AN OFFICER AND A SOCIAL WORKER

America's drug tsar, Barry McCaffrey, has a one-theme cv. He is a general.
He is the son of a general. His own son is a major; his daughter holds the
rank of captain in the National Guard. He has three Purple Hearts, awarded
for wounds received in battle; he has commanded the biggest mechanised
advance in history, leading a pincer of 26,000 soldiers behind Iraqi lines
during the Gulf war, then slaughtering the retreating Republican Guard. In
1996, when Mr. McCaffrey got the job of drugs tsar, he brought his
background with him: several army buddies came along to help run his new
command. So it is not surprising when the general is described, as he was
this week in the leading Dutch newspaper, as "the old war-horse of the
repressive American drug policy". For who better than a career officer to
pursue, with military bone-headedness, America's self-defeating war on
drugs?

Or so you might think, until you meet him; for this general turns out to
demonstrate that cv is not destiny. He has a predictable military
demeanour; he is a tough boss, a tough talker, a tough man to interrupt.
But, for the most part, the drug tsar's message is decidedly unmilitary.
Rather than mouthing the slogans of the "drugs war", Mr. McCaffrey prefers
a medical metaphor: he describes drug abuse by one in 17 Americans as a
"cancer". Rather than pouring ever more money into military
counter-smuggling efforts, Mr. McCaffrey prefers to emphasise unmilitary
campaigns to rehabilitate drug
addicts. "We were promised a general and got a social worker," a Republican
has complained.

On July 9th Mr. McCaffrey confirmed the unmilitary nature of his methods by
launching a new ad campaign, the biggest ever plotted by the federal
government. Over the next five years, American taxpayers will contribute $1
billion towards an anti-drug publicity blitz on television and radio, in
newspapers and on the Internet; private donors will match that. Mr.
McCaffrey claims that the target audience - young Americans and their
parents - will see an anti-drug message four times a week on average. If
corporate America uses ads to sell sneakers and sodas, Mr. McCaffrey
reasons, then America's government should use ads to drive down drug abuse.

And not just ads. Mr. McCaffrey hopes that the publicity campaign will
energise thousands of community organisations - from schools to churches to
boy-scout groups - that might spread the anti-drug gospel. At the moment,
the drug tsar's office works with 4,000 local groups that help to put the
word out; it aims to expand its network to 4,000 soon. There are plans to
recruit 22m small businesses to a drug-abstention effort. The army has
already proved that a determined employer can make a difference - over 50%
of soldiers abused drugs in the igloos, compared with around 3% in 1995 -
and Mr. McCaffrey aims to repeat that success among civilian firms. None of
this will silence the drug tsar's many critics. Republicans love to paint
the Clinton administration as soft on drugs, so they will no doubt deride
advertising as a wimpish alternative to tough law enforcement - even though
the law-enforcement budget has not in fact been cut. Legalisers, for their
part, predict that the ads will prove as ineffective as other strategies
against drugs.

It is possible that the legalisers will be proved right. Ethan Nadelmann,
an articulate legaliser at George Soros's Open Society Foundation, recalls
an old anti-drug ad that showed an egg in a frying pan, while the
voice-over intoned: "This is your brain on drugs." After a while, the ad
appears to have backfired: teenagers wore t-shirts with fried eggs on them,
mocking the ad's cautionary advice. The same thing could happen to Mr.
McCaffrey's commercials, One shows a drug-crazed but attractive woman
smashing up a kitchen. It is intended to make the effects of drugs look
frightening. To some teenagers, it may make the effects look cool instead.

And yet, even if Mr. McCaffrey's ads prove wanting, it is hard to quarrel
with the idea that some kind of advertising makes sense. The case for
legalisation, which The Economist has long supported, is precisely that
drug abuse can be kept down by regulation and education; and that a ban on
drugs (which fuels the profits of crime syndicates) is therefore
unnecessary. A legal-drugs policy would certainly include publicity
campaigns about the ravages of addiction. Indeed the Dutch, whose liberal
regime Mr. McCaffrey criticised recently, have waged such campaigns for
years.

And so, by launching his own ad offensive, Mr. McCaffrey has taken an
important step. Without legalising drugs, he is accepting some of the
legalisers' arguments: that it is impossible to burn all the coca crops in
Latin America or track down every secret airstrip in the Caribbean, and
therefore that the best way to discourage drug abuse is to tackle demand
rather than supply. Demand, moreover, is best reduced by persuasion, not
coercion. So long as people want drugs, coercion will swell the prison
population faster than it reduces drug abuse. This is why the general
refuses to speak of a "drugs war", a metaphor that encourages the delusion
that abuse can be eliminated by force, and talks instead of gradually
reducing the abuse rate from 6%, to 3%. This is why he favours drugs
courts, which offer drug-abusing criminals the option of going into
treatment instead of jail.

And yet, despite these concessions, the war of words continues between Mr.
McCaffrey and his legalising foes. The reason is not hard to fathom. The
drug tsar mixes moderation with flashes of obstinacy, which makes people
think he is just a bone-headed general after all. He rails against the
medical use of marijuana; he refuses to support needle exchanges, which
reduce the spread of AIDS among addicts. If only this war hero could repeat
the boldness of his days in uniform, and press his advance into the
legalisers' territory a bit more.