IS IT TIME TO RETHINK AMERICA'S DRUG LAWS?

Aired August 23, 1999 - 7:30 p.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE
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MARY MATALIN, CO-HOST: Just say no -- or yes. Rivals call on George W. Bush
to answer questions about cocaine use. Tonight, is past drug use really such
a big deal? Is it time to rethink our drug laws?

ANNOUNCER: From Washington, CROSSFIRE. On the left, Bill Press. On the
right, Mary Matalin. In the crossfire, in Albuquerque, New Mexico Governor
Gary Johnson, and in Atlanta, Congressman Bob Barr, a Republican from
Georgia.

DAVID CORN, GUEST HOST: Good evening. Welcome to CROSSFIRE. I'm David Corn
of "The Nation" sitting in on the left.

The hot question in politics has been George W. Bush and cocaine -- did he
or didn't he? Though the Texas governor and front-running Republican
presidential candidate has tried to put this dicey matter behind him, others
are still on his back. Senator Orrin Hatch and Gary Bauer, who are running
against Bush in the Republican primary, have called on him to come clean, to
say whether or not he ever used cocaine. But behind the political tussle,
there is this serious policy question: What should be our policy on drugs?
Has the war on drugs gone too far or not far enough?

Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico, a Republican, says he used marijuana
and cocaine in college and now wants the U.S. to reassess an anti-drug
policy that, in his view, puts too much emphasis on prosecution and
incarceration and overwhelms the courts and prisons with people arrested for
possessing small amounts of drugs.

Is a drug-free America a realistic goal when the drug trade is about $60
billion a year? Are harsh sentences for drug users fair? Should some drug be
legalized and some decriminalized?

The issue is far larger than the usage of one presidential wannabe -- Mary.

MATALIN: Thanks, David. Thanks for joining us. And let me start with a full
disclosure to you, Governor Johnson -- no, it's not about my drug use past
or present. It is that you're one of my favorite governors in all the
country. I agree with you on everything except this matter of drug policy.

Your objection, as you stated over the weekend -- and increasingly
stating -- is that you're against the war on drugs because it's been a
miserable failure. It's been a miserable failure because it hasn't reduced
the number of people on drugs.

Just last week, a government report said the incidence of illegal drug use
among 12- to 17-year-olds, the population we're most concerned about, has
decreased significantly in the last year, and over the span of the last 20
years, the government says users have gone from about 25 million to 13
million. Isn't the war on drugs working?

GOV. GARY JOHNSON (R), NEW MEXICO: From what I saw, Mary, we had an increase
in that population. We had an increase above that. And let me point out that
the goal of the war on drugs should be to reduce drug use. I mean, that's
the goal here.

Are we achieving that? I personally don't think we are. Personally, that
isn't -- that isn't an earnings statement that I would want to take to my
board of directors, that here are the statistics regarding drug use.

I think we've got to open this up. We have got to open this up to talk
about, hey, making it -- making it really onerous to possess drugs, lock you
up for the rest of your life first-time possession. But I want to suggest
that those policies are what we basically have right now. They're not
working and that we need to look at decriminalization.

And the idea, again, the focus, the goal needs to be to reduce drug use. But
what we've got in this country -- we have 78 million Americans that have
admitted to illegal drug use.

MATALIN: Well, do you want -- do you have categories of drugs that you want
to decriminalize or you want to legalize? Could you by your reforms
distinguish for us the difference between those two policies under the law
and which drugs you're talking about?

JOHNSON: Well, I have said let's open this up to discussion, and I think
that logically speaking, if you're going to talk about decriminalization or
legalization, I think you're going to start out with the soft drugs. You're
going to start out with marijuana.

Mary, there were 695,000 arrests in 1997 for marijuana-related crime, which
is the last year that those statistics were available. That's an incredible
burden on our system. When I'm talking about -- when I'm talking about law
enforcement, when I'm talking about the court, when I'm talking about
incarceration, that whole criminal aspect of illegal drugs is costing us
about $50 billion a year.

