NATIONAL DRUG POLICY WILL BE MORE CONSERVATIVE THAN COMPASSIONATE

Bush also has to face a potential quagmire in Colombia. While U.S.
intervention there clearly
fails the "Powell Doctrine" tests of a clear objective and an easy victory,
Bush seems unlikely to abandon a military mission in progress, especially
one supposedly against the twin demons of drug cartels and leftist
guerrillas. (Plan Colombia conveniently ignores the right-wing
paramilitaries' involvement in the drug trade.)

In his first interviews as attorney general, John Ashcroft pledged to
"reinvigorate," "renew," "refresh" and "re-launch" the war on drugs,
arguing that the Clinton administration had been lax in fighting narcotics.

It's difficult to imagine how Bill Clinton could have been much harsher,
short of public executions of drug dealers. Under his administration,
federal prisons opened at a rate of almost one a month, confining a
population that is now 58 percent drug offenders -- almost three times the
percentage in state prisons, according to figures from the Washington-based
Sentencing Project. The Clinton administration also refused to fund
needle-exchange programs, prosecuted medical-marijuana patients, and began
to take sides in the Colombian civil war in the name of fighting cocaine.

A devout prohibitionist, Ashcroft is now the top-ranking federal official
dealing with drugs. As of early March, President George W. Bush had not yet
appointed anyone to head the White House drug-policy office. (Candidates
mentioned include former Florida Rep. Bill McCollum, a militant
prohibitionist, and Elizabeth Dole, who has backed both more drug treatment
and more drug testing.) "Ashcroft is the only person in the country who
thinks that drug treatment doesn't make sense," says Marc Mauer of the
Sentencing Project.

Yet, facing a diverse and growing movement to ameliorate or end
prohibition, Bush's drug policy may turn out to be less fanatically
hardline than his father's. "He's made some good noises in some good
directions," says Jerry Epstein, president of the Drug Policy Forum of
Texas. Last year, Bush suggested that medical marijuana was a states'
rights issue. More recently, he has dropped hints about increasing spending
for drug treatment and reducing the 100-to-1 disparity between federal
sentences for crack and powder cocaine. (For his part, Ashcroft has
advocated reducing the crack/coke sentencing disparity by increasing
penalties for powder cocaine.)

Whether Bush means it is another story. After a Bush aide met with
medical-marijuana patient Tiffany Landreth in Austin last September, his
office issued a statement that "current federal law bans all marijuana use,
and the governor does not support changing those laws." As governor, Bush
signed a law in 1997 increasing the minimum for possession of less than a
gram of cocaine -- barely enough for one night of "youthful indiscretion"
- -- from probation to six months in a state jail. About 3,000 people are now
incarcerated under that law. And Bush also "adamantly supported" school
districts that wanted to test all students for drugs, according to William
Harrell, head of the Texas branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.
"We should all collectively shiver," Harrell says. Bush's record, he adds,
was one of "total militarized policing and total disregard for
constitutional rights."

Harrell points out that in 1999 the Bush administration named undercover
cop Tom Coleman "Lawman of the Year." Coleman's accomplishment was setting
up the arrests of 43 people in the small Panhandle town of Tulia on cocaine
charges. Forty of the people arrested were black, and the ACLU has filed a
civil rights lawsuit charging that many of them were framed -- in two
separate trials, Coleman testified to being in different places at the same
time (see "Easy Targets," page 23). Harrell says the drug task force
program that assigned Coleman to Tulia was "designed and directed" by
Bush's office, and specifically targets users and small-time dealers in
areas where convictions are easy to get.

Texas now has more people in prison than any state. According to state
figures, its 107 prisons, 17 state jails and nine "substance abuse felony
punishment" facilities hold 151,000 inmates. A 2000 study by the
Washington-based Criminal Justice Institute found that Texas had 1 percent
of its entire population (and 3.9 percent of its black population) in
prisons or local jails, the second-highest rate in the nation after
Louisiana. One-fifth of them were imprisoned on drug charges. Between 1988
and 1998, according to the Drug Policy Forum of Texas, the state opened 77
new prisons -- but just one new state university campus. "Nothing that he
did as governor indicated a willingness to move away from prohibition,"
Epstein says.

However, unlike his father, who reigned at the height of the '80s crack
scare (and also looked the other way at the Nicaraguan contras' fundraising
deliveries from Colombia to California), George W. Bush faces a growing
anti-drug war movement that includes significant numbers of conservatives.
The orthodoxy of prohibition -- that illegal drugs breed violence and
depravity and must be stamped out by any means necessary -- is being
challenged on numerous fronts. Nine states and the District of Columbia
have passed laws legalizing medical marijuana, despite a 1970 federal law
that declares marijuana to have "no accepted medical use."

One strain in what is awkwardly called the "drug-law-reform movement"
focuses on "harm reduction" policies such as needle exchange. It is more
realistic to expect addicts to take small steps toward self-preservation
than one giant leap to abstinence, the argument goes, and it's better for
them to shoot two bags of heroin with a clean needle than to shoot 10 bags
with a virus-infested set of "gimmicks." Another strain, more libertarian
and marijuana-oriented, asserts that the government has no right to jail
people for private behavior comparable to drinking or home-brewing. Others
question the length and inflexibility of drug sentences, the numbers of
people in prison, and the racial disparities among those behind bars.

