FREEH ADVICE ON DRUGS: INJECT MONEY AND POLITICAL WILL

John Howard may not like everything the director of the FBI, Louis Freeh,
has to tell him about how to win the war on drugs.

In Mr Freeh's thinking, that fight requires two key ingredients - an
abundance of funding and an equally generous amount of political will.

Money and bravery: the two commodities governments find hardest to provide.

Mr Freeh believes that to make a real dent in the trafficking of heroin,
cocaine and other illicit substances, governments have to take a tough
political stance, empowering their law enforcement bodies to deal
adequately with the threat.

In the five years since Mr Freeh took over the top job at the FBI, he has
managed to attract considerable funding increases, resulting in the
employment of 3,200 extra agents. His record on encouraging the necessary
political fortitude to tackle the drug scourge has not been as good.

Mr Freeh put a plan to the Clinton Administration about two years ago to
centralise the investigation of drug crime under his umbrella and that of
the Drug Enforcement Agency to ensure a more co-ordinated approach.

He let his frustration be known when Mr Clinton soon after appointed
General Barry McCaffrey as the nation's so-called "drug tsar", but gave him
no powers of arrest.

The move was seen as transparently political, a PR stunt, which prompted Mr
Freeh to complain that the greatest thing holding back the US in its attack
on drugs was the lack of "any true leadership" on the issue - comments that
stung the President.

That controversy, however, did result in a raft of agreements with Central
American countries to stem the flow of cocaine and heroin into the US.

Mr Freeh places a heavy emphasis on co-ordination and co-operation between
law enforcement bodies in pursuit of drug targets and the responsibilities
of governments to intervene with social programs that might help users
avoid much heavier punitive action down the line.

"Although the FBI is an agency responsible for the enforcement of the law,
we also have a great interest and concern in things such as the causes of
crime - including drug use, which destroys so many lives and leads to so
much crime," he said in a recent speech.

He has made no public comment on heroin trials but is a supporter of the
drug court system, which is operating strongly across the US and is being
given a trial in NSW. That system places drug offenders in enforced and
sometimes institutionalised rehabilitation, deferring sentences as long as
the participant complies with the program.

Mr Howard can rest assured that Louis Freeh has a highly developed
political radar. He worked for five years at the US Attorney's office in
Manhattan under Rudolph Giuliani before he became Mayor of New York.

There is also talk that Mr Freeh may be approached to seek Republican
nomination to replace Mr Giuliani if the mayor decides to run for the same
New York Senate seat that the President's wife is eyeing off.