U.S. BRUSHED ASIDE MEXICAN ROLE, EX-DRUG CHIEF 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 policy-makers 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 five and a half 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 Attorney General 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."

Constantine said he quickly detected another pattern as
well.

"Every time we had a major case involving a criminal organization from
Mexico operating in the United States, there was a significant
allegation of corruption involving the Mexican attorney general's
office, a Mexican state police force, the highway police," he said.

But, Constantine said, other Clinton administration officials were
resolute: U.S. concerns about Mexico's corruption and drug-trafficking
problems were secondary to trade and other economic interests.

"The idea was, if you said those things publicly, if you release
documents, you will just aggravate the situation," he said. "My
concern was that we had kids in this country dropping like flies.
Maybe that was parochial, but I felt like I was the only person there
who felt like that."

Even after Constantine's counterpart in Mexico was found in 1997 to
have been colluding with the country's biggest cocaine trafficker,
serious discussion of the issue within the Clinton administration was
minimal, even negligible, he said. The exception was the annual debate
over whether to certify the anti-drug efforts of Mexico and other
nations that produce or ship illegal drugs.

"Everyone would say, 'Your facts are correct, but there are bigger
policy issues involved,"' Constantine recalled.

Constantine, who now teaches at the State University of New York at
Albany and consults on law enforcement, said it had never occurred to
him to resign in protest. "My sense was that you always ought to try
to make it work," he said.