THE WALTERS NOMINATION

It has been two weeks since officials in the Bush administration leaked to
the New York Times the president's intention to name John P. Walters as the
new drug czar. Mr. Walters, who served as deputy director of the White
House Office of National Drug Control Policy during the previous Bush
administration, would be an outstanding choice.

His official nomination, which at the time was said to be imminent,
deserves to be made forthwith.

The longer the delay, the more time Mr. Walters' opponents have to distort
his views.

With his nomination reportedly pending, Mr. Walters declined to comment on
the matter to the New York Times. Meanwhile, in an unseemly assault, Barry
McCaffrey, the retired general whom Mr. Walters would replace as drug czar,
unloaded the heavy artillery on his successor.

The Times, whose news article last month characterized Mr. Walters as "a
law-and-order conservative" and implicitly mocked him for, horror of
horrors, "favor severe sentences for violent felons marijuana smugglers,"
was only too happy to provide Gen. McCaffrey with a forum.

Gen. McCaffrey, who told the Times he had researched Mr. Walters' views,
instructed any future confirmation committee to "carefully consider" what
he clearly considered to be Mr. Walters' heretical views on treatment. "I
am hopeful to maintain a commitment to the bipartisan support for treatment
programs," the general said, unfairly implying that Mr. Walters opposed
drug treatment.

Mr. Walters, who has written on drug policy for the op-ed page of this
newspaper, has indeed opposed what he has called the "therapy-only lobby."
This lobby's antipathy toward law enforcement and punishment, Mr. Walters
argued in a recent essay in the Weekly Standard, requires it to adopt the
ideological dogma that "addiction is a disease, not a pattern of behavior
for which people can be held accountable." In fact, Mr. Walters would
combine treatment with law enforcement and punishment.

His critics, recently exemplified by William Raspberry in an op-ed essay in
The Washington Post, have adopted the strategy of denial.

Mr. Walters "harbors no misgivings over the fact that we've been crowding
our prisons almost to the bursting point with non-violent drug offenders,"
Mr. Raspberry wrote.

Now, that is a ludicrous statement coming from someone who has lived in the
D.C. area as long as Mr. Raspberry has. Indeed, anyone who witnessed the
death and destruction that crack wrought throughout the nation's big cities
- -- and especially in Washington, D.C. -- from the mid-1980s to the
mid-1990s could not honestly view the crack trade and its inevitably
murderous turf wars as a non-violent activity.

William Bennett, the nation's first drug czar, has noted in a response to
Mr. Raspberry's hysterics, that Mr. Walters believes that "first- and
second-time arrestees carrying small quantities of drugs should be
routinely diverted from the criminal justice system to treatment and
prevention programs."

Mr. Walters, of course, is perfectly capable of defending his views and his
record. The time to do that is during the confirmation process after he is
nominated. So let us get on with it.