DEA CHIEF FOLLOWS FAILED POLICY IN ANTI-DRUG "CRUSADE"

"I would hope that we are judged by the lives that are touched and
the hope that we give America," declared Asa Hutchinson, President
Bush's new Drug Enforcement Agency chief during a news conference on
his first day in his new job.

Considering that the DEA seeks to maximize the number of people that
it sends to prison each year for drug offenses, such "touching"
rhetoric should be chilling. But Hutchinson is barreling forward
with page after page from Bill Clinton's rhetorical playbook.

At the same Aug. 20 news conference, Hutchinson announced, "I think
part of my mission is to give hope to America." A few weeks earlier,
Hutchinson made a stunning announcement: "I am excited to have the
opportunity to serve Arkansas and the country by beginning our great
national crusade against illegal drugs."

Perhaps Hutchinson has been too busy to tour any prisons recently.
Prisons are overflowing with hundreds of thousands of drug offenders.
In the same week in which he took over at the DEA, a federal report
bragged that the number of people convicted in federal drug courts
had doubled since 1986.

Hutchinson's talk about "beginning" a "crusade" against illegal drugs
signals the Bush administration's intention to ratchet up the drug
war. Yet the evidence of the failure of the punitive approach is
overwhelming.

Despite conservative caterwauling during recent years, President
Clinton actually greatly intensified the drug war. Four million
Americans were arrested for marijuana violations, the vast majority
for simple possession during Clinton's reign. The number of people
arrested for drug offenses rose by 73 percent between 1992 and 1997,
according to the American Bar Association.

But Clinton's crackdown was a dismal failure. More Americans died of
drug overdoses and more Americans went to hospital emergency rooms
for drug-related problems in 1998 than ever before.

More high school students (90 percent) reported that marijuana was
"fairly easy" or "very easy" to get than ever before. The price of
heroin and cocaine were near all-time lows at the end of the 1990's,
signaling the total failure of U.S. interdiction policies.

Like a good Washingtonian, Hutchinson is responding to these debacles
by redefining the baseline: "I think you have to put this in
perspective, that whenever you look at child abuse, whether you look
at teen violence, whenever you impact people's lives, it's a victory."

Thus, as long as the DEA continues sending tanker-loads of people to
prison each year, the drug war is going just fine and dandy.

Hutchinson was asked by the Philadelphia Inquirer what action he
would take to stem the flow of fraudulent arrest statistics from the
DEA (which, in the past, has routinely seized credit for drug busts
made by other police agencies or other nations). He responded: "We
have to have the correct moral compass and the proper training to
make sure we gather our statistics in a correct and truthful fashion."

But Hutchinson seems far too infatuated by the righteousness of law
enforcement to exert the effort to make the DEA go straight.

At his inaugural news conference as DEA chief, Hutchinson proclaimed,
"I believe that law enforcement sets the right tone for America."
During his time as a congressman, he was perennially hysterical about
any proposal to limit the power of law enforcement. In 1998, when
Congress was considering a law to require federal prosecutors to
cease violating the ethics code of state bar associations, Hutchinson
exploded: "This would jeopardize our fight in the war against drugs.
The winner would be the drug cartels, fraudulent telemarketing
operations and Internet pornographers."

In 1999, when Congress was considering a law to restrict federal
agents' power to confiscate private property, Hutchinson proposed a
substitute bill that would have greatly increased government's power
to grab. Hutchinson whined on the House floor, "How does disarming
law enforcement fit into the war on drugs?"

Thus, decreasing a DEA agent's power to seize someone's car is the
equivalent of taking away his sidearm. Apparently, the main
"armament" in the war on drugs is the sweeping power of law
enforcement over nonviolent, private citizens.

In his new job, Hutchinson occasionally sounds like a bleeding-heart
liberal, declaring that the DEA must embark on "a compassionate
crusade." Unfortunately, people suffering from the side effects of
chemotherapy are outside the bounds of Hutchinson's compassion.

The new DEA chief declared, "It is very important that we understand
that we don't want to do anything to take pain medication away from
people. We all have sympathy for folks that need medication, but we
have to listen to the scientific and medical community and they're
saying that marijuana has no legitimate medical purpose."

According to Hutchinson's view, Americans should pretend that recent
studies in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The
American Journal of Psychiatry and the British medical journal Lancet
on Marijuana's medical benefits and risk were never published.

Perhaps it is impossible to fight a "war on drugs" without
institutionalized dishonesty. Hutchinson's comments signal that drug
policy is likely to be the area where the Bush administration does
the most harm to civil liberties. Regardless of how much the "great
crusade" is ratcheted up, the government will continue losing its war
to control the daily life and habits of every citizen.