THE GENERAL GOES TO WAR

LIKE any war commander, Barry McCaffrey has his mission, and he's going for
it without distractions. There is no time for hand-wringers or insurgents.
The enemy is drugs. Drugs on the streets and drugs in sport.

And General McCaffrey, US war hero and for four years President Bill
Clinton's so-called "drug tsar", is the man in charge of $US18billion
$A27billion) to do something about it. It's just that the US prohibitionist
policies are misunderstood internationally. America is on the right track,
right?

He's getting more money from both the Democrats and Republicans every year
because he's getting results, right? And he's had 87 op-eds (opinion
articles) in the papers, right? "Go find some of those op-eds we've written
on," he orders one of two eager young subordinates, ready to hup to
attention at a raised eyebrow from the general.

During a recent European visit, a few articles tagged him the
"controversial" McCaffrey. "Controversial? God, I travel all over this
country and I get showered with awards and these guys give me more money!"
he says. "Unless I go to some goofy college debate or something, we get
enormously laudatory reactions."

Well, not exactly, but Barry McCaffrey, "the old warhorse of the repressive
American drug policy", according to one unkind Dutch newspaper, just knows
he's right.

Within hours of arriving in Australia for an international drugs-in-sport
summit, the general was making headlines, this time over his new interest,
and the subject of the summit he's here for, drugs in sport. The general
wants an independent worldwide drug-testing body for sports. Backed by the
Federal Government, he defied attempts by John Coates, the Australian
Olympics Committee president, to ban him from Olympic venues.

He's a relative newcomer to the intensely political world of the
International Olympic Committee, but, even before his arrival in Australia,
he was causing ructions. The IOC's new drug-testing body, the World
Anti-Doping Agency, has its strong detractors, particularly from nations
sceptical of the IOC's ability to run it, but none so vociferous as
McCaffrey. It is "more public-relations ploy than public-policy solution",
he says.

McCaffrey has five policies he wants included - including 365-day drug
testing on a no-notice basis, no time limit on when an athlete could be
stripped of medals if discovered cheating, and preservation of drug samples
- - and he won't budge.

"I think the IOC will increasingly engage in a dialogue, and if they don't,
we just have to find ways to protect the world athletic competitors," he says.

Nasty letters have gone back and forth. In one to the IOC president, Juan
Antonio Samaranch, early last month, McCaffrey said that it is "our view
that the coming Sydney, Australia, Summit of Governments provides the IOC
with an important opportunity to work with these nations to correct the
flaws of process and substance that I have outlined".

But it's not so simple. Australia and European nations are more willing
than the United States to work with the new body and improve it from
within. Australia doesn't agree with the Americans on key points, including
freezing athletes' blood samples. Said one drug expert, who declined to be
named: "Everything we hear about him (McCaffrey) and see of him makes us
think he's seeing this as an opportunity to grandstand. This is one more
war where the Americans can come in late and try to get all the glory."

None the less, with the US threatening to use its financial leverage,
including scrapping tax breaks for Olympic sponsors, observers believe the
IOC will buckle if Washington gets serious.

Part of the resentment, just like in the illicit drug debate, is that US
sport is notoriously dope-ridden. How could they be so sanctimonious before
cleaning up their own act, critics argue.

While he is no friend of Coates, McCaffrey has at least one in Canberra, as
evidenced by the Federal Government's support for him in the spat over
whether he could or could not visit Olympic venues in Australia. The Prime
Minister, John Howard, met McCaffrey in Washington in July and invited him
on his first visit down under. Howard backs the US "zero tolerance" stance
on illicit drugs and agreed with the general that heroin trials and
injecting rooms send the wrong message to young people. "We have the
balance about right," Howard said.

The Prime Minister's meeting with McCaffrey came at a time when people
closely watching Australia's heroin death rate - among them former "zero
tolerance" police commissioners not partial to "goofy" debates - were
shifting their positions. The debate, which has yet to occur seriously in
America, was about whether prohibition was a prohibitively expensive flop
that was costing, rather than saving, lives, and whether a moral objection
to drugs had clouded the issue for decades.

As New South Wales and Victoria move towards harm-minimisation strategies
of heroin-injecting rooms, warnings for first-time heroin offenders, and
decriminalisation of marijuana, McCaffrey remains the face of prohibition,
for 50 years the US-backed international response to illicit drugs.

He has opposed even relatively non-controversial symbols of drug tolerance.
Last year, he was pivotal in getting Clinton to block US federal money for
needle-exchange programs, which aim to reduce the spread of HIV, and which
have been government-funded in Australia since 1986. Needle exchange is
credited in part with Australia's acknowledged success in containing AIDS.
But McCaffrey says he is "one of the few people in the world who read the
studies" and that they show that needle exchange doesn't work. "I
personally think this is boffo thinking on the part of those who are
essentially saying, `Let's treat the wounded, let's surrender in the
struggle against heroin addiction."'

