HOW AMERICA LOST THE WAR ON DRUGS

After Thirty-Five Years and $500 Billion, Drugs Are as Cheap and
Plentiful as Ever: An Anatomy of a Failure.

1. After Pablo

On the day of his death, December 2nd, 1993, the Colombian
billionaire drug kingpin Pablo Escobar was on the run and living in a
small, tiled-roof house in a middle-class neighborhood of Medellin,
close to the soccer stadium. He died, theatrically, -ridiculously,
gunned down by a Colombian police manhunt squad while he tried to
flee across the barrio's rooftops, a fat, bearded man who had kicked
off his flip-flops to try to outrun the bullets. The first thing the
American drug agents who arrived on the scene wanted to do was to
make sure that the corpse was actually Escobar's. The second thing
was to check his house.

The last time Escobar had hastily fled one of his residences - la
Catedral, the luxurious private prison he built for himself to avoid
extradition to the United States - he had left behind bizarre,
enchanting -detritus, the raw stuff of what would -become his own
myth: the photos of -himself dressed up as a Capone-era gangster with
a Tommy gun, the odd collection of novels ranging from Graham Greene
to the Austrian modernist Stefan Zweig. Agents from the Drug
Enforcement Administration, arriving after the kingpin had fled,
found neat shelves lined with loose-leaf binders, carefully organized
by content. They were, says John Coleman, then the DEA's assistant
administrator for operations, "filled with DEA reports" - internal
documents that laid out, in extraordinary detail, the agency's
repeated attempts to capture Escobar.

"He had shelves and shelves and shelves of these things," Coleman
tells me. "It was stunning. A lot of the informants we had, he'd
figured out who they were. All the agents we had chasing him - who we
trusted in the Colombian police - it was right there. He knew so much
more about what we were doing than we knew about what he was doing."

Coleman and other agents began to work deductively, backward. "We had
always wondered why his guys, when we caught them, would always go to
trial and risk lots of jail time, even when they would have saved
themselves a lot of time if they'd just plead guilty," he says. "What
we realized when we saw those binders was that they were doing a job.
Their job was to stay on trial and have their lawyers use discovery
to get all the information on DEA operations they could. Then they'd
send copies back to Medellin, and Escobar would put it all together
and figure out who we had tracking him."

The loose-leaf binders crammed in Escobar's office on the ground
floor gave Coleman and his agents a sense of triumph: The whole
mysterious drug trade had an organization, a structure and a brain,
and they'd just removed it. In the thrill of the moment, clinking
champagne glasses with officials from the Colombian police and taking
congratulatory calls from Washington, the agents in Medellin believed
the War on Drugs could finally be won. "We had an endgame," Coleman
says. "We were literally making the greatest plans."

At the headquarters of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in
Washington, staffers tacked up a poster with photographs of sixteen
of its most wanted men, cartel leaders from across the Andes.
Solemnly, ceremoniously, a staffer took a red magic marker and drew
an X over Escobar's portrait. "We felt like it was one down, fifteen
to go," recalls John Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the
drug-control -office. "There was this feeling that if we got all
sixteen, it's not like the whole thing would be over, but that was a
big part of how we would go about winning the War on Drugs."

Man by man, sixteen red X's eventually went up over the faces of the
cartel leaders: KILLED. EXTRADITED. KILLED. Jose Santacruz Londono, a
leading drug trafficker, was gunned down by Colombian police in a
shootout. The Rodriguez Orejuela brothers, the heads of the Cali
cartel, were extradited after they got greedy and tried to keep
running their organization from prison. Some U.S. drug warriors
believed that the busts were largely public-relations events, a showy
way for the Colombian government to look tough on the drug trade, but
most were less cynical. The crack epidemic was over. Drug-related
murders were in decline. Winning the War on Drugs didn't seem such a
quixotic and open-ended mission, like the War on Poverty, but rather
something tangible, a fat guy with a big organization and binders
full of internal DEA reports, sixteen faces on a poster, a pinata you
could reach out and smack. Richard Canas, a veteran DEA official who
headed counternarcotics efforts on the National Security Council
under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, can still recall the
euphoria of those days. "We were moving," he says, "from success to success."

This is the story of how that momentary success turned into one of
the most sustained and costly defeats the United States has ever
suffered. It is the story of how the most powerful country on Earth,
sensing a pinata, swung to hit it and missed.

2. The Making of a Tragedy

For Canas and other drug warriors, the death of Escobar had the feel
of a real pivot, the end of one kind of battle against drugs and the
beginning of another. The war itself had begun during the Nixon
administration, when the White House began to get reports that a
generation of soldiers was about to come back from Vietnam stoned,
with habits weaned on the cheap marijuana and heroin of Southeast
Asia and hothoused in the twitchy-fingered freakout of a jungle
guerrilla war. For those in Washington, the problem of drugs was
still so strange and new in the early Seventies that Nixon officials
grappled with ideas that, by the standards of the later debate among
politicians, were unthinkably radical: They appointed a panel that
recommended the decriminalization of casual marijuana use and even
considered buying up the world's entire supply of opium to prevent it
from being converted into heroin. But Nixon was a law-and-order
politician, an operator who understood very well the panic many
Americans felt about the cities, the hippies and crime. Calling
narcotics "public enemy number one in the United States," he used the
issue to escalate the culture war that pitted Middle Americans
against the radicals and the hippies, strengthening penalties for
drug dealers and devoting federal funds to bolster prosecutions. In
1973, Nixon gave the job of policing these get-tough laws to the
newly formed Drug Enforcement Administration.

By the mid-1980s, as crack leeched out from New York, Miami and Los
Angeles into the American interior, the devastations inflicted by the
drug were becoming more vivid and frightening. The Reagan White House
seemed to capture the current of the moment: Nancy Reagan's plaintive
urging to "just say no," and her husband's decision to hand police
and prosecutors even greater powers to lock up street dealers, and to
devote more resources to stop cocaine's production at the source, in
the Andes. In 1986, trying to cope with crack's corrosive effects,
Congress adopted mandatory-minimum laws, which hit inner-city crack
users with penalties as severe as those levied on Wall Street brokers
possessing 100 times more powder cocaine. Over the next two decades,
hundreds of thousands of Americans would be locked up for drug offenses.

The War on Drugs became an actual war during the first Bush
administration, when the bombastic conservative intellectual Bill
Bennett was appointed drug czar. "Two words sum up my entire
approach," Bennett declared, "consequences and confrontation." Bush
and Bennett doubled annual spending on the drug war to $12 billion,
devoting much of the money to expensive weaponry: fighter jets to
take on the Colombian trafficking cartels, Navy submarines to chase
cocaine-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. If narcotics were the
enemy, America would vanquish its foe with torpedoes and F-16s - and
throw an entire generation of drug users in jail.

