THE NATION - REPRISING ZERO TOLERANCE

WHEN New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir announced a tough
new plan this month to seize the vehicles of drunk drivers, he might
have had a talk first with Dick Weart.

A decade ago, Mr. Weart was the ombudsman for the Federal Government's
zero-tolerance drug crackdown. From his desk in Washington, he fielded
frantic telephone calls from customs inspectors all over the country
who had just turned up a few marijuana seeds or the end of a marijuana
cigarette in a car or boat.

''I was on the phone from seven in the morning to seven at night,'' he
recalled. ''There were times when I was pulling my hair out.'' Every
case, it seemed, had extenuating circumstances.

Such crackdowns have been highly popular with politicians and
law-enforcement officials, but after the the klieg-light hype, the
programs are usually quietly dumped or throttled back.

The Federal Government's drug program, a model of the genre, was
announced in 1988 by the Customs Service Commissioner, William von
Raab. ''There will be no mercy,'' he vowed. And for a while, that
seemed to be true. His inspectors, sometimes with the help of the
Coast Guard, confiscated thousands of cars and boats from people
caught with small amounts of drugs, regardless of whether they were
the owners.

But within 18 months, the program had been revised three times,
evolving into a relatively lenient approach in which people were cited
and released without any confiscation of their property. (Federal
agents still use forfeiture laws, but mostly against large-scale drug
dealers and money launderers.)

It was a chaotic time, Mr. Weart recalled. ''The simplest incident
could evolve into something very serious,'' he said. One incident
involved a college student who had driven his father's Ferrari to a
party in Mexico, he recalled. Trying to reenter the United States, the
student realized that the small amount of marijuana in the car might
be enough to get it seized. So he tried to evade inspectors by roaring
through the Customs entry lanes. ''It matured into something very
serious,'' Mr. Weart said, including charges of marijuana possession
and endangering a Federal agent.

When applied to boats, the policy seemed to exaggerate the disparity
between the seriousness of the crime and the severity of the
punishment. Within weeks of the introduction of the policy,
authorities had seized the Ark Royal, a $2.5 million yacht, after
finding less than one-tenth of an ounce of marijuana on board.

NOT long afterward, Federal agents confiscated the country's premier
research vessel, the Atlantis II, owned by the Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institution, because a tiny amount of marijuana had been
found in a crew member's shaving kit. The boat was not formally
returned to Woods Hole for two months. And a multi-million-dollar
vessel owned by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California
was seized after dogs found a small amount of marijuana hidden in the
berth of a low-ranking crew member.

Those and other high-profile seizures brought as much attention to
zero tolerance as criticism. But notwithstanding the problems, Mr.
Weart said, the program sent a strong message. It pleased criminal
justice conservatives, but enraged scores of motorists and boat owners
- -- not to mention civil libertarians -- who made the same criticisms
that are now being raised about New York's drunk-driver policy. They
complained that such Draconian steps entangle law-enforcement and
court personnel in time-consuming wrangles when they could be better
deployed elsewhere.

Since the nation's earliest years, Federal authorities have used
forfeiture laws to seize the property of people who violated Customs
and tax laws, said Sandra Guerra, a professor at the University of
Houston Law Center. Later, they were used against people who made
liquor during prohibition, she added. But in applying the law to drunk
drivers, she said, officials may be imposing a punishment
disproportionate to the crime.

Other experts said the crackdown might never make it through the New
York courts. ''I think people who drive drunk and hurt people should
be punished,'' said Steven L. Kessler, a New York lawyer and an expert
on asset forfeiture in the state. ''Unfortunately, the Administrative
Code as written doesn't permit it.''

Mr. Safir defended the program, saying that seizing the vehicles of
drunk drivers means taking a weapon out of the hands of potential
criminals. ''I can't tell you how many times I've been to the scene
where somebody was killed, and the drunk driver had been arrested
three or four times before,'' he said. ''Nothing is perfect, nothing
is going to solve the problem totally, but we believe this is a very
good start.''

The policy would be administered ''reasonably,'' he said, and
exceptions will be made when drunk drivers are operating someone else's car.

''I think there are lots of people who will think twice about drinking
and driving if they think they are going to lose their car,'' he said.
''I really do.'' Captioned as: The border crossing at San Ysidro,
Calif., was one of the main targets of the zero tolerance push a
decade ago.