EX-DEA CHIEF - I WAS IGNORED

Economic Concerns Superseded Drug-Fighting, He Says

ALBANY, N.Y. -- During the five years that Thomas Constantine spent as
the United States' top drug-enforcement official, he never sat down
with President Clinton to discuss drug policy. He was never called to
brief the president on a major enforcement issue. The phone never rang
for a chat.

Constantine, who went to the job after more than three decades in the
New York State Police, initially took some pride in being a Washington
outsider. But by his retirement last summer, he acknowledges, he had
become a different kind of outsider--one circumvented by the White
House, particularly in its annual evaluation of anti-drug efforts in
Mexico.

"The policymakers from the National Security Council and the State
Department started with the premise that they were going to certify
Mexico," Constantine said recently of what he described as the
administration's unspoken determination to put economic concerns ahead
of drug issues. "Their question was, `How do we get around the facts
presented by Tom Constantine?' "

Depending on one's perspective, Constantine emerged at the head of the
Drug Enforcement Administration as either a truth-teller among cynical
bureaucrats or a resonance box for the sometimes conspiratorial views
of his agents.

Constantine uses the word "whistle-blower" with a beat cop's derision;
when the subject of his bureaucratic battles arises, he says he has no
interest in attacking the president or his policies, even those with
which he disagreed.

Still, it is hard to leave a few long conversations with Constantine,
61, without the impression of a man struggling to hold his tongue out
of loyalty to a system he sees as flawed and a president he does not
seem to respect.

"I watched that situation for 5 1/2 years, and every year it became
worse," he finally said of the drug trade in Mexico. "We were not
adequately protecting the citizens of the United States from these
organized-crime figures."

A White House spokesman, Mike Hammer, said the administration would
have no comment on Constantine's remarks.

At a time when the nation's drug policies are coming under their
sharpest public attack in decades, Constantine came through his tenure
as the drug-enforcement agency's administrator relatively unscathed.

Challenges to the Clinton administration's limited efforts to reduce
the demand for illegal drugs have been directed mainly at the White
House and its drug-policy adviser, Gen. Barry McCaffrey. Criticism of
its policies on drug laws and other enforcement issues has mostly
fallen on McCaffrey and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno.

But while budgets rose steadily at the Drug Enforcement Administration
under Constantine, allowing for the hiring of hundreds of new agents,
there has been relatively little evidence that the agency is making
any real headway against the world's most powerful
traffickers.

The Drug Enforcement Administration played a central role in the
arrests of Colombian cocaine bosses in 1995 and 1996, only to see
smaller, more elusive groups quickly take their place.

After having some success in Bolivia and Peru, the agency has watched
much of the drug business there shift to Colombia. And while the
agency has struck at some important traffickers in Asia, it has been
mostly helpless as drug production has reportedly risen sharply in
Burma and Afghanistan.

Nor is it clear that Constantine's efforts to strengthen the drug
agency's ties to local and state police forces contributed
significantly to the declines in drug violence. The General Accounting
Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said in July that it was
hard to assess the agency's work at all because of its failure to set
measurable standards of performance.

A notoriously demanding boss, Constantine was said by some of his
critics within the agency to have driven away some of its most
experienced officials, a charge he denies.

Still, Constantine said his greatest frustration came from Mexico.
Evidence of the growing power of Mexican drug mafias greeted him
almost as soon as he took over the agency in March 1994.

Mexican traffickers were by then taking as much as half of the
Colombian cocaine they moved into the United States as payment for
their services.

Mexicans were also dominating the growing U.S. market for
methamphetamine and expanding their distribution of heroin across the
western United States.

"In retrospect, we underestimated their importance," Constantine said
of the Mexican traffickers. "The focus at the time was all on Colombia."