Under a strategy of redirecting those -- the idea would be re -- what if we
redirect some of those resources over on the problem side, the health side,
perhaps we can actually reduce drug use.

But locking -- locking up -- you know, locking up people for using
marijuana, I think the majority of Americans would not say let's not lock
people up for just smoking marijuana.

CORN: Well, Governor Johnson is turning into one of my favorite Republicans.
Let's bring in another Republican and get a real Republican mud wrestle
going here. Congressman Bob Barr, there are 13.6 million Americans who have
admitted to using illegal drugs sometime in the last month. As the governor
said, there are about a third of all adult Americans who say that they've
used illegal drugs at least once in their lifetime.

Now, you're one of these tough on law -- law and order guys. Do you believe
we should lock up all of those people, and if so, are you willing to commit
the necessary resources to getting those 13.6 million Americans behind bars?

REP. BOB BARR (R), GEORGIA: Well, fighting the war on drugs, and continuing
to fight the war against mind-altering drugs -- which I strongly support,
whether it's marijuana, cocaine, heroin or LSD and other drugs --- must go
forward. But that does not mean and has never meant our prosecutors --
federal or state -- that every single person that had done drugs, no matter
in what quantity or when, should be put in jail. So, that's a red herring.

What we're really looking at here is whether or not we as a society -- and
maybe this is great to tee this issue up in a presidential campaign -- we
are really looking at the fundamental question are we as a society going to
now tell our young people that it's OK to do mind-altering drugs? Because if
we're telling them it's not OK, and then we say, well, it's OK as long as it
was so many years ago or as -- you know, I saw an astounding statement by my
friend and former governor -- and Governor of Oklahoma Mr. Keating that I
don't care what George Bush did when he was in college with drugs as long as
he didn't kill somebody.

You know, if that's now the standard, that you can do whatever you want as
long as you don't kill somebody, then fine, let's have that debate on that
standard. I hope we don't go in that direction.

CORN: But I'm talking about the here and now. How do you pick and choose
which Americans of the 13.6 million that are honest enough to say they use
illegal drugs and put them in jail? The governor told us that 600,000 people
were arrested and convicted and punished for possessing marijuana. We're not
talking about big-time drug dealers here. The war on drugs is leading to the
locking up of hundreds of thousands of people.

How do you pick and choose -- how can you have a fair system under these
circumstances where drug use is so rampant, particularly among soft drug
use?

BARR: David, that's a very, very fair question. And you do it the way we
have always approached criminal law. We don't lock everybody up who violates
every law. What you do is you have good prosecutors at the Department of
Justice, the U.S. attorneys and state prosecutors who exercise reasonable
prosecutorial discretion.

So for example, of that 650,000 or whatnot, assuming it's correct, you
separate out from those your major-level drug traffickers. You separate out
from those your repeat offenders. You separate out from those, for example,
those that have sold drugs or distributed drugs to children, and you
prioritize. You prosecute the most serious offenses and you put the most
serious offenders in jail. And there probably will be a large number of
those that don't do jail time if it is simple first-time personal use in
small quantities.

JOHNSON: Let me...

CORN: Not with mandatory minimums.

MATALIN: Go ahead, governor.

JOHNSON: Can I cut in here? First of all, this is not -- when you talk about
decriminalization, when you use the "decriminalization, legalization" words,
this is not promoting drug use among kids.

BARR: It necessarily is, Governor. You can't have it both ways.

JOHNSON: I saw a statistic the other day that 95 percent of high school kids
believe that illegal drugs are readily available. How do we make illegal
drugs anymore readily available than 95 percent of the kids?

BARR: Well, if you legalize them and have the government sell them, you'd
make it a 100 percent available. Is that what you want?