Though many on the left suspected that things had gone seriously
awry, drug policy under Reagan and Bush was largely conducted in a
fog of ignorance. The kinds of long-term studies that policy-makers
needed - those that would show what measures would actually reduce
drug use and dampen its consequences - did not yet exist. When it
came to research, there was "absolutely nothing" that examined "how
each program was or wasn't working," says Peter Reuter, a drug
scholar who founded the Drug Policy Research Center at the RAND Corp.

But after Escobar was killed in 1993 - and after U.S. drug agents
began systematically busting up the Colombian cartels - doubt was
replaced with hard data. Thanks to new research, U.S. policy-makers
knew with increasing certainty what would work and what wouldn't. The
tragedy of the War on Drugs is that this knowledge hasn't been
heeded. We continue to treat marijuana as a major threat to public
health, even though we know it isn't. We continue to lock up
generations of teenage drug dealers, even though we know imprisonment
does little to reduce the amount of drugs sold on the street. And we
continue to spend billions to fight drugs abroad, even though we know
that military efforts are an ineffective way to cut the supply of
narcotics in America or raise the price.

All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to
fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as
cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used.
Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5
million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have
nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold
increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic.
Virtually the only success the government can claim is the decline in
the number of Americans who smoke marijuana - and even on that count,
it is not clear that federal prevention programs are responsible. In
the course of fighting this war, we have allowed our military to
become pawns in a civil war in Colombia and our drug agents to be
used by the cartels for their own ends. Those we are paying to wage
the drug war have been accused of -human-rights abuses in Peru,
Bolivia and Colombia. In Mexico, we are now -repeating many of the
same mistakes we have made in the Andes.

"What we learned was that in drug work, nothing ever stands still,"
says Coleman, the former DEA official and current president of Drug
Watch International, a law-and-order advocacy group. For every move
the drug warriors made, the traffickers adapted. "The other guys were
learning just as we were learning," Coleman says. "We had this hubris."

3. Brainiacs and Cold Warriors

"At the beginning of the Clinton administration," Canas tells me,
"the War on Drugs was like the War on Terror is now." It was, he
means, an orienting fight, the next in a sequence of abstract,
generational struggles that the country launched itself into after
finding no one willing to actually square up and face it on a
battlefield. After the Cold War, in the flush and optimism of
victory, it felt to drug warriors and the American public that
abstractions could be beaten. "It was really a pivot point," recalls
Rand Beers, who served on the National Security Council for four
different presidents. "We started to look carefully at our drug
policies and ask if everything we were doing really made sense." The
man Clinton appointed to manage this new era was Lee Brown.

Brown had been a cop for almost thirty years when Clinton tapped him
to be the nation's drug czar in 1993. He had started out working
narcotics in San Jose, California, just as the Sixties began to
swell, and ended up leading the New York Police Department when the
city was the symbolic center of the crack epidemic, with kids being
killed by stray bullets that barreled through locked doors. A big,
shy man in his fifties, Brown had made his reputation with a simple
insight: Cops can't do much without the trust of people in their
communities, who are needed to turn in offenders and serve as
witnesses at trial. Being a good cop meant understanding the everyday
act of police work not as chasing crooks but as meeting people and
making allies.

"When I worked as an undercover narcotics officer, I was living the
life of an addict so I could make buys and make busts of the
dealers," Brown tells me. "When you're in that position, you see very
quickly that you can't arrest your way out of this. You see the cycle
over and over again of people using drugs, getting into trouble,
going to prison, getting out and getting into drugs again. At some
point I stepped back and asked myself, 'What impact is all of this
having on the drug problem? There has to be a better way.' "

In the aftermath of the Rodney King beating, this philosophy - known
as community policing - had made Brown a national phenomenon. The
Clinton administration asked him to take the drug-czar post, and
though Brown was skeptical, he agreed on the condition that the White
House make it a Cabinet-level position. Brown stacked his small
office with liberals who had spent the long Democratic exile doing
drug-policy work for Congress and swearing they would improve things
when they retook power. "There were basic assumptions that
Republicans had been making for fifteen years that had never been
challenged," says Carol Bergman, a congressional staffer who became
Brown's legislative liaison. "The way Lee Brown looked at it, the
drug war was focused on locking kids up for increasing amounts of
time, and there wasn't enough emphasis on treatment. He really wanted
to take a different tactic."

Brown's staff became intrigued by a new study on drug policy from the
RAND Corp., the Strangelove-esque think tank that during the Cold War
had employed mathematicians to crank out analyses for the Pentagon.
Like Lockheed Martin, the jet manufacturer that had turned to
managing welfare reform after the Cold War ended, RAND was scouting
for other government projects that might need its brains. It found
the drug war. The think tank assigned Susan Everingham, a young
expert in mathematical modeling, to help run the group's signature
project: dividing up the federal government's annual drug budget of
$13 billion into its component parts and deciding what worked and
what didn't when it came to fighting cocaine.

Everingham and her team sorted the drug war into two categories.
There were supply-side programs, like the radar and ships in the
Caribbean and the efforts to arrest traffickers in Colombia and
Mexico, which were designed to make it more expensive for traffickers
to bring their product to market. There were also demand-side
programs, like drug treatment, which were designed to reduce the
market for drugs in the United States. To evaluate the
cost-effectiveness of each approach, the mathematicians set up a
series of formulas to calculate precisely how much additional money
would have to be spent on supply programs and demand programs to
reduce cocaine consumption by one percent nationwide.

"If you had asked me at the outset," Everingham says, "my guess would
have been that the best use of taxpayer money was in the source
countries in South America" - that it would be possible to stop
cocaine before it reached the U.S. But what the study found surprised
her. Overseas military efforts were the least effective way to
decrease drug use, and imprisoning addicts was prohibitively
expensive. The only cost-effective way to put a dent in the market,
it turned out, was drug treatment. "It's not a magic bullet," says
Reuter, the RAND scholar who helped supervise the study, "but it
works." The study ultimately ushered RAND, this vaguely creepy Cold
War relic, into a position as the permanent, pragmatic left wing of
American drug policy, the most consistent force for innovating and
reinventing our national conception of the War on Drugs.

