VOTE ON DRUGS

Notice to the public: Vote now on drugs, one of the only two ways.

1. If you support the war against drugs, vote now for pending Congressional
legislation designed to wound major drug lords around the world. It cuts
them off from all commerce with the U.S., now a laundry for bleaching the
blood from drug-trade billions and turning them into investments in
legitimate businesses.

Vote by telling your members of Congress that when the House-Senate bill
authorizing intelligence funds comes up for final decision, probably next
month, you want them to vote for the section called "blocking assets of
major narcotics traffickers."

Insist they start now to tell the Administration not to try to water it down
to satisfy any country for diplomatic or economic reasons -- including
Mexico, the biggest drug entry point for America, already complaining about
"negative consequences" of the proposal.

Turn yourself and your civil, labor or commercial organization, or religious
congregation, into lobbies for the bill -- counterweight to the lobbies of
drug-transfer nations and American companies beholden to them. 2. If you are
against the war on drugs or just don't care about what drugs are doing to
our country, then don't do a thing. That is a vote, too. That's the way it
is in Washington. Members of Congress introduce legislation, committees
discuss it for months, votes are taken and then when the time comes to work
out House-Senate differences, administrations on the fence and under
professional lobbyists' pressure use their power to try to mold the
legislation to their liking.

That is exactly the time for ordinary Americans around the country to do
their own lobbying.

The bill targeting drug lords extends throughout their vicious world the
economic sanctions already directed at Colombian drug lords, by President
Clinton's executive order. It will prohibit any U.S. commerce by
specifically named drug operators, seize all their assets in the U.S., and
ban trading with them by American companies.

The bill specifies that every year the U.S. Government list the major drug
lords of the world, by name and nation. The lists are certain to include top
drug traders from countries such as Afghanistan, Jamaica, the Dominican
Republic, Thailand and Mexico.

In the Senate it was introduced by Paul Coverdell, a Georgia Republican, and
Dianne Feinstein, Democrat from California, and passed with bipartisan
support. In the House it also has support in both parties, including Porter
Goss of Florida, a Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee, and Charles Rangel, the New York Democrat. It awaits the final
September House-Senate Joint Intelligence Committee vote. For awhile I heard
from within the Administration the kind of mutters that preceded the Clinton
certification last year that Mexico was carrying out anti-drug commitments
satisfactorily, which was certainly a surprise to Mexican drug lords.

Then, yesterday, the White House told me that it favored some target
sanctions. Its objection to the bill was that the Administration would have
to list all major drug lords for the President to choose targets, and that
could endanger investigations. The White House said it would be better for
the President to select targets without having to choose from a list. Bit of
a puzzle. The bill already gives him the right to decide which of the drug
lords to target from the Administration's unpublished list. But some members
of Congress think the motive is to avoid a list that might include just a
little too many from a "sensitive country."

No one bill will end the drug war. Only the determination of Americans to
use every sort of resource will do that -- parental teaching, law
enforcement with some compassion toward first offenders and none for career
drug criminals, enough money for therapy in and out of jails, targeting drug
lords -- and passionate leadership.

That would preclude Presidential candidates who mince around about whether
they used drugs when they were younger -- unless they grow up publicly and
quickly. Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal, head of the Phoenix House therapeutic
communities, says that the bill "reflects the kind of values that we don't
hear enough these days." So vote -- one way or the other.