JOHNSON: Well, point out another fact is, I was talking to a prosecutor in
southern New Mexico the other day. And this is a reality. He was talk --
first off, he said I disagree with decrimalization, legalization. He said,
but I am prosecuting a woman tomorrow that sold four one quarter-ounce bags
of marijuana. She sold a gram of cocaine. She profited about $50 from the
transaction. She has three children. She is a single mom. She is going to
spend the next five years of her life in jail.

This is what we're...

BARR: Well, I, frankly, I think she probably ought to, Governor. Under the
laws of your state or the laws of Georgia, somebody that distributes cocaine
certainly ought to spend time in jail. I am amazed that you think otherwise.

JOHNSON: Well, my point, though, is that whether we catch the big
trafficker, which we occasionally do, or whether we catch this woman at the
bottom, taking any of those links out of the chain -- let's get back to the
goal. The goal is reduced drug use. We take any of those links out of the
chain, and guess what? Nobody's affected by this woman going to jail for
five years. Her kids certainly are.

BARR: The children that might not get the drugs that she's distributing will
be positively affected.

MATALIN: Governor, that -- and let me pick up on the congressman's point
there. This is not an abuse that goes specifically and only to personal
liberties, if you're just hurting yourself. Although, there is a cost to the
society of that. That's the personal liberty argument, but the incidence of
kids and child welfare, or families under duress, 81 percent of those
families have drug use in the family by one of the parents -- you're hurting
more than yourself in this case.

JOHNSON: Well, again, you know, you can argue -- I would suggest that this
is about personal responsibility and this is about holding people
accountable for their actions. So, never is it going to be legal for kids to
do drugs. It's going to be against the law. Never is it going to be legal
for an adult to give an underage person drugs; that's going to always be
against the law.

MATALIN: No, governor, let me -- I'm sorry to interrupt. Let me re-ask my
question. I asked it badly. I'm saying, families headed up by parents that
are using drugs or selling drugs are more -- the non- using children are
more likely to be killed. The families are to be broken up. They're more
likely to be in poverty. They're more likely to be abused. We're not talking
about personal accountability. We're talking about innocent nonusers who are
affected by this behavior of their custodians.

JOHNSON: And, Mary, I would just argue that maybe you're making the
argument, and by making the argument -- we have two problems when you talk
about drugs. One of the problems is the health side of it, bad choice. Don't
do drugs. It's a real handicap. It's not good to do drugs. Over here, you've
got the fact that it's illegal. You're engaged in illegal activities. You
have to associate with an illegal group. You have a problem with
distribution of your drug product, it gets -- much like Prohibition, it gets
played without guns rather than in the courts. So, Mary, you talk about
problems that perhaps are all over here on the crime side rather than
getting back to the goal which is to have people not use drugs.

BARR: Governor, I do think, with all due respect, that if you think that
legalizing drugs will do away with these problems, will reduce drug usage,
will make it less prevalent, that is totally unrealistic from the same
argument you just made regarding Prohibition. Doing away with Prohibition
does not mean people don't abuse alcohol. It is more readily available. If
you make drugs available, whether it is through the government or through
decriminalization, more people will do drugs. That is a hard fact that you
can't get around.

JOHNSON: Well -- and you may have point there. But is anybody suggesting
that we return to Prohibition for alcohol? During the days of Prohibition,
again, we had -- because alcohol was illegal, you've got five percent of the
people that use alcohol that have a real problem with alcohol. Over on the
other side, you've got the crime side of when we had Prohibition, where the
bootleggers played out their differences with guns.

BARR: Governor, don't you think there's a difference between alcohol use and
doing lines of cocaine? Do you equate the two?

JOHNSON: Actually, Bob, part of what I've raised here, which is the question
of legalization, decriminalization, is going to bring together forums. And I
think maybe for the -- maybe it's happened before, but I think we'll be able
to understand, what are the impairments? How do the impairments compare
between alcohol -- I don't know. Mary, I don't know, but that's part of what
needs to come out in all of this discussion.