When Everingham's team looked more closely at drug treatment, they
found that thirteen percent of hardcore cocaine users who receive
help substantially reduced their use or kicked the habit completely.
They also found that a larger and larger portion of illegal drugs in
the U.S. were being used by a comparatively small group of hardcore
addicts. There was, the study concluded, a fundamental imbalance: The
crack epidemic was basically a domestic problem, but we had been
fighting it more aggressively overseas. "What we began to realize,"
says Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who
studied drug policy for RAND, "was that even if you only get a
percentage of this small group of heavy drug users to abstain
forever, it's still a really great deal."

Thirteen years later, the study remains the gold standard on drug
policy. "It's still the consensus recommendation supplied by the
scholarship," says Reuter. "Yet as well as it's stood up, it's never
really been tried."

To Brown, RAND's conclusions seemed exactly right. "I saw how little
we were doing to help addicts, and I thought, 'This is crazy,' " he
recalls. " 'This is how we should be breaking the cycle of addiction
and crime, and we're just doing nothing.' "

The federal budget that Brown's office submitted in 1994 remains a
kind of fetish object for certain liberals in the field, the moment
when their own ideas came close to making it into law. The budget
sought to cut overseas interdiction, beef up community policing,
funnel low-level drug criminals into treatment programs instead of
prison, and devote $355 million to treating hardcore addicts, the
drug users responsible for much of the illegal-drug market and most
of the crime associated with it. White House political handlers, wary
of appearing soft on crime, were skeptical of even this limited
commitment, but Brown persuaded the president to offer his support,
and the plan stayed.

Still, the politics of the issue were difficult. Convincing Congress
to dramatically alter the direction of America's drug war required a
brilliant sales job. "And Lee Brown," says Bergman, his former
legislative liaison, "was not an effective salesman." With a kind of
loving earnestness, the drug czar arranged tours of treatment centers
for congressmen to show them the kinds of programs whose funding his
bill would increase. Few legislators came. Most politicians were
skeptical about such a radical departure from the mainstream
consensus on crime. Congress rewrote the budget, slashing the $355
million for treatment programs by more than eighty percent. "There
were too many of us who had a strong law-and-order focus," says Sen.
Chuck Grassley, a Republican who -opposed the reform bill and serves
as co-chair of the Senate's drug-policy caucus.

For some veteran drug warriors, Brown's tenure as drug czar still
lingers as the last moment when federal drug policy really made
sense. "Lee Brown came the closest of anyone to really getting it,"
says Carnevale, the longtime budget director of the drug-control
office. "But the bottom line was, the drug issue and Lee Brown were
largely ignored by the Clinton administration." When Brown tried to
repeat his treatment-centered initiative in 1995, it was poorly
timed: Newt Gingrich and the Republicans had seized control of the
House after portraying Clinton as soft on crime. The authority to
oversee the War on Drugs passed from Rep. John Conyers, the Detroit
liberal, to a retired wrestling coach from Illinois who was tired of
drugs in the schools a rising Republican star named Dennis Hastert.
Reeling from the defeat at the polls, Clinton decided to give up on
drug reform and get tough on crime. "The feeling was that the drug
czar's office was one of the weak areas when it came to the
administration's efforts to confront crime," recalls Leon Panetta,
then Clinton's chief of staff.

4. The Young Guns

The administration was not doing much better in its efforts to stop
the flow of drugs at the source. Before Clinton had even taken
office, Canas - who headed drug policy at the National Security
Council - had been summoned to brief the new president's choice for
national security adviser, Anthony Lake, on the nation's narcotics
policy in Latin America. "I figured, what the hell, I'm going back to
DEA anyway, I'll tell him what I really think," Canas recalls.

The Bush administration, he told Lake, had been sending the military
after the wrong target. In the 1970s, drugs were run up to the United
States through the Caribbean by a bunch of "swashbuckling
entrepreneurs" with small planes - "guys who wouldn't have looked out
of place at a Jimmy Buffett concert." In 1989, in the nationwide
panic over crack, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney had managed to secure
a budget of $450 million to chase these Caribbean smugglers. (Years
later, when a longtime drug official asked Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld why Cheney had pushed the program, Rumsfeld grinned and
said, "Cheney thought he was running for president.") The U.S.
military loved the new mission, because it gave them a reason to ask
for more equipment in the wake of the Cold War. And the Bush White
House loved the idea of sending the military after the drug
traffickers for its symbolism and swagger and the way it proved that
the administration was taking drugs seriously.

The problem, Canas told Lake, was that the cocaine traffic had
professionalized and was now moving its product through Mexico. With
Caribbean smugglers out of the game, the military program no longer
made sense. The new national security adviser grinned at Canas,
pleased. "That's what we think as well," Lake said. "How would you
like to stay on and help make that happen?"

Taking a new approach, the Clinton administration shifted most
military assets out of the Caribbean and into the Andes, where the
coca leaf was being grown and processed. "Our idea was, Stop messing
around in the transit countries and go to the source," Canas tells
me. The administration spent millions of extra dollars to equip
police in Bolivia and Colombia to bust the crop's growers and
processors. The cops were not polite - Human Rights Watch condemned
the murders ofBolivian farmers, blaming "the heavy hand of U.S. drug
enforcement" - but they were -effective, and by 1996, coca production
in Bolivia had begun a dramatic decline.

After Escobar fell, the American drug agents who had been chasing him
did not expect the cocaine industry to dry up overnight - they had
girded for the fallout from the drug lord's death. What they had not
expected was the ways in which the unintended consequences of his
downfall would permanently change the drug traffic. "What ended up
happening - and maybe we should have predicted this would happen -
was that the whole structure shattered into these smaller groups,"
says Coleman, the veteran DEA agent. "You suddenly had all these new
guys controlling a small aspect of the traffic."

Among them was a hired gun known as Don Berna, who had served as a
bodyguard for Escobar. Double-crossed by his boss, Berna broke with
the Medellin cartel and struck out on his own. For him, the
disruption caused by the new front in America's drug war presented a
business opportunity. But with the DEA's shift from the Caribbean
into Bolivia and Colombia, Berna and other new traffickers had a
production problem. So some of the "microcartels," as they became
known, decided to move their operations someplace where they could
control it: They opened negotiations with the FARC, a
down-at-the-heels rebel army based in the jungles of Colombia. In
return for cash, the FARC agreed to put coca production under its
protection and keep the Colombian army away from the coca crop.

