Pubdate: 18 Jul 1998 Source: The Economist Contact: http://www.economist.com AN OFFICER AND A SOCIAL WORKER America's drug tsar, Barry McCaffrey, has a one-theme cv. He is a general. He is the son of a general. His own son is a major; his daughter holds the rank of captain in the National Guard. He has three Purple Hearts, awarded for wounds received in battle; he has commanded the biggest mechanised advance in history, leading a pincer of 26,000 soldiers behind Iraqi lines during the Gulf war, then slaughtering the retreating Republican Guard. In 1996, when Mr. McCaffrey got the job of drugs tsar, he brought his background with him: several army buddies came along to help run his new command. So it is not surprising when the general is described, as he was this week in the leading Dutch newspaper, as "the old war-horse of the repressive American drug policy". For who better than a career officer to pursue, with military bone-headedness, America's self-defeating war on drugs? Or so you might think, until you meet him; for this general turns out to demonstrate that cv is not destiny. He has a predictable military demeanour; he is a tough boss, a tough talker, a tough man to interrupt. But, for the most part, the drug tsar's message is decidedly unmilitary. Rather than mouthing the slogans of the "drugs war", Mr. McCaffrey prefers a medical metaphor: he describes drug abuse by one in 17 Americans as a "cancer". Rather than pouring ever more money into military counter-smuggling efforts, Mr. McCaffrey prefers to emphasise unmilitary campaigns to rehabilitate drug addicts. "We were promised a general and got a social worker," a Republican has complained. On July 9th Mr. McCaffrey confirmed the unmilitary nature of his methods by launching a new ad campaign, the biggest ever plotted by the federal government. Over the next five years, American taxpayers will contribute $1 billion towards an anti-drug publicity blitz on television and radio, in newspapers and on the Internet; private donors will match that. Mr. McCaffrey claims that the target audience - young Americans and their parents - will see an anti-drug message four times a week on average. If corporate America uses ads to sell sneakers and sodas, Mr. McCaffrey reasons, then America's government should use ads to drive down drug abuse. And not just ads. Mr. McCaffrey hopes that the publicity campaign will energise thousands of community organisations - from schools to churches to boy-scout groups - that might spread the anti-drug gospel. At the moment, the drug tsar's office works with 4,000 local groups that help to put the word out; it aims to expand its network to 4,000 soon. There are plans to recruit 22m small businesses to a drug-abstention effort. The army has already proved that a determined employer can make a difference - over 50% of soldiers abused drugs in the igloos, compared with around 3% in 1995 - and Mr. McCaffrey aims to repeat that success among civilian firms. None of this will silence the drug tsar's many critics. Republicans love to paint the Clinton administration as soft on drugs, so they will no doubt deride advertising as a wimpish alternative to tough law enforcement - even though the law-enforcement budget has not in fact been cut. Legalisers, for their part, predict that the ads will prove as ineffective as other strategies against drugs. It is possible that the legalisers will be proved right. Ethan Nadelmann, an articulate legaliser at George Soros's Open Society Foundation, recalls an old anti-drug ad that showed an egg in a frying pan, while the voice-over intoned: "This is your brain on drugs." After a while, the ad appears to have backfired: teenagers wore t-shirts with fried eggs on them, mocking the ad's cautionary advice. The same thing could happen to Mr. McCaffrey's commercials, One shows a drug-crazed but attractive woman smashing up a kitchen. It is intended to make the effects of drugs look frightening. To some teenagers, it may make the effects look cool instead. And yet, even if Mr. McCaffrey's ads prove wanting, it is hard to quarrel with the idea that some kind of advertising makes sense. The case for legalisation, which The Economist has long supported, is precisely that drug abuse can be kept down by regulation and education; and that a ban on drugs (which fuels the profits of crime syndicates) is therefore unnecessary. A legal-drugs policy would certainly include publicity campaigns about the ravages of addiction. Indeed the Dutch, whose liberal regime Mr. McCaffrey criticised recently, have waged such campaigns for years. And so, by launching his own ad offensive, Mr. McCaffrey has taken an important step. Without legalising drugs, he is accepting some of the legalisers' arguments: that it is impossible to burn all the coca crops in Latin America or track down every secret airstrip in the Caribbean, and therefore that the best way to discourage drug abuse is to tackle demand rather than supply. Demand, moreover, is best reduced by persuasion, not coercion. So long as people want drugs, coercion will swell the prison population faster than it reduces drug abuse. This is why the general refuses to speak of a "drugs war", a metaphor that encourages the delusion that abuse can be eliminated by force, and talks instead of gradually reducing the abuse rate from 6%, to 3%. This is why he favours drugs courts, which offer drug-abusing criminals the option of going into treatment instead of jail. And yet, despite these concessions, the war of words continues between Mr. McCaffrey and his legalising foes. The reason is not hard to fathom. The drug tsar mixes moderation with flashes of obstinacy, which makes people think he is just a bone-headed general after all. He rails against the medical use of marijuana; he refuses to support needle exchanges, which reduce the spread of AIDS among addicts. If only this war hero could repeat the boldness of his days in uniform, and press his advance into the legalisers' territory a bit more. - ---