MATALIN: Well, as if the policy wasn't provocative enough, now politics is
on center stage when we talk about drugs.

We'll be right back. Both of you guys, hang in with us, and the rest of you
out there. We'll be right back on CROSSFIRE talking about the politics of
drugs.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MATALIN: Welcome back to CROSSFIRE.

What was the last generation's youthful indiscretion is this generation's
incarceration. We're battling over the war on drugs with New Mexico governor
and legalization supporter, Gary Johnson, and Georgia congressman and law
and order advocate, Bob Barr. Sitting in on the left tonight, David Corn of
the "Nation" magazine -- David.

CORN: Thanks, Mary.

Congressman, let's say that George W. Bush did use cocaine when he was, say,
28 years old. Why should he now be allowed to become president of the United
States when someone who was a Texan these days could get 10, 20 years in the
slammer for the same behavior?

BARR: Well, it's a very legitimate question and I think one that ought to
play a part in the presidential debate. The people ought to be able to
decide this. When I -- I think, for example, of my days as a U.S. attorney.
We would have to decide which cases to prosecute, which not to. We would
also have to decide of those people who were applying for the job of an
assistant U.S. attorney, for example, which ones would be ineligible because
of prior drug usage, and I think it's legitimate for the American people to
know, just as any employer would, when did this use take place? How frequent
was it? What sort of drugs? What variety of drugs?

CORN: Let me ask, instead of the American people, let me ask about one,
Congressman Bob Barr. If it turns out that George W. Bush or any other
Republican contender who gets the nomination ever used cocaine as an adult,
would that be enough to disqualify them for you? Would you not support such
a Republican?

BARR: That is one reason, as a matter of fact, why I'm supporting Steve
Forbes, because he has indicated to me and to the American people he has not
done cocaine, he has not done mind-altering drugs, and frankly, I would
rather have a president who hasn't.

CORN: And you wouldn't support one who had, no matter who it was -- George
Bush or anybody else?

BARR: Well, what I'm saying is that if I had my choice between a candidate
who has and one who hasn't, I would go with the one who hasn't. Now, as
between... CORN: Even Al Gore versus George Bush?

BARR: No, that was the next part of my answer. I might sit that one out. But
I think that's a legitimate question. I want to know more about this drug
usage, to be honest with you.

MATALIN: You know, one of the issues here, governor, is the age of all of us
participating in this debate. We are baby boomers, and what you have said
about -- that is, your credo is to always reveal. That may very well even be
George W. Bush's political credo, but it's pretty clear it's not his
parental credo. Aren't we all struggling with what are we supposed to tell
our kids if we did or we didn't? Honesty is not always the best policy when
it comes to your kids. And shouldn't George W. Bush be given some latitude
to have a parental credo as well as a political one?

JOHNSON: Boy, Mary, that was really a convoluted question.

MATALIN: Do you have kids?

JOHNSON: I do. And I'm sorry, the audio isn't perhaps as clear as it should
be.

MATALIN: All right. Let me ask it less convolutely. If you did drugs -- you
have -- are you telling your kids all of it? And isn't there another --
different way to raise your kids? I mean, all the literature says, don't
tell your kids.

JOHNSON: I think it's important for kids to know. I'm one of those 78
million Americans who have done illegal drugs, and I personally am kind of
offended when I'm told that I really can't serve in political office because
I have done illegal drugs. And I think this is such a lightning rod issue,
because you do have 78 million Americans that have done drugs, illegal
drugs, and does that disqualify you from serving in public office for one?
For a lot of people, it's offensive.

BARR: We can also focus, Governor, on the other 200 or so million Americans
that haven't. And I just think that this is a very legitimate debate.

David, for example, I mean, if we are, again, at the point in our nation's
history when we're going to say that cocaine usage or LSD usage or whatever
shall not disqualify somebody, no matter how much they use, no matter when
they used it, then that's a very fundamental question. I hope we don't go
that route, it's a very legitimate debate that we're now engaged in.