Berna and the younger kingpins also had a transportation problem:
Mexican traffickers, who had been paid a set fee by the cartels to
smuggle product across the U.S. border, wanted a larger piece of the
business. The Mexican upstarts had a certain economic logic on their
side. A kilo of cocaine produced in Colombia is worth about $2,500.
In Mexico, a kilo gets $5,000. But smuggle that kilo across the
border and the price goes up to $17,500. "What the Mexican groups
started saying was, 'Why are we working for these guys? Why don't we
just buy it from the Colombians directly and keep the profits
ourselves?' " says Tony Ayala, a retired DEA agent and former Mexico
country attache.The remaining leaders of the weakened Cali cartel,
DEA agents say, traveled up to Guadalajara for a series of meetings
with Mexican traffickers. By 1996, the Colombians had decided to hand
over more control of the cocaine trade to the Mexicans. The Cali
cartel would now ship cocaine to Guadalajara, sell the drugs to the
Mexican groups and then be done with it. "This wasn't just
happenstance," says Jerome McArdle, then a DEA assistant agent for
special operations. "This was the Colombians saying they were willing
to reduce their profits in exchange for reducing their risk and
exposure, and handing it over to the Mexicans. The whole nature of
the supply chain changed."

Around the same time, DEA agents found themselves picking up Mexican
distributors, rather than Colombians, on the streets of New York.
Immigration and customs officials on the border were meanwhile
overwhelmed by the sheer number of tractor-trailers - many of them
loaded with drugs - suddenly pouring across the Mexican border as a
consequence of NAFTA, which had been enacted in 1994. "A thousand
trucks coming across in a four-hour -period," says Steve Robertson, a
DEA special agent assigned to southern -Texas at the time. "There's
no way we're going to catch everything."

Power followed the money, and Mexican traffickers soon had a style,
and reach, that had previously belonged only to the Colombians. In
the border town of Ciudad Juarez, the cocaine trafficker Amado
Carrillo Fuentes developed a new kind of smuggling operation. "He
brought in middle-class people for the first time - lawyers,
accountants - and he developed a transportation division, an
acquisitions division, even a human-resources operation, just like a
modern corporation," says Tony Payan, a political scientist at the
University of Texas-El Paso who has studied the drug trade on the
border. Before long, Carrillo Fuentes had a fleet of Boeing 727s,
which he used to fly cocaine, up to fifteen tons at a time, up from
Colombia to Mexico. The newspapers called him El Senor de los Cielos,
the Lord of the Skies.

The Mexican cartels were also getting more imaginative. "Think of it
like a business, which is how these guys thought of it," says Guy
Hargreaves, a top DEA agent during the 1990s. "Why pay for the
widgets when you can make the widgets yourselves?" Since the climate
and geography of Mexico aren't right for making cocaine, the cartels
did the logical thing: They introduced a new product. As Hargreaves
recalls, the Mexicans slipped the new drug into their cocaine
shipments in Southern California and told coke dealers, "Here, try
some of this stuff - it's a similar effect."

The product the Mexican cartels came up with, the new widget they
could make themselves, was methamphetamine. The man who mastered the
market was a midlevel cocaine trafficker, then in his late twenties,
named Jesus Amezcua. In 1994, when U.S. Customs officials at the
Dallas airport seized an airplane filled with barrels of ephedrine, a
chemical precursor for meth, and traced it back to Amezcua, the
startling new shift in the drug traffic became clear to a handful of
insiders. "Cartels were no longer production organizations, whose
business is wrapped up in a single drug," says Tony Ayala, the senior
DEA agent in Mexico at the time. "They became trafficking
organizations - and they will smuggle whatever they can make the most
profit from."

5. The Lobbyists & the Mad Professor

It is only in retrospect that these moments - the barrels of
ephedrine seized in Dallas, the quiet suggestion that meth had worked
its way into the cocaine supply chain - take on a looming character,
the historic weight of a change made manifest. Up until
methamphetamine, the War on Drugs had targeted three enemies. First
there were the hippie drugs - marijuana, LSD - that posed little
threat to the general public. Then there was heroin, a horrible drug
but one that was largely concentrated in New York City. And, finally,
there was crack. What meth proved was that even if the DEA could wipe
out every last millionaire cocaine goon in Colombia, burn every coca
field in Bolivia and Peru, and build an impenetrable wall along the
entire length of the Mexican border - even then, we wouldn't have won
the War on Drugs, because there would still be methamphetamine, and
after that, something else.

Gene Haislip, who served for years as one of the DEA's top-ranking
administrators, believes there was a moment when meth could have been
shut down, long before it spiraled into a nationwide epidemic.
Haislip, who spent nearly two decades leading a small group at the
agency dedicated to chemical control, is his own kind of legend; he
is still known around the DEA as the man who beat quaaludes, perhaps
the only drug that the U.S. has ever been able to declare total
victory over. He did it with gumshoe methodicalness: by identifying
every country in the world that produced the drug's active
ingredient, a prescription medication called methaqualone, and
convincing them to tighten regulations. Haislip believes he was
present the moment when the United States lost the war on
methamphetamine, way back in 1986, when meth was still a crude biker
drug confined to a few valleys in Northern California - a decade
before the Mexican drug lords turned it into the most problematic
drug in America. "The thing is, methamphetamine should never have
gotten to that point," Haislip says. And it never would have, he
believes, if it hadn't been for the lobbyists.

Haislip was known around the DEA as precise-minded and verbal. His
impulse, in combatting meth, was the same one that had pushed the
drug warriors after Escobar: the quixotic faith that if you could
just stop the stuff at the source, you could get rid of all the
social problems at once. Assembling a coalition of legislators,
Haislip convinced them that the small, growing population of speed
freaks in Northern California was enough of a concern that Congress
should pass a law to regulate the drug's precursor chemicals,
ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, legal drugs that were used in cold
medicine and produced in fewer than a dozen factories in the world.
"We were starting to get reports of hijacking of ephedrine, armed
robbery of ephedrine, things that had never happened before," Haislip
tells me. "You could see we were on the verge of something if we
didn't get a handle on it."

All that was left was to convince the Reagan administration. One day
in late 1986, Haislip went to meet with top officials in the Indian
Treaty Room, a vast, imposing space in the Eisenhower Executive
Office Building: arches, tiled floors, the kind of room designed to
house history being made. Haislip noticed several men in suits
sitting quietly in the back of the room. They were lobbyists from the
pharmaceutical industry, but Haislip didn't pay them much attention.
"I wasn't concerned with them," he recalls.

When Haislip launched into his presentation, an official from the
Commerce Department cut him off. "Look, you're way ahead of us," the
official said. "We don't have anything to suggest or add." Haislip
left the meeting thinking he had won: The bill he proposed was
submitted to Congress, requiring companies to keep records on the
import and sale of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine.

