DRUG CZAR MCCAFFREY LAYS SOME FACTS ON THE TABLE

For the moment, Barry McCaffrey, who heads the Office of National Drug
Control Policy, doesn't want to argue drug policy. He wants to use a
modest lunch in his office to get some facts out so that when people
do argue drug policy, they can argue from agreed-upon facts.

He's talking about lots of people, "including the president of the
United States, who said at least twice that the United States, with 5
percent of the world's population, uses half the world's supply of
illegal drugs."

Wrong, says McCaffrey. The real figure? Nobody knows for sure, but the
retired general and present drug "czar" thinks the presumed half may
be closer to 11 percent.

Does it matter? Of course it matters, he says. You can't make rational
policy until you have some fairly clear idea of the problem the policy
is to address. Painting pictures of America as a drug-ridden society
leads to bad policy -- as does the tendency in some quarters to
conflate the various drug abuses into a single dreadful statistic.

Quite apart from the different -- and differentially addictive --
drugs of choice, McCaffrey is saying it is important to distinguish
between two broad types of drug users.

"One group of people takes drugs to feel better. The second group of
people is using drugs to feel good."

What is he talking about? "I've got underlying mental health problems,
psychiatric problems," he says, lapsing into his habit of describing
other people in first-person terms. "I'm a 14-year-old girl and I'm
sitting there in this treatment center with 16 other girls telling
this drug policy guy I wouldn't be alive today were it not for drugs.
I was using drugs to self-medicate. I've got a severe mental health
problem, and, by the way, if you diagnose me with that mental problem
at an earlier age, and start treating that, I won't turn into a
chronic addict at 25."

That's the first group of abusers. The second: "You go down to the
Johns Hopkins Research Center where they have laboratory rats and
rhesus monkeys. If you take a male rhesus monkey and give him an
option of pushing a lever to open a trap door to get at water, food, a
lady rhesus monkey or cocaine, for sure he'll go for the cocaine.
He'll wind up chronically addicted to cocaine. He'll malnourish
himself. ... He will choose cocaine over any other reward -- and it
won't have anything to do with mental health problems or growing up
with a bad rhesus monkey mother. It's the drugs."

The point? Some drug abusers can stop on their own; some can't. It's
what our young people know, and what too many of their well-meaning
advisers can't bring themselves to acknowledge. Not everyone is
equally susceptible to addiction. Drawing a link between casual use
and hard-core addiction makes as much sense to them as drawing a link
between the glass of cabernet you have at dinner and the stupefied
wino devoting his life to collecting "spare change" for the next
bottle of cheap wine.

But then there are the others. "I'm not undisciplined or immoral or
weak," McCaffrey describes them. "My brain is telling me I must
continue this behavior or I'm going to feel intensely bad. At this
point, I'm exhibiting severe problems and mental health challenges.
I'm malnourished, HIV positive and I've got a whole host of medical,
social and legal problems. You can't, at this point, disentangle them,
but for sure what the numbers tell me is if you get me off drugs, in
mandatory treatment and testing, even for say 30 days, I've got the
flush back in my cheeks, and a lot of my problems start disappearing.
Keep me in treatment for a year, and the likelihood of my going back
to work and remaking family connections skyrockets."

But if McCaffrey is right -- not just about our haphazard use of
statistics but also about drug abuse typology -- why isn't he
screaming from the rooftops that throwing people in prison for abusing
drugs (or for selling drugs to support their addictions) makes no
sense at all? Why isn't he saying that the drug problem ought to be
treated more like a medical problem than a criminal justice problem?

And how do the facts he lays out support the administration's proposal
to stick a $1.6 billion military, criminal justice and drug
interdiction nose into Colombia?