New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, a Republican with libertarian sensibilities,
advocates legalizing marijuana. While he believes that employers have the
right to drug-test workers, and personally opposes drug use, Johnson is one
of the few politicians who doesn't say he "experimented" with marijuana. "I
smoked it," he emphasizes. Another Republican, New York Gov. George Pataki,
has proposed some easing of the state's draconian "Rockefeller laws," which
mandate 15 years to life for possession of four ounces of heroin or
cocaine, regardless of the defendant's role in the deal.

And with three-fourths of the nation's drug prisoners being black or Latino
(that figure is more than 90 percent in New York, Maryland and Illinois),
African-Americans, whose neighborhoods bore the worst of the crack-trade
wars, are increasingly weary of seeing multitudes of their young men locked
up. Black-community pressure got President Clinton to free Kemba Smith, who
served six years of a 24-year sentence essentially for being a crack
wholesaler's ex-girlfriend. "I don't think the law was intentionally
designed to oppress one group of people over another. But in its
implementation, it certainly has had a disproportionate effect on people of
color," former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke told High Times last year.

Some of this dissent may reach into the Bush administration. Epstein
speculates that policy ultimately will be determined by whoever wins the
power struggle between committed drug warriors, advocates of more treatment
and a handful of libertarians. One possibility that may emerge would be a
"compassionate conservative" model: continued prohibition coupled with a
few token statements and programs to give it a veneer of humanity. "Status
quo with a little sugar on top," says Allen St. Pierre of the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).

"I'm more hopeful than I expected to be," says Kevin Zeese of Common Sense
for Drug Policy. He sees possible movement in five areas: increased
treatment, easing mandatory minimum sentences, reducing racial profiling,
eliminating the crack/cocaine sentencing disparity, and maybe legalizing
needle exchanges. Ashcroft is an ardent foe of needle-exchange programs,
Zeese notes, but Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson funded
them while he was governor of Wisconsin.

Drug courts, in which defendants are sentenced to mandatory treatment
instead of jail, would fit the "compassionate conservative" model
perfectly. They are the centerpiece of Pataki's proposal in New York, which
he released in January. It would allow judges to send some people charged
with possession of cocaine or heroin to a court-run rehabilitation program,
with probation if they complete it, and prison if they don't. However, most
of the state's drug prisoners are low-level dealers with prior felony
convictions and would not be eligible. (Democratic legislators have
introduced a counterproposal that includes them.)

But compulsory treatment brings up several caveats. First, there's little
funding for voluntary treatment, so focusing resources on compulsory
treatment means that poorer addicts would have to to be arrested before
they could get help. Second, if it is crossed with Bush's plans to turn
social services over to "faith-based" groups, the result could be forcing
drug users into programs telling them the only way to conquer their
addiction is to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. Third,
treatment costs money. Bush has promised to add $ 1 billion in federal
funding, a small fraction of the amount spent on drug enforcement. It is
generally estimated that about 30 percent of total government drug spending
goes to treatment and education. President Clinton vowed to increase that
proportion, St. Pierre recalls, but never did.

Whatever hopes people have about Bush, they do appear to contain at least
some wishful thinking, largely stemming from the "Nixon going to China"
theory: that it will take a Republican to end the war on drugs, someone
free of any hippie-liberal "soft on crime" stigma. Gary Johnson might fit
that bill, but it is extremely difficult to imagine George W. Bush
legalizing marijuana.

For one, a significant part of his political base comes from the culture
warriors of the Christian right, for whom marijuana and drugs are a central
moral issue. The Family Research Council opposes legalizing industrial
hemp, the minimal-THC strain of cannabis grown for fiber. FRC drug-policy
specialist Robert Maginnis writes that "hemp is clearly identified with the
counterculture" (not exactly untrue) and that legalizing it "sends the
wrong message" about marijuana. The FRC also opposes medical marijuana. In
a pending Supreme Court case, it filed one of only two amicus briefs
supporting the government's appeal of a lower-court ruling that "medical
necessity" may exempt an Oakland "cannabis buyers' club" from federal
prosecution.

Bush also has to face a potential quagmire in Colombia. While U.S.
intervention there clearly fails the "Powell Doctrine" tests of a clear
objective and an easy victory, Bush seems unlikely to abandon a military
mission in progress, especially one supposedly against the twin demons of
drug cartels and leftist guerrillas. (Plan Colombia conveniently ignores
the right-wing paramilitaries' involvement in the drug trade.)

Bush's delay in picking a drug czar could be a sign that he wants to avoid
drug issues as much as possible. It is hard to argue that prohibition is
not an awful flop. It can't stop what it's meant to stop: The nation's
prison and jail population has quadrupled since Ronald Reagan took office
20 years ago, but cocaine and heroin prices have plummeted. Most Americans
under 55 have either smoked marijuana themselves or know people who have,
yet pot busts now average 700,000 a year, with 70,000 in New York City
alone last year. And the excesses of the war on drugs, from
search-and-seizure abuses to the racial disparities in who goes to prison,
are increasingly obvious.

On issues such as racial profiling, Epstein says, "They have to do damage
control. They can't avoid addressing it." But does Bush have the desire to
make significant changes, or the courage to face the furious opposition
that would come if he did? If you can't arrest your way out of the problem,
but don't want to consider legalization, what do you do?

"He couldn't even tell his kids that he'd been arrested for drunk driving,"
notes NORML's St. Pierre. "Considering his inability to talk about drugs
during the campaign, and his evasiveness about his own drug use, I hope
lack of communication doesn't become national policy."