STILL WALTERS

Bush fulfills a Gore campaign pledge.

So why are the Democrats up in arms?

What a difference a name makes.

Only one year ago on the campaign trail in Atlanta, the pledge was
crystal clear. "If I'm entrusted with the Presidency, I'll send a
strong message to every American child: Drugs are wrong, drugs can
kill you. I'll lead a national crusade to dry up drug demand, hold up
drugs at the border and break up the drug rings that are spreading
poison on our streets." Prisoners and parolees alike would be faced
with a "simple deal": If you want to get out of jail and stay out of
jail, make sure you can pass a drug test.

This week George W. Bush made good on that promise--even though it
wasn't his. For the promise was originally Al Gore's. And it came in a
speech last May in Atlanta, where then-candidate Gore vowed that his
would be a "law enforcement" Presidency. Which fact tells us much
about today's concerted effort to paint the President's choice for
director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, John Walters,
as some kind of law-and-order Dr. Strangelove.

The fury of op-eds and editorials and sound bites now deployed against
his nomination all sound one theme: that Mr. Walters, a former deputy
to Bill Bennett, is all enforcement and no treatment.

Indeed, that was the charge echoed on a recent "Meet the Press" by the
outgoing drug czar, Army General Barry McCaffrey, who called for Mr.
Walters to "educate himself." That was relatively mild compared with
other statements. Ethan Nadelmann, director of New York's Lindesmith
Center, accused Mr. Walters of being "all about punishing people for
their sins," while Eric Sterling, a former Democratic staffer who now
runs the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, told the Detroit Free
Press that "John Walters not only hates drug addictions, he hates drug
addicts, and he certainly hates drug users who are not addicts." And
that's pretty much the way the headlines have played it.

So let's look at treatment.

Yes, it is true that only about two million out of the estimated five
million addicts in America get treatment today.

The problem, however, is that you can't simply build it and they'll
come. The sad, tabloid cases of Robert Downey Jr. and Darryl
Strawberry ought to remind us that effective treatment requires not
only having treatment available, but getting people in and making sure
they stay. We thought Mr. Gore had it right when he put the focus of
the drug issue where it ought to be--on criminals.

As he noted in Atlanta a year ago, two-thirds of America's prisoners
get arrested within three years of release.

More than half have a drug problem when
arrested. Mr. Gore: "We have to stop that revolving door once and for
all. First of all we have to test prisoners for drugs while they are
in jail and break up the drug rings in our prisons.

We have to expand drug treatment within our prisons."

In an editorial last May (headlined "Al Gore's Good Idea") we noted
that the Vice President's remarks came two weeks after an April 13
op-ed on these pages by James Q. Wilson, which argued that
"probationers and parolees constitute the hard core of dangerous
addicts." Mr. Gore's subsequent proposal to treat this problem through
testing and control was based on a concept called "coerced
abstinence," generally credited to UCLA professor Mark Kleiman. Which,
to bring it full circle, happens to be precisely the phrase President
Bush invoked at the Rose Garden ceremony last week in which he
introduced Mr. Walters as his choice for drug czar: "We also recognize
the benefits of coerced abstinence, and so we will support drug courts
and drug testing for prisoners, probationers and parolees."

The larger point here is that nothing has been more debilitating to
America's sense of morale than the idea, expressed most vividly in the
movie "Traffic," that nothing really works.

Mr. Walters does not believe that, and in the larger sense his
selection signals that the best way to treat drug addicts is to
cultivate a culture that tries to keep kids from getting on drugs in
the first place.

That also means recognizing that you can't be serious about treatment
until you acknowledge that in many cases treatment itself depends on
coercion and law enforcement. Only in a place like the Beltway, where
historical memories reach back no further than the last news cycle,
could a man like Mr. Walters be tarred as a right-wing zealot for
looking to do pretty much what Al Gore himself said ought to be done.
In short, the message from this Administration is that it will not buy
into the idea that drugs are somehow innocent fun, or wink at use as
some youthful right of passage, a point underscored by the President's
and Vice President's taking of their own drug tests.

And it fits in well with Mr. Bush's overall message of personal
responsibility, accountability and simple right and wrong.

Yes, Mr. Walters is going to have his share of critics as he
implements such a vision, from liberals who plain don't like law
enforcement to libertarians who don't think drugs should be illegal.
Coming from these quarters, does anyone believe America will really
buy their argument that it's Mr. Walters who's on the fringe?