All the same, HIV rates even in Australian prisons are lower than in the
general US population.

McCaffrey reckons no-surrender on drugs is working; it's just that the good
news isn't getting through. He quotes figures that drug use in America is
down by 50per cent since the worst year in 1979; that youth drug abuse is
down 13per cent since last year; and that cocaine use is down 70per cent.
And McCaffrey is not one-dimensional. He supports drug courts, which divert
offenders away from prison into treatment, and also backs methadone
maintenance programs. But law enforcement remains the linchpin.

"This place got disgusting in the '70s and '80s and a lot of it was drug
and alcohol abuse, and now we're trying to change that, and we're saying no
- - it's sport, it's computers, this is what's fun in life, and it's working."

McCaffrey, 57, is charming in a gruff, military way. He stands tall, a
picture of army discipline, his white hair trimmed to a military neatness.
He's a US hero, having served in four combat tours of duty, receiving the
Purple Heart for war wounds three times. His status was confirmed after he
was hit in Vietnam in 1969 and, though his left arm hung from threads,
wouldn't leave his men. He was evacuated only after he collapsed.

Doctors wanted to amputate his arm, but he refused, and his arm survived,
just. Then, back in the Gulf War, he was the leader of a now-famous
manoeuvre that trapped Iraqi forces inside Kuwait.

McCaffrey says his job as the director of the Office of National Drug
Control Policy, a cabinet-level position, is just a chance to do his duty
one more time. When Bill "I-didn't-inhale" Clinton was looking for someone
who would be acceptable to tough-on-drugs Republicans, he picked McCaffrey.

"My dad (also a general), who at the time was 83, said ... this is a
national responsibility. Stop worrying about it, get out of uniform and go
do it."

And so he did, and he reckons he's doing it well. He acknowledges that
America imprisons too many people (1.8million, more than any country bar
Russia), but adds: "By the way, it works. Crime's down, it's plummeting.
You get these silly articles where somebody says, `How's it possible we can
be jailing more people when crime's going down?' Well, duh, if you're an
aggressive violent male with a cocaine habit and you pop some old lady in
the head to steal her purse, you're going to get prosecuted and locked up."

Not everyone surrenders to the general's arguments. "If this is victory,"
sighs Kevin Zeese, the president of the drug-reform group Common Sense for
Drug Policy, "I would hate to see defeat."

Zeese and other reformers (McCaffrey calls them closet legalisers) have
been hugely disappointed in McCaffrey, who came to the job talking about
treatment and saying "we can't incarcerate our way out of this problem".

According to his critics, that's exactly what has happened. More than 80per
cent of the increase in the federal prison population in the decade to 1995
was due to drug convictions. While treatment funds have increased under
McCaffrey, so too has money for law enforcement.

Zeese calls him "Pinocchio McCaffrey", accusing him of distorting the
figures and engaging in a kind of blind optimism about the results of US
drug policy. While cocaine use is down from its height in the 1980s, it was
because suppliers switched to heroin production, which is now cheap and
easy to get. The reality, according to Zeese, is heroin overdose deaths now
at record levels and emergency admissions also skyrocketing. He
acknowledges that McCaffrey isn't entirely to blame - he doesn't have the
final say on how money is spent, and states have their own, sometimes
draconian, laws. But he argues that McCaffrey has scuttled needle exchange
and failed to push for an abandonment of the notorious disparity in how
crack cocaine, favored by blacks, and powder cocaine, mostly used by
middle-class whites, are treated under the law. (A first-time offender with
five grams of crack gets five years in prison, but would need to have 500
grams of powder to get the same sentence.) Increas! ! ingly the war against
drugs is a war against blacks - in 1997, more than five times as many
blacks as whites were in state prisons for drug crimes.

In February, leading black intellectuals and public health advocates
criticised McCaffrey for "a series of inaccurate and misleading statements"
on drugs. He once declared: "The murder rate in Holland is double that of
the US. That's drugs," whereas the US murder rate is four times higher than
that of the Netherlands.

How could McCaffrey declare that "we're lowering drug abuse rates" when
illegal drugs cause 52,000 deaths in America each year?

McCaffrey keeps saying the US is winning with prohibition. His new
drugs-in-sport push is very McCaffrey in style: loud, moral in tone, and
sure to rankle those who have worked on the problem for years. He
acknowledges he's a newcomer to the sport debate and says he will "listen
to the smart people".

But some smart people are beginning to resent US muscle and think the
answers, whether to drugs in sport or illicit drugs, lie elsewhere.