REP. CAMPBELL UNVEILS RADICAL DRUG PROPOSAL

He's far behind in the polls, underfunded and unpopular with his party's
conservative base, so Rep. Tom Campbell has thrown caution to the wind
in his underdog quest to unseat Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Nov. 7.

"I'm going to have to do dramatically important things to call attention
to dramatically important issues," Campbell, R-San Jose, said Monday.

And so saying, he announced a drug policy that is, for the most part,
so radical in tone that San Francisco's Democratic District Attorney
Terence Hallinan - California's most liberal DA - said he liked it better
than Feinstein's stance on the drug issue.

Campbell, 48, who represented the 15th Congressional District from 1988
to 1992, and was re turned to the office in 1995, laid out his drug
policy in a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. It was the
first of four speeches planned this week that he hopes will cure his lack
of name recognition and make a horse race out of what now has the makings
of a walkover by Democrat Feinstein.

Measured by any standard, America's 30-year war on drugs has failed,
Campbell said, with slogans ("tough on drugs") and draconian prison
sentences having replaced reducing demand as the critical, indispensable
element of an effective anti-drug strategy.

"We should fight this war on terms we can win," he said.

Lest anyone should accuse him of being soft on drugs, Campbell's policy
carries within it a definitive refutation: "I propose the death penalty
for an adult who intentionally sells heroin, cocaine or methamphetamine
to a child under 12."

Campbell believes that the United States should use the $1.3 billion it
is sending to Colombia to fight cocaine production to instead "provide
enough funds nationwide to provide serious, effective rehabilitation for
every addict seeking it."

Feinstein voted in favor of the Colombian anti-drug aid package, which
includes sending U.S. helicopters and military advisors to beef up that
nation's military efforts to stamp out cocaine production. Her campaign
spokesman, Kam Kuwata, said Campbell's proposal oversimplified the issue
by focusing only on the demand side, whereas Feinstein supported
interdiction - as in Colombia -"with dogged oversight," and local
rehabilitation programs, exemplified by San Francisco-based Delancy Street.

Campbell also proposes a comprehensive education program for children to
drill home the point that "drugs kill - they're not cool, they'd stupid."
If necessary, he said, "we should physically harbor children against this
danger - in churches and community centers, in after-school programs that
keep kids under a watchful eye."

He would permit government health centers to prescribe and administer to
adult addicts drugs that are now illegal. He also he would address the
problem of drug use in prisons by instituting a fine-grained treatment
and testing program for inmates.

Campbell, who is arguably the most liberal Republican in the House, has
infuriated conservatives with his support for abortion rights and his
vote several years ago against making Newt Gingrich House speaker. But
he also managed to irk Democrats by voting to impeach President Clinton.

He acknowledged that advocating the death penalty for adults who sold hard
drugs to youngsters was "not a conventional position for a Republican, or
for anyone to take - especially one running for the United States Senate.
But you should know that I do not strive to be conventional. To be so, I
believe, is to be damned by mediocrity, to be corrupted by the status quo."

Campbell said that his own poll by the Zogby organization showed him
trailing Feinstein by 10 points, but most polls put the margin between
15 and 20 points. "For all practical purposes, we've got a substantial
lead - but we're not taking anything for granted," Kuwata said.

Feinstein, who is recuperating from a broken leg, seems disinclined to
debate. "I've accepted all the invitations, she has accepted none,"
Campbell said.

Hallinan, who said he had attended the speech at Campbell's request,
said "he makes sense to me," but stopped short of endorsing the
Republican. "I'm a Democrat, and on this basic gut issue, where he has
such a good position and Senator Feinstein has such a bad position, that
makes it really tough," said Hallinan.

"She harkens back to the Reagan era and "just say no,' " Hallinan said.

Federal election records disclose that Feinstein has approximately $3.1
million in cash on hand, compared with $1.15 million for Campbell.

Campbell has been on the Stanford University law faculty for 17 years,
and his run for Senate is an "up or out" proposition. If he wins, he
relinquishes his professorship; if he loses, it's back to the classroom,
he said.