DEWINE AND CLINTON ARE AT ODDS OVER DRUG WAR

WASHINGTON - By land, sea, and air, U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine has mapped
strategies in the war on drugs.

The Ohio Republican has talked to the border patrol in El Paso, Tex., and
walked in the poppy fields with Colombia's president, all in an effort to
figure out how to destroy illegal drugs at their source.

Mr. DeWine's interest began more than two decades ago, when, he estimates,
eight in 10 of the people he went after as the Greene County, Ohio,
prosecutor were involved in drugs in some way. Subsequently, as Ohio's
lieutenant governor, he worked to get more treatment programs into jails,
prisons, and juvenile facilities.

The Republican lawmaker says his firsthand knowledge makes him appreciate
how complex and comprehensive a national anti-drug strategy has to be. And
he understands that this is not a war that can be won overnight.

``You have to stay at it year after year after year and apply the pressure
consistently,'' Mr. DeWine says.

No one disagrees on this point. But there the consensus on Capitol Hill ends.

Mr. DeWine and other Republicans are finding themselves in a tug-of-war
with the Clinton administration over how to spend taxpayers' dollars on
reducing illicit drug use in the United States.

Although Barry McCaffrey, White House drug czar, recently told Congress
that the administration's new strategy would cut drug use and availability
in half by 2007, Mr. DeWine is demanding tougher efforts to prevent illegal
drugs from flowing into the United States.

He wants to top off Mr. Clinton's proposed $17.8 billion anti-drug budget
by adding $2.6 billion over the next three years to pay for an overseas
eradication, interdiction, and crop substitution strategy that he thinks
will greatly disrupt the transit of cocaine and heroin. ``Ultimately, it
means more planes, more radar, more ships interdicting drugs, driving price
up and consumption down,'' he says.

The White House is praising the involvement of Mr. DeWine, whose bill is
among a handful of the GOP's top-priority bills in the new Congress. Yet
the administration is stressing that many of his ideas are nothing new and
were found in its international crime bill introduced last year.

Mr. DeWine says he wants a balanced approach that includes education and
treatment, and he is putting together legislation providing millions of
dollars for youth and adult-treatment programs in the criminal-justice
system. But he is starting with interdiction because he's seen how drugs
find their way into the United States as soon as the effort stops.

Last year, Mr. DeWine spearheaded what turned into a bipartisan effort,
pouring $690 million into an emergency spending bill for drug interdiction.
This session, 14 GOP senators, including Spencer Abraham of Michigan, are
co-sponsoring Mr. DeWine's ``Drug Free Century Act.'' It awaits hearings in
the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In the coming year, the Clinton administration wants to add $735 million to
the anti-drug budget, increasing spending by $525 million for law
enforcement and by $210 million for prevention and treatment.

Jonathan Caulkins, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School
of Policy and Management and a drug-policy researcher for Rand Corp., says
this budget ``just basically increases everything without getting smarter.''

Mr. Caulkins claims a better strategy would focus on getting rid of
mandatory minimum prison sentences for small-time drug users, increasing
money for treatment, and exerting more pressure over addicts to stay in
programs. He says it also would try to control the ``collateral damage''
caused by illegal drug use, the offshoots such as homicide, law-enforcement
corruption, overdose deaths, the spread of HIV infection, and child abuse
and neglect.

Eric Sterling, former Democratic counsel to the House Judiciary Committee
responsible for overseeing national drug policy, echoes the views of
various liberal groups that insist that interdiction and crop control are
costly and largely wasteful: ``They have to be measured by the way they
affect price, and illegal cocaine is priced near an all-time low.''

Tyler Green, a spokesman for the Washington-based Drug Policy Foundation,
claims that the tens of billions of dollars spent by the U.S. government to
destroy drug crops in Central and South America and to interdict drugs at
the border ``have been mostly for naught.'' The latest figures show 86 per
cent of the 650-odd metric tons of cocaine produced in South America made
it into the United States in 1997, he says. And the street cost for cocaine
in 1996 was one-third of its price tag in 1981, when the government spent
almost nothing on interdiction.

In Capitol Hill's war on drugs, statistical skirmishes are commonplace.
When Mr. DeWine introduced his bill Jan. 19, he warned of rising drug use
and more drug-related arrests and emergency-room visits in recent years,
all under Mr. Clinton's watch.

When the White House released its national drug-control strategy Feb. 8, it
acknowledged a ``tremendous toll'' from illicit drug use. But it reported
youth drug use leveling off and in many instances decreasing, more
youngsters viewing drug use as risky and unacceptable, a declining rate of
drug-related murders, and lower cocaine production in Bolivia and Peru.

Analysts explain the problem may be characterized as ``better'' or
``worse'' depending on which indicators are used and how declines are
interpreted. Drug-related murders are down, for example, but it may not be
worth boasting about if it's because the market has settled down after
years of violent competition or because the overall U.S. homicide rate is
down and not because drug-control strategies are working.

``Everybody always wants to get into this fight'' over which strategy works
best and which numbers reflect the problem, Mr. DeWine says. ``But it's a
losing fight, a stupid fight.''