RETIRING DRUG WARRIOR WOULD RATHER TREAT THAN FIGHT

"I doubt that I've ever seen in combat the misery such as I've
encountered through watching what drug abuse does to people." Gen.
Barry McCaffrey, who prepared Saturday to step down as the White
House director of national drug control policy

WASHINGTON -- Reflecting upon nearly five years as the Clinton
administration's top drug policy official, Gen. Barry McCaffrey looks
back even further, to 31 years in the Army, where he became its most
highly decorated general after fighting in Vietnam and the Persian
Gulf War.

"I doubt that I've ever seen in combat the misery such as I've
encountered through watching what drug abuse does to people,"
McCaffrey said Saturday as he prepared to step down as the White
House director of national drug control policy.

"They're doing things which they know to be morally and physically
repulsive," he said. "They're ashamed of themselves. They're fearful,
they're sick, they're driven."

And they are fellow Americans, added McCaffrey, a professional
soldier who refuses to accept the metaphor of a war on drugs.
Beginning with his Senate confirmation hearings in early 1996, the
retired four-star general has likened America's drug problem to a
cancer that must be treated.

In an interview, he said that treatment for addiction and mental
illness should be covered by the same health insurance that
recognizes physical illnesses. McCaffrey was instrumental in
persuading President Clinton to extend such parity in health coverage
to 9 million federal employees.

McCaffrey called it "silly" for federal law to impose harsher
penalties for selling or possessing crack cocaine than for powder
cocaine because they are the same drug pharmacologically.

He criticized predetermined prison sentences for drug felons.

"I am unalterably opposed to the system of mandatory minimums," he
said. "I think we need to give this authority back to the judges."

And most nonviolent addicts behind bars, he said, belong in treatment
centers, not in prison, where they learn to become better criminals.

The solution to drug abuse and its $110 billion annual consequences,
he said, is "to engage in a more coherent, rational way the
chronically addicted as we encounter them in our communities. And we
find them in the criminal justice system, in the health-care system
and the welfare system."

"At that point, it seems to me," McCaffrey said, "if you want to save
taxpayer dollars, and you want to reduce violence in your
communities, if you want to accomplish all of these larger social
goals, you have to draw them into effective drug treatment."

McCaffrey conceded that appropriating money to treat every addict had
been a hard sell, on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.

"That's the argument that has to be made to state legislatures and
county councils," he said. "Then we've got to tell the health
insurance industry: `Look, you're going to pay for it one way or
another. You can pay for it in the emergency room, you can pay for it
with a lot less dollars in drug treatment centers. You can wait till
they're HIV-infected and then pay a quarter of a million dollars to
deal with AIDS as a medical condition.' "

But he acknowledged that drug abuse elicited more revulsion than
sympathy from the majority of Americans.

"They get a better feel for it when it's their son or daughter, or
their mother," McCaffrey said.

Even as he leaves the White House, McCaffrey continued to challenge
the perception of a lost war on drugs, which he said was fueled by "a
very deliberate, well-thought-out strategy by drug legalization
forces" seeking public resignation to drug use.