: Ambrose Beers Editor's Note: Suck is a satirical website with the slogan "A Fish, a Barrel, and a Smoking Gun". It's updated daily. EZ-BAKE OVEN Barry McCaffrey, an old Cold Warrior, has gone on to a new battlefield. And he's getting colder. Speaking before a Senate committee last month without benefit of a pair of steel balls to roll in his hand, the retired Army general said one of those out-there things that would get most of us taken in for observation. Shortly after discussing the threat caused to America's youth by the movie Half-Baked (a wonderful detail that doesn't seem to have made it into any of the news accounts of McCaffrey's testimony), the Clinton administration's so-called drug czar got down to fighting the real enemy. See how many errors in reasoning you can spot: "There is an carefully-camouflaged, exorbitantly-funded, well-heeled, elitist group whose ultimate goal is to legalize drug use in the United States. However, because the impacts of legalization - heroin being sold at the corner store to children with false identifications, the driver of an eighteen-wheeler high on methamphetamines traveling alongside the family minivan, skyrocketing numbers of addicts draining society of its productivity - are so horrifying to the average American, the legalizers are compelled to conceal their real objectives behind various subterfuges. (Currently, 87 percent of Americans reject legalization on its face.) Through a slick misinformation propaganda campaign these individuals perpetuate a fraud on the American people -- a fraud so devious that evensome of the nation's mostrespected newspapers and sophisticated media are capable of echoing their falsehoods." Pretty goddamned entertaining, huh? We like to picture him clenching his jaw and making a squinty-eye at the panel while he speaks, maybe with a stub of slobbery cigar between his teeth. "We got dopers in our wire, gentlemen!" McCaffrey was coy, but The New York Times filled in the blanks the next day. "While McCaffrey named no names," wrote Times reporter Christopher Wren, "he was clearly referring to a coalition of advocacy groups little-known to the public that argues the global war on drugs has cost society more than drug abuse itself. Some of those advocates attracted attention last week with an open letter to the UN secretary-general as the General Assembly opened a three-day special session on drugs." This would be the cabal of secret legalizers. There's no reference to "legalization" in their letter, but remember that they're a sneaky sack of bastards. And just who are they? Well, George Schultz signed the letter. You may remember George from the notoriously subversive, pro-drug Reagan administration, for which he served as secretary of state. Then there were Alan Cranston and Claiborne Pell, former colleagues of the very senators McCaffrey was addressing. George Soros, who is rich and gives money to influence political discussion, like Richard Mellon Scaife, is scary and bad. And so is Javier Perez de Cuellar, a former secretary-general of the United Nations and a known foreigner. Plus 495 others. In fact, the suggestion floated by Schultz and company is simply that the longstanding hit-with-stick throw-in-cage approach to drug use isn't working, while the consequences of both US drug use and the effort to suppress it are making life in other countries - Colombia, to name one example among many - kind of unpleasant. They go on to wonder if, without making drugs legal, it might be possible to simply moderate the law-and-order approach. Alternatives go by the names "medicalization" - long favored by lunatic outsiders like Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke - and harm reduction. (Different advocates define the term medicalization differently. To some, it means offering a limited menu of drugs - marijuana, really - for the treatment of pain and chemotherapy-induced nausea, with a doctor's prescription. To others - Schmoke among them - it means viewing addiction as a treatable illness, rather than as a crime, within limits.) And, yes, quite a few groups involved in that coalition favor the legalization of marijuana. Horror of horrors. It leads straight to children buying heroin at the corner store. Whatever. McCaffrey needn't worry, since there's precisely no danger at all that the dope-loving anarchists are going to be heard over all the screaming. The current US government budget allocates more money than ever to federal anti-drug efforts. If the Clinton administration's plan to hire 1,000 new border-patrol agents - plus 100 new DEA agents, which should fix this drug thing PDQ - seemed like a bit much. Note that some of the people in a position to do something about it thought it wasn't enough. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has called for the death penalty for people repeatedly caught smuggling drugs over the border, called the US$17 billion Clinton-McCaffrey anti-drug plan, "a hodgepodge of half-steps and half-truths." Which is half a truth too much for the ol' Newtster. So, why bother to squawk like a squashed rooster over some letter that offers precisely no threat at all? Well, because you're the nation's leading anti-drug official, and it's hard to make sense when you've been assigned the task of selling a dubious product. The tendency is to overstate things in fairly predictable ways. Like the announcement of a plan "that will subject all suspicious cargo and vehicles to non-intrusive inspections" in an effort to make the US-Mexico border "open to trade, but impermeable to drugs." You try to say any of this with a straight face. If you can pull it off, there may be a job in law enforcement with your name on it. One nicely entertaining example of the profound silliness that arises out of trying to fight an obviously unwinnable war as though it meant something is the press release sent out back in November by McCaffrey's agency, the White House Office of Drug Control Policy: "A new study released by Barry R. McCaffrey, Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, found that in 1995, Americans spent $57.3 billion on illegal drugs." The release went on to quote McCaffrey as pointing out that $57.3 billion could have paid for such I-love-mommy-and-America niceties as "22 billion gallons of milk to feed undernourished infants ... or a year's worth of child care for 14 million kids." Children born to drug addicts unquestionably suffer horrifying deprivation, but to toss that monthly $20 marijuana purchase (yes, we do know your personal habits - we're Suck) into the starving baby bin is a bit of a stretch, huh? But it gets better. Inspired to act by the barrage of bullshit, we called the Macebearer office and got a copy of the complete 109-page report described in the press release. And, yes, we did have to ask several times. The Associated Press story on the report played it straight, but we were wondering how on earth a government agency could possibly know how much money its constituents spend breaking the law. The answer is: They can't. Page 5: "First, the secretive nature of drug-crop production and manufacturing prevents accurate assessments of drug production. Second, with some exceptions, drug dealers and their customers transact business away from public view. Finally, drug users often misrepresent their drug use when interviewed. Thus estimates of retail expenditures must be based on incomplete, inaccurate, and often inconsistent data, as well as assumptions that occasionally lack strong justification." No kidding, no kidding, no kidding, and no kidding. But it's good to hear it straight from the mouth of the milk-'n'-babies source. Especially since the press release didn't make any mention of all those maybes. Similarly amusing language appears throughout the report, by the way. On page 31, an estimate of cocaine shipped into the United States puts that figure at "372 to 458 metric tons" in 1994 and "421 to 513 metric tons" the following year. This much - plus or minus a hundred metric tons. Close enough for government work, guys. And plenty good enough for the war on drugs, where sober thinking pretty clearly misses the point. - --- Checked-by: Melodi Cornett