DRUG CZAR TARGETS ABUSE MYTHS

Using a blunt approach, Barry R. McCaffrey tells college and high school
students that the "drug war" metaphor is inaccurate, and prevention is the
solution.

PROVIDENCE -- The question was just the sort of no-nonsense query you would
expect from a thoughtful college student: How can marijuana be illegal when
alcohol isn't?

Barry R. McCaffrey, the White House drug czar and former four-star Army
general, answered with a directness that was refreshing.

"I don't share that view, but it is a legitimate topic for debate," he told
200 Providence College students yesterday. "If you are some 40-year-old guy
smoking pot in a hut in Oregon and writing a book, I don't care what you
do."

That got their attention. Then McCaffrey shifted seamlessly into his
antidrug spiel: that marijuana is dangerous and carcinogenic. That too many
children get into enormous trouble because of their dependence on
marijuana.

But McCaffrey didn't stop there. Alcohol, he said, is the most abused drug
in the United States. "Booze," he said with a voice that sounded like Jimmy
Stewart, "is the biggest cause of crime."

McCaffrey brought his antidrug crusade to Southern New England yesterday,
where he spoke at the Fifth Annual Substance Abuse Roundtable in Taunton,
Mass., followed by visits to Providence College and Barrington High School.

For more than 30 years before his appointment in 1996 as director of the
White House's National Drug Control Policy, McCaffrey had a career in the
U.S. Army. He served four combat tours -- two in Vietnam -- and was
commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces Southern Command before
President Clinton called.

When he retired, McCaffrey was the most highly decorated and the youngest
four-star general in the Army.

So McCaffrey speaks from experience when he says that the "war on drugs" is
an inaccurate metaphor. Dealing with the problem of drugs is more akin to
fighting cancer, he once said, because both call for patience, compassion
and the will to carry on, despite setbacks.

"If we are fighting a war, we're winning," said McCaffrey, a Taunton
native, who asserted that drug use and drug-related deaths have declined by
50 percent since 1979.

Still, 14 million people use illegal drugs a year, and 5 million of them
are chronically addicted.

At Providence College yesterday, McCaffrey spent a lot of time dispelling
common myths about who abuses drugs: "Americans," he said, "like to believe
they are black, brown, poor, crazy. I say, `Hold up the mirror.'"

People who use drugs do so because of what it does to their brains,
McCaffrey said. It has nothing to do with race or economic status. He said
the only difference between a middle-class drug addict and a poor one is
that the middle-income person can probably afford treatment. However, in
both cases, their downward trajectory is certain unless they receive
effective treatment.

McCaffrey also predicted that methamphetamine, commonly known as speed,
will become the drug of choice in the next decade.

"It is the worst thing that can happen to America," he said. "These are
drugs made by idiots in a hotel room. That's the future of drug use in our
society."

The solution is prevention, McCaffrey said, but you must start early and
repeat your message to each new generation of elementary school children.
By the time most teenagers are high school seniors, half have sampled an
illegal drug. The key to successful intervention is to educate children at
the community level, through programs like the Boys and Girls Clubs and the
YMCA.