REPRISING ZERO TOLERANCE: HISTORY SHOWS THAT TOUGH TALK IS CHEAP

When New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir announced a tough new
plan in January to seize the vehicles of drunk drivers, he might have had a
talk first with Dick Weart A decade ago, 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 burnt
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 program, a model of the genre, was announced in
1988 by 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, 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," 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 in Massachusetts, because the Coast Guard had found a tiny
amount of marijuana 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 the zero tolerance, as
criticism. But notwithstanding the problems, 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
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 may never make it through the New York courts. "I think
people who drive drunk and hurt people should be punished," said Steven
Kessler, a New York lawyer and an expert on asset forfeiture in the state.
"Unfortunately, the Administrative Code as written doesn't permit it."
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."