DRUG WAR POLITICS

The presidential candidates have not widely touted their plans to deal with
drug abuse. Is it because of their own suspect histories?

Oct. 12, 2000 | Al Gore and George Bush have strenuously avoided discussing
the $19 billion drug war for most of the presidential campaign -- a
deafening silence compounded by the national media's peculiar inclination
not to press the candidates on drug-related issues beyond their own alleged
(Bush) and acknowledged (Gore) use of illicit substances.

So it was something of a landmark moment in the campaign when Bush finally
broke his silence on the issue last Friday by taking a swipe at the Clinton
administration's drug war policies. In a speech in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Bush
deplored what he claimed was an increase in teenage drug use caused by
Clinton and Gore "sending the wrong message" and "failing to show
leadership."

Yet Bush's critique missed by a mile. It's true, as he stated, that teenage
marijuana use climbed through most of the 1990s. But that trend occurred
throughout the Western world, from lenient Switzerland to France, whose drug
laws are nearly as tough as ours. Although Bush argued that the U.S.
situation resulted from a "leadership gap," any half-serious examination of
the topic makes W's claim appear dubious.

In 1996, Clinton covered his "never-inhaled" flanks by appointing Gen. Barry
McCaffrey as the nation's drug czar. The staffing of the White House drug
office immediately shot up even higher than it was under Daddy Bush, when
former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez filled his office with political hacks. The
anti-drug budget has increased from $12 billion to $19 billion under
McCaffrey's leadership, and around the country drug arrests are up 50
percent.

Clinton was the first presidential candidate of the generation that
experimented widely with drugs; this year's election is the first in which
both candidates have found themselves battered by questions about drug use,
a situation that is likely to occur in every election from now on. The two
candidates, naturally, have offered fuzzy answers to reporters' hard
questions about their youthful indiscretions. They appear far more
comfortable promising to get -- and stay -- tough on drugs.

Gore released a drug war plan quietly in May. Now that Bush has also weighed
in on the issue, the dual plans reveal one area both men have in common:
They think that drug use should be treated -- in prison.

"I think it's very unfortunate that they have these drug backgrounds because
it means neither of them is willing--at least in a campaign--to make a move
toward less harsh policies, because that would open them up to attacks they
can do without," says Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology at the
University of Maryland.

"Clinton's infamous line about never having inhaled was very expensive,"
Reuter says. "It really cut down his options a lot. Gore is conspicuously
uninterested in this topic. And obviously for Bush, given how prominent the
issue was early in his campaign, he has no room for maneuver, and probably
no instinct for it either."

Bush, by his own admission, was a heavy drinker until 1988. In a classic
Clintonian nondenial denial, he has claimed that any illegal drugs he did or
didn't do he stopped doing if he was doing them 25 years ago, when he was 28
years old. "Young and irresponsible," maybe, as he has said, but certainly
not a minor. People doing the same things that he was possibly doing back
then can get thrown in prison today -- and particularly if they live in
Bush's home state.

Gore claims to have smoked pot only occasionally while at Harvard, in Vietna
m and during graduate school. But a few friends' recollections suggest his
use may have exceeded the once-in-a-while toke. Jerry Roberts, managing
editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and a dorm-mate of Al Gore and actor
Tommy Lee Jones at Harvard in the late 1960s, jokingly told a group of
journalists attending a conference last month that when Jones told the
Democratic Convention about how he and Al would watch "Star Trek," it was a
"euphemism" for smoking dope.

One former acquaintance, John Warnecke, claims that he and Gore smoked dope
regularly through 1976, when they both worked at the Tennesseean newspaper
in Nashville. Gore even had his own roach clip, Warnecke says. (The Gore
campaign claims Warnecke is wrong.)

Although Nixon started the drug war, it really came to occupy a central
place in American politics some time after 1976, the year that Keith Suchard
and Sue Rusche, two suburban Atlanta moms, noticed that their seventh grade
kids were getting stoned all the time. The women wrote letters to their
congressman and the head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse; the
nationwide parents' movement they launched gave the war on drugs permanent
fuel because it proved that white suburban swing voters were eager consumers
of a tough-on-drugs message.

Twenty-four years and millions of arrests later, the war on drugs seems as
healthy as ever. However, politicians have apparently started to accept the
fact that police alone -- whether in Baltimore or Cartagena, Colombia --
can't stop the drug problem. In addition to being tough on crime,
politicians are increasingly paying lip service, at least, to prevention and
treatment.