But what Haislip didn't know was that the men in suits had already
gone to work to rig the bill in their favor. "Quite frankly," Allan
Rexinger, one of the lobbyists present at the meeting later told
reporters, "we appealed to a higher authority." The pharmaceutical
industry needed pseudoephedrine to make profitable cold medications.
The result, to Haislip's dismay, was a new law that monitored sales
of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in bulk powder but created an
exemption for selling the chemicals in tablet form - a loophole that
protected the pharmaceutical industry's profits.

The law, drug agents say, sparked two changes in the market for
illegal meth. First, the supply of ephedrine simply moved overseas:
The Mexican cartels, quick to recognize an emerging market, evaded
the restrictions by importing powder from China, India and Europe and
then smuggling it across the border to the biker groups that had
traditionally distributed the drug. "We actually had meetings where
we planned for a turf war between the Mexicans and the Hells Angels
over methamphetamine," says retired DEA agent Mike Heald, who headed
the San Francisco meth task force, "but it turned out they realized
they'd make more money by working together." Second, responding to a
dramatic uptick in demand from the illegal market, chemical-supply
companies began moving huge amounts of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine
out to the West Coast in the form of pills, which were then converted
into meth. Rather than stemming the tide of meth before it started,
the Reagan administration had unwittingly helped accelerate a new
epidemic: Between 1992 and 1994, the number of meth addicts entering
rehab facilities doubled, and the drug's purity on the street rose by
twenty-seven percent.

Haislip resolved to have another go at Congress, but the issue ended
up in a dispiriting cycle. The resistance, he says bitterly, "was
always coming from the same lobbying group." In 1993, when he
persuaded lawmakers to regulate the sale of ephedrine in tablet form,
the pharmaceutical industry won an exception for pseudoephedrine.
Drug agents began to intercept shipments of pseudoephedrine pills in
barrels. Three years later, when lawmakers finally regulated tablets
of pseudoephedrine, they created an exception for pills sold in
blister packs. "Congress thought there was no way that meth freaks
would buy this stuff and pop the pills out of blister packs, one by
one," says Heald. "But we're not dealing with normal people - we're
dealing with meth freaks. They'll stay up all night picking their toes."

By the time Haislip retired, in 1997, the methamphetamine problem was
really two problems. There were the mom-and-pop cooks, who were
punching pills out of blister packs and making small batches of drugs
for themselves. Then there were the industrial-scale Mexican cartels,
which were responsible for eighty percent of the meth in the United
States. It took until 2005 for Congress to finally regulate
over-the-counter blister packs, which caused the number of labs to
plummet. But once again, the Mexican groups were a step ahead of the
law. In October 2006, police in Guadalajara arrested an American
chemist named Frederick Wells, who had moved to Mexico after losing
his job at Idaho State University. An academic troublemaker who drove
around campus with signs on the back of his pickup truck raging at
the college administration, Wells had allegedly used his university
lab to investigate new ways that Mexican traffickers could use
completely legal reagents to engineer meth precursors from scratch.
"Very complicated numerical modeling," says his academic colleague
Jeff Rosentreter. By the time Wells was arrested, the State
Department had only just succeeded at pressuring Mexico to restrict
the flow of pseudoephedrine, even though Wells had apparently been
hard at work for years creating alternatives to that chemical. The
lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry, Haislip says, "cost us eight
or nine years."

For some in the drug war, it was a lesson that even the most
promising efforts to restrict the supply of drugs at the source -
those that rely on legal methods to regulate legally produced drugs -
remained nearly impossible, outflanked by both drug traffickers and
industry lobbyists. The tragedy of the fight against methamphetamine
is that it repeated the ways in which the government tried to fight
the cocaine problem, and failed - racing from source to source,
trying to eliminate a coca field or an ephedrine manufacturer and
then racing to the next one. "We used to call it the Pillsbury
Doughboy - stick your finger in one part of the problem, and the
Doughboy's stomach just pops out somewhere else," says Rand Beers.
"The lesson of U.S. drug policy is that this world runs on unintended
consequences. No matter how noble your intentions, there's a good
chance that in solving one problem, you'll screw something else up."

6. The General & the Adman

Within the Clinton White House, the reform effort spearheaded by Lee
Brown had created a political dilemma. Republicans, having taken
control of Congress in 1994, were attacking the administration for
being soft on drugs, and the White House decided that it was time to
look tougher. "A lot of people didn't think Brown was a strong
leader," Panetta tells me. As senior figures within the
administration cast about for a replacement, they started by thinking
about who would be the opposite of Brown. "We wanted to get someone
who was much stronger, much tougher, and could come across that way
symbolically," Panetta says.

During the planning for a possible invasion of Haiti, Panetta and
others had discovered a rising star at the Pentagon, a charismatic,
bullying four-star general named Barry McCaffrey, who had annoyed
many in the Pentagon's establishment. In 1996, halfway into his State
of the Union address, Clinton looked up at McCaffrey, a lean,
stern-seeming military man in the balcony, and informed the nation
that the general would be his next drug czar. "To succeed, he needs a
force far larger than he has ever commanded before," Clinton said.
"He needs all of us. Every one of us has a role to play on this
team." McCaffrey, the bars on his epaulets shimmering, saluted. It
was one of the president's biggest applause lines of the night.

For the drug warriors in McCaffrey's office, "the General" was
everything the languid, considered, academic Lee Brown had not been.
"It was clear from the outset that here was a guy who would take
advantage of the bully pulpit and who, unlike Brown, would probably
be able to get things done," says Bergman, Brown's former liaison.
"One thing that surprised us all was how thoughtful he was - he
wasn't a knee-jerk, law-enforcement guy. He understood there needed
to be money for treatment. He prided himself on being very sensitive
to the racial issues, and he was sensitive to the impact of
sentencing laws on African-American men." McCaffrey imported his own
staff from the Southern Command - mostly men, all military. They lent
the White House's drug operation - previously a slow place - the
kinetic energy of a forward operating base. "We went to a
twenty-four-hour clock, so we'd schedule meetings for 1500," one
longtime staffer recalls. "His people sat down with senior staff and
told us what size paper the General wanted his memos on, this kind of
report would have green tabs, this would have blue tabs."

The General's genius was for publicity. "He was great at getting
visibility," Carnevale says. McCaffrey held grandstanding events
everywhere from Mexico to Maine, telling reporters that the
decades-long narrative of impending doom around the drug war was out
of date - and that if Congress would really dedicate itself to the
mission, the country had a winnable fight on its hands. Drug-use
numbers were edging downward; even cocaine seemed to be declining in
popularity. "We are in an optimistic situation," McCaffrey declared.

