OVERDOSE

After a dramatic pause in his January State of the Union address, President
Clinton introduced his new "drug czar," General Barry McCaffrey. Then, last
month, he quadrupled the staff of the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy (ondcp) and requested an extra $3.4 million in funding.
Congressional Republicans upped the ante with another half-million. Yup,
it's an election year.

This latest "war on drugs" represents a case study in political pandering.
It starts with an apparently unrelated pander: Clinton's 1992 campaign
promise to cut the White House staff by 25 percent. He had no evidence that
the staff needed to be cut by a quarter--or at all--but the line was such a
zinger in stump speeches he felt he had to follow through. In office the
president was shocked to discover that most of those good-for-nothing
Beltway bureaucrats were necessary, after all. So he cut the ondcp staff
from 146 to twenty-five (the rest of the 25 percent cut came from
contracting work out) and elevated the drug czar to Cabinet level to show
he was tough on drugs. So far, so good. The first drug czar was Bill
Bennett in 1988, who conceived of the position (as he conceives of most
things) as a largely rhetorical exercise. Many of the fired Bush staffers
were political appointees in the Bennett mold, such as former Notre Dame
basketball coach Digger Phelps, who at Dan Quayle's insistence was paid six
figures to fulminate. Clinton then appointed as drug czar Lee Brown, a
successful black police chief. Brown, a career cop, had neither the talent
for rhetorical uplift nor the staff resources for serious law enforcement.
So Clinton's main contribution was to change the office from a large
collection of Republican cronies delivering inspirational speeches into a
small collection of Democratic cronies delivering uninspirational speeches.

As a result, Republicans have accused him of abandoning the war on drugs.
"He's reduced money for interdiction; he's reduced funds for drug
enforcement," charged Bob Dole, who in the same speech offered a free lunch
to anyone who "can name one thing that President Clinton has done to reduce
the size of government." And what has Dole done to fight drugs? Well, the
GOP Congress has proposed a cut in funding for drug education by 15
percent. Drug education is big government. Drug enforcement isn't.

Now Clinton has reversed his drug policy. That is to say, his need to
appear tough on drugs currently supersedes his need to cut the White House
staff by 25 percent. He's all set for the campaign. Whenever somebody asks
him about drugs he can make two points: he's hired a general, and he's
given him lots of money. Dole can't possibly outflank him; the military
currently has no rank higher than general, and Clinton will match any bid
to give him more funding. This being an election year it's hard to expect
national drug policy to be much more than a pandera-thon. But maybe, after
November, we can seriously re-think the drug czar position. Right now the
position has two main administrative responsibilities. One is impossible,
the other pointless. The impossible job is to coordinate the anti-drug
efforts of the thousands of federal, state and local agencies that play a
role. (The ondcp itself spends less than 0.1 percent of the national
anti-drug budget.) None of these agencies have separate drug budgets, so
ondcp can't do anything about what they spend or how they spend it. The
Customs Department, for example, looks for all kinds of contraband and bad
guys. How much does it "spend" looking for drugs? Who knows? About the most
the drug czar has been able to do is prod these agencies to cook their
books to show that they're spending more to fight drugs.

The pointless job is to prepare annual statistics on domestic drug use as a
gauge of the president's effectiveness in fighting drugs. White House
policy is one of the tiniest factors controlling drug use, and the little
it can do--mainly education--requires years to take effect. Judging the
president's drug policies by this year's drug statistics is like judging
his environmental record by this year's global warming.

That leaves just one role for the drug czar: leading public opinion against
drugs. Maybe McCaffrey is cut out for this duty. But giving him more money
won't make the speeches better.