Last week, Bush promised to dump more money into training parents to talk to
their kids about drugs, more money for community anti-drug policing, more
money for coca bushwacking in the Andes and interdiction flights. But one of
the keynotes of Bush's proposal was the call for more drug testing and
treatment in prisons, along with more funding for drug courts that offer
alternatives to incarceration. Gore's anti-drug plan -- called "Get clean to
get out, stay clean to stay out" -- also calls for drug testing and
treatment of inmates, and beefing up the drug courts. Bush's package calls
for additional spending of $2.7 billion over five years, Gore's for an extra
$5.3 billion over 10 years -- which amounts to pretty much the same thing.

The drug courts are a varied set of institutions around the country in which
people arrested for drugs can avoid prison by spending up to 18 months in
heavily supervised treatment. The first drug court was set up in Miami in
1989, when Janet Reno was district attorney there. The idea was to help deal
with some of the thousands of crack addicts whose cases were swamping
regular courts.

Several cities began copying Miami's drug court, and in 1994 Congress
authorized federal funding to support the courts -- there are an estimated
580 around the country right now. Judges and drug counselors alike favor the
courts, because they combine the carrot of a new start with the stick of
threatened prison time for those who repeatedly fail urine tests during the
process. California, with more than 120 of the courts, leads the field.

Texas, under Gov. Bush, lags far behind, as it does in drug treatment as a
whole.

At the moment there are only six functioning drug courts in Texas, and many
of them are underfunded. "We've had problems getting stable funding," says
Judge Vi McGuinness, who has run a drug court in Beaumont for seven years.
"Nobody at the state level has shown much interest."

There are more than 28,000 people in prison on drug charges in Texas, up
from 17,000 when Bush became governor, and probably another 50,000 inmates
with drug problems of some kind. But there are only 5,300 treatment spaces
inside the prisons -- a third of the number that Bush's predecessor,
Democrat Ann Richards, had promised to establish before she was unseated by
Bush.

"We have one of the highest prison populations in the country," McGuinness
says. "We built them like crazy and they're starting to fill up. They're
going to have to make a decision at the state level about whether they want
to just keep engorging the prisons or do something about the problem. Even
little Louisiana has 32 of the courts and we've only got six."

Bush does seem to be taking notice -- perhaps because of the coming
election.

Judge Larry Gist, who brought the drug court idea to Texas after observing
it in Florida, says Bush's director of justice called him just within the
past week to set up a meeting to talk about the courts.

Many treatment advocates are heartened to hear that Bush and Gore are at
least discussing increasing treatment, even if it is treatment in prison. At
the moment, only half of the 4 million estimated drug addicts in the country
have access to treatment. In prison, only about 5 percent of the inmates
with substance abuse problems get treatment, according to Stephen Belenko of
Columbia University.

"Treatment is good wherever you provide it," says Dr. Robert Schwartz, a
treatment specialist who works in Baltimore for billionaire George Soros'
Open Society Institute. "But whether the addict is coerced into it by facing
prison, or losing his job or his family, it only works in the long term if
it's voluntary."

What that means is that addicts have to have some reason for stopping using
drugs. To give them the reason, says Schwartz, you have to offer them
comprehensive packages that include education or job training, psychiatric
care and efforts to get them off dope. Soros' group is helping Baltimore
provide treatment on demand to addicts, along with ancillary services.

In the opposite corner of the country, in the coyote-infested corner of
Southern California where he works as a counselor to methamphetamine
addicts, Jay McGuire sometimes wishes that tough-on-crime politicians could
see what he sees.

"There are a lot of people who believe all these guys should just be put in
jail but if they met some of them they'd see treatment does work. Not
always, but often," he says. "A lot of these guys are 18, 19, 20 years old
and they're going to prison for something they believed was the norm. They
grow up seeing dad sitting in the front room shooting dope."

McGuire, 41, and a recovering addict himself, has been a counselor in Indio,
Calif., for nine years, the last two in a program that treats addicts sent
over by the Riverside County drug court. Seventy percent of the addicts
graduate the one-year course without falling off the wagon -- a statistic
that bears up around the country, although it's a little early to know how
much of a dent in drug addiction, and crime, these special courts will make.

There's one 23-year-old kid in McGuire's current group who's getting the
first treatment he's had since he became an addict seven years ago. "The
other day I looked at him and said, 'How does it feel to wake up not feeling
sick to your stomach with snot running down your face?"' said McGuire. "And
he broke into this shit-eating grin and said, "It feels good, Jay.' And I
almost cried."