A MIXED RECORD

McCaffrey Ends Five Years As Drug Czar

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey departs as director of the White House
Office of National Drug Control Policy with a five-year record he would
candidly acknowledge is mixed.

On the plus side, drug use by adolescents is down 21 percent since 1997.
Drug-related murders are down by half since 1990. Overall rates for use of
cocaine and heroin have stabilized since 1992. Federal spending on programs
to prevent drug abuse has increased 55 percent since 1996. The number of
community drug courts has gone from only 12 in 1994 to about 700 planned or
in operation today.

Moreover, the use of illegal drugs in the United States has declined by
about 50 percent over the last 20 years.

Unfortunately, there is at least as much bad news on the drug front. The
use of so-called club drugs, like ecstasy, by teen-agers is increasing
almost exponentially. Heroin is making a comeback. The methamphetamine
plague continues. About 6 percent of Americans, 14 million of us, use
illegal narcotics. The latest figures available show that 57 percent of
addicts in the United States get no drug treatment. That's disastrous.

In addition, escalating federal efforts over more than 20 years to
interdict drugs entering the United States have failed to reduce their
availability or raise their street prices. Cocaine and marijuana are
cheaper than ever.

So it's easy for skeptics to brand America's supposed "war on drugs" a
failure, and even urge its termination. It's also easy enough to brand
McCaffrey a failure, a soldier out of his element and over his head on the
narcotics issue.

Easy, but wrong.

In truth, McCaffrey has been by far the most energetic and determined White
House drug fighter in the dozen years the office has existed. True, he made
mistakes, like his misguided plan to buy anti-drug messages inserted into
television entertainment. His bureaucratic battle to put himself into a
centralized chain of command that the drug war lacks proved a divisive
flop. The White House and Congress couldn't be persuaded, and federal law
enforcement agencies like the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration
predictably resisted any encroachment on their authority.

Still, McCaffrey was undeterred. He used the office's bully pulpit
relentlessly to crusade against the drug abuse that kills an estimated
50,000 Americans a year and blights millions of lives. He got steady
increases in funding for counter narcotics programs. Two decades ago, the
federal government spent barely $1 billion fighting drugs. Today the figure
is $19 billion.

To his credit, McCaffrey grew and learned on the job. He now acknowledges
that "America can't arrest our way out of the drug problem," meaning simply
putting people in jail for drug crimes is not a long-term solution. Federal
funding for drug treatment and drug prevention has increased dramatically,
with McCaffrey's support.

His as-yet-unnamed successor in the Bush administration should spend the
time needed to digest the lessons McCaffrey learned, and the
recommendations he leaves behind. Those start with, in McCaffrey's words,
"prevention coupled with treatment accompanied by research." And no to the
drug legalization that would constitute surrender.