For the first time ever, McCaffrey had the drug czar's office develop
a strategy for an endgame to the drug war, a plan for finishing the
whole thing. The federal government needed to reduce the amount of
money it was spending on law enforcement and interdiction. But
McCaffrey believed this was only possible once it could guarantee
that drug use would continue to decline. "The data suggested very
strongly that those who never tried any drugs before they were
eighteen were very likely to remain abstinent for their whole lives,
but that those who even smoked marijuana when they were teenagers had
much worse outcomes," says McCaffrey's deputy Don Vereen. So the
General decided to focus the government's attention on keeping kids
from trying pot.

The "gateway theory," as it became known, had a natural appeal.
Because most people who used hard drugs had also smoked marijuana,
and because kids often tried marijuana several years before they
started trying harder drugs, it seemed that keeping them off pot
might prevent them from ever getting to cocaine and heroin. The only
trouble is, the theory is wrong. When McCaffrey's office commissioned
the Institute of Medicine to study the idea, researchers concluded
that marijuana "does not appear to be a gateway drug." RAND, after
examining a decade of data, also found that the gateway theory is
"not the best explanation" of the link between marijuana use and hard
drugs. But McCaffrey continued to devote more and more of the
government's resources to going after kids. "We have already clearly
committed ourselves," he declared, "to a number-one focus on youth."

"That decision," Bergman says, "was where you could see McCaffrey
begin to lose credibility."

In 1996, less than a year into his term, the new drug czar met Jim
Burke, a smooth-talking, silver-haired executive who chaired the
Partnership for a Drug-Free America - the advertising organization
best known for the slogan "This is your brain on drugs." "Burke
personally was very hard to resist," one of his former colleagues
tells me. "I've seen him sell many conservative members of Congress
and also liberals like Mario Cuomo."

Burke told McCaffrey a simple story. In the late 1980s, he said, the
major television networks had voluntarily given airtime to the
Partnership to run anti-drug ads aimed at teenagers. The number of
teenagers who used drugs - especially marijuana - declined during
that period. But in the early 1990s, Burke said, the rise of cable TV
cut into the profits of the networks, which became stingier with the
time they dedicated to anti-drug advertising. The result, the adman
told the General, was that the number of teenagers who used drugs was
climbing sharply - to the outrage of Dennis Hastert and other
conservative members of Congress. As a clincher, Burke handed
McCaffrey a graph that showed the declining amount of airtime
dedicated to anti-drug advertising on one axis and the declining
perception among teenagers of the risks associated with drugs on the
other. "I'm ninety-nine percent sure," one staffer at the Partnership
tells me, "that it was that conversation that sold McCaffrey."

The General mobilized his office, lobbying Congress to allocate
enough money to put anti-drug advertising on the air whenever
teenagers watched television. His staff was skeptical. For all of
McCaffrey's conviction and charisma, he didn't have much in the way
of facts. "That was all we had - no data, just this one chart - and
we had to go and sell Congress," Carnevale recalls. But Congress
proved to be a pushover. Conservatives, who held a majority, were
thrilled that soft-on-pot liberals in the Clinton administration
finally wanted to do something about the drug problem. "At some
point, you have to draw a line and say that some things are right and
some things are wrong," says Sen. Grassley, explaining his support of
the measure. "And using any drugs is just flat-out wrong." To the
Partnership's delight, Congress allocated $1 billion to buy network
time for anti-drug spots aimed at teenagers.

The General was also starting to make friends beyond the Clinton
administration. The drug czar had found a natural ally in Hastert,
who had become the GOP's de facto leader on drug policy. The former
wrestling coach struck few as charismatic - his joyless and drudging
style, his form like settled gelatin - but his experiences in high
schools had left him with the feeling that the drug issue, in the
words of his longtime aide Bobby Charles, "had become extremely
poignant." Hastert wasn't quite Lee Brown; he believed that the prime
focus of the drug war should be to increase funding for military
operations in Colombia. But he and his staff had grown frustrated
with the exclusively punitive character of drug policy and wanted the
Republicans to take a more compassionate stance. His staff had
studied the RAND reports and largely agreed with their conclusions.
"We felt if you didn't get at the nub of the problem, which was
prevention and treatment, you weren't going to do any good," says
John Bridgeland, a congressional aide who helped coordinate
Republican drug policy. Hastert eventually won $450 million to be
used, in part, to expand a faith-based program discovered by
Bridgeland: Developed by a former evangelical minister, it brought
together preachers, parents and drug counselors to fight the problem
of "apathy" through "parent training" and "messages from the pulpit."

But with McCaffrey's emphasis on kids came another, almost fanatical
focus: going after citizens who used pot for medical purposes. If he
was fighting marijuana, the General was going to fight it everywhere,
in all its forms. He threatened to have doctors who prescribed pot
brought up on federal charges, and dismissed the science behind
medical marijuana as a "Cheech and Chong show." In 1997, voters in
Oregon introduced an initiative to legalize medical marijuana in the
state. "I'll never forget the senior-staff meeting the morning after
the Oregon initiative was announced," Bergman says. "McCaffrey was
furious. It was like this personal affront to him. He couldn't
believe they'd gotten away with it. He wanted to have this research
done on the groups behind it and completely trash them in the press."
As the General traveled to the initiative states, stumping against
medical marijuana, his aides sneered that the initiatives were "all
being mostly bankrolled by one man, George Soros," the billionaire
investor who favored decriminalizing drugs.

Even for those who shared McCaffrey's philosophy, the theatrics
seemed strange: There he was, on evening newscasts, effectively
insisting that grandmothers dying of cancer were corrupting America's
youth. His office pushed arguments that, at best, stretched the
available research: Marijuana is a gateway drug that leads inexorably
to the abuse of harder drugs; marijuana is thirty times more potent
now than it was a generation ago. "It didn't track with the
conclusions our researchers came to," says Bergman. "It felt like he
was trying to manipulate the data."

McCaffrey had taken the drug war in a new direction, one that had
little obvious connection with preventing drug abuse. For the first
time, the full force of the federal government was being brought to
bear on patients dying from terminal diseases. Even the General's
allies in Congress were appalled. "I can't tell you how many times I
went to the Hill with him and sat in on closed-doors meetings,"
Bergman recalls. "Members said to him, 'What in the world are you
doing? We have real drug problems in the country with meth and
cocaine. What the hell are you doing with medical marijuana? We get
no calls from our constituents about that. Nobody cares about that.'
McCaffrey was just mystified by their response, because he truly
believed marijuana was a gateway drug. He truly believed in what he was doing."

