DRUG CZAR CHALLENGES CALIFORNIA VOTERS

We've all heard the familiar rap against generals -- that they tend to
fight every new war with weapons and tactics from the last one.

As an enlisted man, I never was positioned to second-guess a general. And I
surely would hesitate to argue with a czar -- the lofty title, Lord help
us, now borne by retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey.

But the longer we watch Czar McCaffrey's stumbles in America's fight
against drugs, the clearer it becomes that this is just another general
waging the wrong war.

On June 1, the California secretary of state validated a record number of
citizen signatures on a proposed initiative radically overhauling our drug
laws. This strangely named proposition, the Drug Treatment Diversion
Program, needed just over 400,000 signers to qualify for the November
ballot. Its sponsors came in with 713,849.

As if shot from a Civil War canister cannon, McCaffrey was in California
within 48 hours. He denounced the new ballot proposal as "a poison pill"
that would dismantle the present system for handling narcotics offenders.

Poison pills aside, the dismantling Czar McCaffrey fears is precisely what
those petition-signers had in mind. McCaffrey thinks the drug laws he
oversees are doing the job. He seems undisturbed that one-half of the
nearly 2 million Americans now behind bars were put there on drug or
drug-related offenses.

But the horde of Californians who deplore this -- and who signed petitions
seeking change -- would fill the Los Angeles Coliseum eight times over. It
could be that people are out of patience with McCaffrey and others, in and
out of government, whose outdated weaponry seems useless against a rampant
social problem.

In their chain of command, generals (much less, czars) are not easily
attuned to democracy. But there is a certain fatheadedness in civilian
leaders who cannot or will not heed what the people are telling them. In
the last two general elections, California and a half-dozen other states,
plus the District of Columbia, voted to legalize marijuana for medicinal
use under a doctor's prescription.

Yet almost nowhere has state or local law enforcement permitted the drug to
be dispensed without considerable harassment. In Arizona, moreover, voters
had to approve their statewide initiative a second time when the
Legislature moved to void the initial vote.

And for a half-million residents of Washington, D.C., who are still wards
of the federal government, the conflict with authority was drawn even more
sharply. Under orders from congressional overseers, district officials were
barred from even tabulating the votes in a local referendum empowering
physicians to recommend pot smoking for patients with certain illnesses.

(Media "exit polling" had shown the vote at 80 percent in favor.)

The principal purpose of California's new ballot initiative is to treat
drug users for their possible addiction instead of just locking them up.
Persons convicted on first or even second "possession" offenses would be
placed on probation, under supervised health care.

Backers of the measure insist that dealing with drug victims outside prison
walls would cost less than one-fifth what we're spending under the harsher
methods McCaffrey favors.

The revised statute would show no leniency toward persons producing or
selling narcotics, or with a record of violent crime.

But generals (and especially those advanced to czar status) don't give up
easily. This one is not about to fall on his sword.

If you think the proposed new approach will work, then "you obviously don't
understand the nature of the addict's brain disease," McCaffrey asserted in
his hastily mounted campaign of opposition.

Ever the deferential enlisted man, I won't challenge a general's right to
practice medicine without a license. But some might think McCaffrey's
expertise in trench warfare and close-order drill does not qualify him to
lecture us on brain disease. Or much else.

Does it seem illogical, moreover, that doctors today are free to prescribe
the highly addictive narcotic morphine for easing pain, but not the far
milder derivatives of marijuana?

An eminent trio of public servants, starting with William Bennett, has
accepted this oddly un-American designation, "drug czar." All have been
longer on rhetoric than on delivering the solutions one might expect of czars.

Other than jampacked prison cells, of course.

Perhaps the people of California, come November, will have shown us a
better way.

Van Deerlin represented a San Diego County district in Congress for 18 years.