CORN: Well, Congressman Barr, what other questions would you like to ask?
Would you ask George W. Bush, for instance, if he'd ever sold cocaine as a
young man?

BARR: Well, certainly. And I cannot imagine that he has, but that is a
legitimate question. For example, also, one would ask an applicant for a
job, and that's essentially what the governor is putting himself forward as,
an applicant for the job of president of the United States. We are his
prospective employer. I think an employer would want to know how frequently
was this done, what other drugs, if any, were used? How frequently? When was
the last usage, and so forth. Was there any sale?

Certainly those are legitimate questions.

MATALIN: Governor, I'm going to agree with you on the use of drugs amongst
baby boomers shouldn't be disqualifying. We didn't know. We didn't know then
what we know now. We didn't have drugs then like we have now.

JOHNSON: Oh, Mary.

MATALIN: Come on. But what I do think is disqualifying in a different way is
the way the press is in everybody's face who wants to work in public service
today. Don't you think George Bush has a point in not answering the question
just on those fronts? Someone has to draw the line?

JOHNSON: Mary, I'm not going to -- I'm not going to criticize George Bush. I
think the world of George Bush. I think he's honest, I think he's hard
working. We've had this -- he's become a very good friend. He hasn't had a
drink -- same with me -- for -- for 12 years. We almost quit drinking at the
same time.

I wouldn't be sitting where I'm at if I were doing drugs, if I were
drinking, if I weren't an athlete. But again, going back to my own past, I
just -- I don't want to be disqualified, and I don't want to be -- I don't
want to be hypocritical either. I don't want to -- I don't want to say that,
hey, by the good graces of God I didn't get caught, but somebody else did
and is serving time.

And looking at the present, is sending people to jail solving or -- or
getting at the goal of reduced drug usage. I would just argue that we're
not. By all measurements, we're spending more and more and more money on a
problem that by all measurements is getting worse.

MATALIN: Well, Governor Johnson, as always, you've opened up a provocative
policy debate, and Congressman Barr, thank you for joining us as always.

BARR: Thank you.

MATALIN: We'll be right back, David and I, on CROSSFIRE, with our closing
comments.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CORN: Now, Mary, I don't remember Republicans being upset when they asked
Bill Clinton whether or not he smoked marijuana. It seems that was a fair
question at the time. It's a fair question for George W. Bush now. What I
don't get is the line he takes, which is, I want to share the wisdom about
mistakes I've made in the past, but I'm not going to tell you what those
mistakes are.

I've just become a parent, and I don't believe that that can play well with
kids.

MATALIN: Wait. You're a brand new daddy and wait for about a week. You'll
have changed all of your views about drugs and alcohol and everything else.

The public didn't ask Clinton, the press asked Clinton. And Clinton's
problem was lying about it, OK? So just let's get off of Clinton and get on
to a new age, a new paradigm here. George Bush is trying to set new rules
that the press should not invade every single corner of our lives, those who
would choose public service, and he does make a distinction and so can I and
so can you intellectually between youth...

CORN: So you don't want to know...

MATALIN: ... and what you did as an adult and how your living your life...

CORN: You don't want to know about -- you don't want...

MATALIN: ... today: faithfully and alcohol-free.

CORN: You don't want to know about the youthful indiscretions of your
Republican candidates?

MATALIN: No.

CORN: Now we're going to have...

MATALIN: No, no.

CORN: a blanket exemption for them?

MATALIN: Now that I have kids, I don't -- a kids' honesty is not the best
policy, and you'll believe the same way in a year. Just wait until they
start saying, no, daddy you did it. I can do it.

CORN: Well, I didn't do it. But sitting in on the left, I'm David Corn. Good
night for CROSSFIRE.

MATALIN: And from the right, I'm Mary Matalin.

Join us again tomorrow night for another edition of CROSSFIRE.

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