WORRISOME SIGNALS ON DRUGS

The Bush administration has been sending disappointing signals to those who
had hoped the new team might fashion a better balance between military
interdiction of drug producers abroad and treatment for drug addicts at
home. President Bush's reported plan to nominate John Walters as chief of
the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy suggests a clear
preference for military and law enforcement strategies, the traditional
emphasis, as opposed to more effective treatment strategies. Even before
the formal announcement, his expected nomination has stirred sharp
commentary from critics and supporters. The Senate should subject him to a
rigorous examination of his priorities before confirming his appointment.

Mr. Walters was the top deputy to William Bennett, the drug czar in the
previous Bush administration. Together with Mr. Bennett and John J.
DiIulio, Mr. Bush's appointee to head a White House office on faith-based
and community initiatives, Mr. Walters wrote a book on crime and drugs in
1997 that advanced the theory that a burgeoning generation of drug-dealing
juvenile "superpredators" would sharply increase the level of teenage
violence. The theory has since been discredited, as the rate of juvenile
crime has dropped by half.

Mr. Walters has advocated an accelerated battle against drugs at their
source in Latin America, hailing foreign interdiction programs as cheap and
effective. In fact they are anything but. Interdiction efforts remain
indispensable to American drug policy, but there are inherent limitations
on their effectiveness, as the steady flow of drugs into this country over
the decades shows. Interdiction cannot succeed without a more robust effort
to curtail the demand for drugs at home.

There is a growing recognition that treatment programs for addicts are more
cost-effective than enforcement and interdiction in reducing drug use. Yet
treatment is currently available for only half of those who need it. Nearly
two-thirds of the federal government's $19.2 billion annual drug-fighting
budget is still spent on interdiction and enforcement. Mr. Walters has
given little indication that he understands this problem. Instead he has
derided advocates of more funding for treatment as "the latest
manifestation of the liberals' commitment to a `therapeutic state' in which
government serves as the agent of personal rehabilitation."

Another signal of the administration's emphasis on the enforcement side of
drug control was the reported choice of Representative Asa Hutchinson, a
former federal prosecutor in Arkansas who achieved national prominence as
one of the House managers in former President Clinton's impeachment trial,
to become the next head of the Drug Enforcement Administration. He would
serve in the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft, who
like Mr. Walters has a history of favoring interdiction and enforcement
while disparaging treatment. President Bush needs to find ways to ensure
comparable prominence and funding for treatment programs to create balance
in the administration's overall effort.

President Bush, who has acknowledged his own problems with alcohol earlier
in life, has rightly spoken of addiction as an "illness" and emphasized the
need to reduce demand in the United States. His administration, to its
credit, has proposed a 6 percent increase for federal treatment programs in
this year's budget and a 16 percent increase for addiction research, but
the budget is still heavily tilted toward enforcement. Some hoped that with
new leadership at the drug control office, Congress might be nudged toward
a shift in priorities. The choice of Mr. Walters would suggest otherwise.