7. The Harvard Man

For the cops on the front lines of the War on Drugs, the federal
government's fixation with marijuana was deeply perplexing. As they
saw it, the problem wasn't pot but the drug-related violence that
accompanied cocaine and other hard drugs. After the crack epidemic in
the late 1980s, police commissioners around the country, like Lee
Brown in Houston, began adding more officers and developing computer
mapping to target neighborhoods where crime was on the rise. The
crime rate dropped. But by the mid-1990s, police in some cities were
beginning to realize there was a certain level that they couldn't get
crime below. Mass jailings weren't doing the trick: Only fifteen
percent of those convicted of federal drug crimes were actual
traffickers; the rest were nothing but street-level dealers and
mules, who could always be replaced.

Police in Boston, concerned about violence between youth drug gangs,
turned for assistance to a group of academics. Among them was a
Harvard criminologist named David Kennedy. Working together, the
academics and members of the department's anti-gang unit came up with
what Kennedy calls a "quirky" strategy and convinced senior police
commanders to give it a try. The result, which began in 1995, was the
Boston Gun Project, a collaborative effort among ministers and
community leaders and the police to try to break the link between the
drug trade and violent crime. First, the project tracked a particular
drug-dealing gang, mapping out its membership and operations in
detail. Then, in an effort called Operation Ceasefire, the dealers
were called into a meeting with preachers and parents and
social-service providers, and offered a deal: Stop the violence, or
the police will crack down with a vengeance. "We know the seventeen
guys you run with," the gangbangers were told. "If anyone in your
group shoots somebody, we'll arrest every last one of you." The
project also extended drug treatment and other assistance to anyone
who wanted it.

The effort worked: The rates of homicide and violence among young men
in Boston dropped by two-thirds. Drug dealing didn't stop - "people
continued what they were doing," Kennedy concedes, "but they put
their guns down."

As Kennedy reflected on the success of the Boston project, which ran
for five years, he wondered if he had discovered a deeper truth about
drug-related violence. If the murders weren't a necessary component
of the drug trade - if it was possible to separate the two - perhaps
cities could find a way to reduce the violence, even if they could do
nothing about the drugs.

In 2001, Kennedy got a call from the mayor of San Francisco that gave
him a chance to examine his theories in a new setting. The city had
experienced a recent spike in its murder rate, much of it caused by
an ongoing feud between two drug-dealing gangs - Big Block and West
Mob - that had resulted in dozens of murders over the years. Could
Kennedy, the mayor asked, help police figure out how to stop the killings?

Kennedy flew out to San Francisco and met with police. But as he
researched the history of the violence, it seemed to confirm his
findings in Boston. Though both Big Block and West Mob were involved
in dealing drugs, the shootings were not really drug-related - the
two groups occupied different territories and were not battling over
turf. "The feud had started over who would perform next at a
neighborhood rap event," says Kennedy, now a professor at John Jay
College of Criminal Justice. "They had been killing each other ever since."

Such evidence suggested that drug enforcement needed to focus more
narrowly on those responsible for the violence. "Seventy percent of
the violence in these hot neighborhoods comes back to drugs," Kennedy
says. "But one of the profound myths is that these homicides are
about the drug trade. The violence is driven by these crews - but
they're not killing each other over business." The real spark
igniting the murders, he realized, was peer pressure, a kind of
primordial male goad that drove young gang members to kill each other
even in instances when they weren't sure they wanted to.

Given that police departments had already locked up every drug dealer
in sight and were still having problems with violence, Kennedy
thought a new approach was worth a try. "There's a difference between
saying, 'I'm watching this, and you should stop,' and putting someone
in federal lockup," he says. "The violence is not about the drug
business - but that's a very hard thing for people to understand."

But in the early days of the Bush administration, police departments
were in no hurry to experiment with an approach that focused on
drug-related murders and mostly ignored users who weren't committing
violence. Kennedy's efforts proved to be yet another missed
opportunity in the War on Drugs - an experience that made clear how
difficult it is for science to influence the nation's drug policy.

"If ten years ago the medical community had figured out a way to
reduce the deaths from breast cancer by two-thirds, every cancer
clinic in the country would have been using those techniques a year
later," Kennedy says. "But when it comes to drugs and violence,
there's been nothing like that."

8. Helicopters and Coca

Instead of pursuing the Boston Gun Project and other innovative
approaches to fighting drug violence, the federal government decided
to escalate its military response in Colombia. For the past decade
and a half, cooperation from officials in Bogota had been
halfhearted, sporadic and deeply corrupt. But by 1999, the country,
it seemed, was on the verge of collapsing into civil war. The drug
money that had flowed into Colombia had found its way into the hands
of the rebel militia - the FARC - which had been laying siege to the
Colombian government. The Clinton foreign-policy team, having spent
the previous few years dealing with the consequences of failed states
in Somalia and the Balkans, was deeply concerned about the
possibility of a failed narco-state in America's own back yard.

One afternoon in June 1999, a dozen senior Clinton officials filed
into the National Security Council's situation room, summoned by
Sandy Berger, the president's national security adviser. Even though
Bogota had ceded control of vast swaths of the country to the
left-wing rebels, they were told, recent peace talks had collapsed.
"The FARC had basically always been jungle campesinos - they were a
pretty austere bunch," says Brian Sheridan, who was in charge of the
Pentagon's counternarcotics effort at the time and attended the
meeting. "All of a sudden, they were leveling these attacks that had
gotten more and more audacious." When FARC rebels had emerged from
the jungle for a round of peace talks the previous fall, they had
brandished brand-new AK-47s and Dragunovs, as if on military parade.
One U.S. official observed at the time that the weaponry was "far
beyond" what the Colombian army had - in a pitched battle, the
Clinton administration worried, the -Colombian government could
plausibly collapse.

The White House advisers weren't the only officials in Washington
concerned about Colombia. Earlier that day, two men who attended the
briefing - Rand Beers of the State Department and Charlie Wilhelm of
the Defense Department - had gotten a call from the Republican caucus
on the Hill. Dennis Hastert, who had been elevated to Speaker of the
House six months earlier, wanted to see them right away. "It was kind
of unusual," Beers recalls - but when Hastert called, you came.

When Beers and Wilhelm arrived, Rep. Porter Goss, then the chairman
of the House Intelligence Committee, handed them a piece of paper. It
was a copy of a supplemental spending authorization that the
Republicans planned to offer immediately. Crafted by Bobby Charles,
Hastert's longtime aide, the bill would have more than doubled
military aid to Colombia to take on the rebels and narcotraffickers
- -to a staggering $1.2 billion a year. But it was the politics of the
situation that worried Beers as much as the money. "It occurred to me
that if the administration was going to do anything on Colombia, it
better do it soon," he says now, "or the Republicans would once again
outflank what they perceived as the I-never-inhaled Clinton
administration." Beers told the Republicans he would take a look, and
then hurried to Berger's meeting.

