TAKING FLAK IN THE TSAR WARS

He came to his post as President Clinton's adviser on drugs in 1996 as the
youngest four-star general in the United States army and a former commander
in chief of the US armed forces' southern command, effectively the chief US
military figure in Central and South America. He had been an adviser on
Latin American internal security policy and a major player in Operation
Desert Storm. Last weekend he came in London to share his knowledge and
views with British ministers and agencies.

Barry McCaffrey, the director of the White House office of national drug
control policy, better known as the US drug tsar, has responsibility for a
$17.8bn federal control budget, so his views are likely to command
attention. But how seriously should he be taken?

McCaffrey's military credentials must have seemed suitably impressive to a
president lumbered with a reputation for having smoked cannabis but not
inhaled. Who better to tackle such a mighty issue?

The general wasted no time in attacking those perceived to be soft on the
subject. In 1996 he announced: "There is not a single shred of evidence
that shows that smoked marijuana is useful or needed. This is not science.
This is not medicine. This is a cruel hoax." The American national
institute of health begged to differ by stating that "inhaled marijuana
has the potential to improve chemotherapy-related nausea and vomiting" or,
in other words, it could be of value to cancer sufferers.

The following year, McCaffrey stated unequivocally that "marijuana is a
gateway drug". But statistics from the department of health and human
resources showed that "for every 104 people who have used marijuana, there
is one regular user of cocaine and less than one heroin addict".

Perhaps his most controversial claim concerns the Netherlands, which has
one of the most liberal drug policies in the world in terms of the
provision of needle exchange for addicts and sanctioning of the sale of
cannabis in regulated cafes. "The murder rate in Holland is double that in
the United States and the per capita crime rates are much higher than the
United States," he said last year. "That's drugs."

The Dutch ambassador to the US responded that McCaffrey's claims had "no
basis in fact". The figures quoted by McCaffrey showed that the US had a
rate of 8.2 murders per 100,000 population compared with 17.58 murders in
the Netherlands. In fact, his researchers had included the "attempted
murders" figure in the total by mistake. The true figure was 1.8 per
100,000 in the Netherlands, making the American rate more than four times
as high. When challenged on the figures, McCaffrey's spokesman responded
imaginatively: "What you are left with is that they [the Dutch] are a much
more violent society and more inept at murders and that's not much to brag
about." Indeed not. What he gave less prominence to was the fact that the
US heroin addiction rate runs at about eight times the level in the
Netherlands.

Last June McCaffrey told a US government criminal justice and drug policy
sub-committee in Washington that the only people who backed drug reform in
the US were "a carefully camouflaged, well-funded, tightly knit core of
people whose goal is to legalise drug use". This is also worth scrutiny.
Among those in favour of drug law reform are the governors of New Mexico
and Minnesota, who are hardly in carefully camouflaged positions. The
"well-funded" group he was probably referring to is the Lindesmith centre,
a drug policy institute funded by the financier George Soros, an
involvement about which Soros is perfectly open.

Not all Barry McCaffrey's statements have been recanted or contested.
Shortly after coming to office he said that "we cannot arrest our way out
of the drug problem".

This may or may not be of great comfort to those 700,000 people arrested in
the US last year for marijuana offences, or the 400,000 prisoners serving
time for drug offences, but is seen as an acceptance that there are other
ways of addressing the issue than the warehousing of a percentage of the
American population. But of the federal budget on drugs, 60% is used for
law enforcement while only 11% goes towards reducing its use among young
people.

"Barry McCaffrey has presided over a system where marijuana use has
declined among American youth, masking an even greater rise in the
adolescent use of crack and heroin," says Paul Lewin of the organisation
Common Sense for Drug Policies. "It is unlikely that most parents would be
comfortable with a system that replaces marijuana with crack and heroin use."

During his stay in Britain, McCaffrey will have an opportunity to outline
what he believes the US has accomplished beyond turning the prison system
into the second biggest employer after General Motors. People should
certainly listen to what he has to say. But perhaps it would be advisable
not to inhale too deeply.