Throughout much of the Clinton administration, the hope had been that
the United States would be able to reduce its military aid to the
Andes as the cocaine epidemic waned. Now, as Berger's group heard
from intelligence agents, that hope seemed to be fading.
Narcotraffickers were paying off the FARC so they could grow coca in
the jungles of Colombia. The FARC were then turning around and using
the money to buy weapons to stage attacks on the Colombian government.

Berger decided to act. Rather than oppose the Republican plan, he
agreed to negotiate on an assistance package to bail out the
Colombian government. The result was Plan Colombia - nearly $1.6
billion to escalate the War on Drugs in the Andes. The new program
would arm the military and police in their fight against the FARC,
launch an ambitious effort to spray herbicide on coca crops from the
air and provide economic assistance to poor farmers in rural
villages. The initial aid, officials decided, would be heavily
concentrated in Putumayo, a rebel-run province in the jungle.

No one is sure what convinced President Clinton to approve such an
ambitious escalation in the War on Drugs. But some observers at the
time speculated that the critical factor was a conversation with Sen.
Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat, whose state is home to
the helicopter manufacturer Sikorsky Aircraft. In early 2000, Clinton
unveiled Plan Colombia - and Sikorksy promptly received an order for
eighteen of its Blackhawk helicopters at a cost of $15 million each.
"Much has been made of the notion that this was Dodd looking to sell
Blackhawks to Colombia," Beers tells me. He pauses before adding, "I
am not in a position to tell you it didn't happen."

Plan Colombia would be the Clinton administration's primary and most
- -costly contribution to the War on Drugs, the major counternarcotics
program it bequeathed to the Bush administration. But as with so many
other aspects of American drug policy, the plan had an unintended
consequence: As it evolved, the emphasis on supplying arms to the
Colombian government ended up having less to do with drugs and more
to do with helping Bogota fight its enemies. Colombia used the
military aid to target the left-wing FARC - even though many believed
that right-wing paramilitaries, who were allies of the government,
were more directly involved in narcotrafficking. "It wasn't really
first and foremost a counternarcotics program at all," says a senior
Pentagon official involved in the creation of Plan Colombia. "It was
mostly a political stabilization program."

9. The Temple of Hope

In July of 1999, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas traveled to Cincinnati
to visit Hope Temple, a former crack house that had been turned into
a church. It was an almost unbearably hot day. Bush was on a tour
through the Midwest during which he was testing out his philosophy of
compassionate conservatism, trying to see if its rhetoric and
principles could sustain a winning presidential run. "The American
dream is vivid," Bush told audiences, "but too many feel, 'This dream
is not meant for me.' " John Bridgeland, the congres-sional aide who
had helped steer federal funding to Hope Temple, says Bush was
"overwhelmed" by his visit to the church that day, and stayed the
whole afternoon. That evening, Bush spoke about the fervent
- -religiosity of the place and the rough joys of the addict's
redemptions. "These," he said, "are the armies of compassion."

This was a strange moment in the politics of the drug war: Just as
the Clinton administration was toughening its rhetoric, influential
Republicans were going all soft and gentle. John DiIulio, a political
scientist from the University of Pennsylvania who would become a key
Bush adviser, was disgusted by the "perverse consequences" of harsh
sentencing laws that had put millions of young Americans in prison,
disbelieved the "sweeping scientific claims" made about the dangers
of medical marijuana and wanted to expand "meaningful drug-treatment
opportunities in urban areas." DiIulio and his contemporaries were
troubled, too, by the racial imbalances of the War on Drugs: Blacks,
who comprised only fourteen percent of drug users, made up
seventy-four percent of those in prison for drug possession. It was
not as if the Republican Party had suddenly taken up a position on
the far left of the drug war. But it did seem, for a moment during
the 2000 campaign, as if some moderation were possible.

Three months later, when the Bush campaign released its drug policy,
even the most experienced drug warriors were impressed. The platform
balanced spending between demand- and -supply-side programs, stressed
treatment and doubled the number of community anti-drug coalitions.
When Bush won the White House and DiIulio became the director of the
Office of Faith-Based Programs, they raided the team of compassionate
conservatives surrounding Hastert: Bridgeland became director of the
White House Domestic Policy Council, and Charles became assistant
secretary of state for narcotics control. The new administration,
DiIulio believed, would take the lead in "reforming drug-related
sentencing policies that -research had shown were having perverse
consequences."

"If you look back at that campaign document, it really is pretty
impressive," says Carnevale, who ended up heading the drug office's
transition team for the Bush administration. "Which is kind of
remarkable, given what happened next. They've appointed a drug czar
who ran like hell from a very sensible policy."

It took Bush nearly a year to pick his drug czar, and almost no one
felt encouraged by his choice: John Walters, a laconic Midwesterner
who had served as Bill Bennett's chief of staff during the
administration of George H.W. Bush. "We all knew who Walters was,"
one longtime drug warrior tells me, "but he wasn't what you would
call an inspiring figure, even to conservatives." When Walters
submitted his first National Drug Control Strategy to Bush in
February 2002, it became clear that the administration's focus had
narrowed: Walters was devoted to Plan Colombia and to a prevention
campaign that would keep kids from trying drugs for the first time,
aimed particularly at marijuana - even though the number of
first-time pot smokers had been flat for half a decade. Longtime drug
warriors like Carnevale were stunned. "We were going back to an
Eighties-style drug policy," he says - one that emphasized the kind
of military and law-and-order programs that had been proven not to
work, while ignoring programs, particularly treatment, that did.

Walters also had a complaint with the ads that the Partnership for a
Drug-Free America had created for the drug czar's office under
McCaffrey. They were, he said, too soft. He had a point. The ads,
which ran under the slogan "The Anti-Drug," had been designed by a
committee of academics who apparently believed that kids needed to be
shown that not doing drugs could be fun too. In one characteristic
spot, a pen draws an animated landscape, with a cartoon boy avoiding
the advances of cartoon dealers before driving off into the distance
with a cartoon dragon on a cartoon motorcycle. "My name is Brandon,
and drawing is my anti-drug," the narrator says sweetly. The
commercials made abstinence seem so lame they could have been
designed by the cartels. "A lot of the ads that were produced were
really boring," admits Philip Palmgreen, a University of Kentucky
communications professor who served on the ad committee. Walters not
only wanted harder-hitting messages - he also wanted the focus "to
narrow around marijuana," according to one staffer at the Partnership
who asked not to be identified. "Very candidly, the Partnership
pushed back against that because the problems associated with
marijuana are not very dire."