EZ-BAKE OVEN

Barry McCaffrey, an old Cold Warrior, has gone on to a new battlefield. And
he's getting colder.

Speaking before a Senate committee last month without benefit of a pair of
steel balls to roll in his hand, the retired Army general said one of those
out-there things that would get most of us taken in for observation. Shortly
after discussing the threat caused to America's youth by the movie
Half-Baked (a wonderful detail that doesn't seem to have made it into any of
the news accounts of McCaffrey's testimony), the Clinton administration's
so-called drug czar got down to fighting the real enemy. See how many errors
in reasoning you can spot:

"There is an carefully-camouflaged, exorbitantly-funded, well-heeled,
elitist group whose ultimate goal is to legalize drug use in the United
States. However, because the impacts of legalization - heroin being sold at
the corner store to children with false identifications, the driver of an
eighteen-wheeler high on methamphetamines traveling alongside the family
minivan, skyrocketing numbers of addicts draining society of its
productivity - are so horrifying to the average American, the legalizers are
compelled to conceal their real objectives behind various subterfuges.
(Currently, 87 percent of Americans reject legalization on its face.)
Through a slick misinformation propaganda campaign these individuals
perpetuate a fraud on the American people -- a fraud so devious that
evensome of the nation's mostrespected newspapers and sophisticated media
are capable of echoing their falsehoods."

Pretty goddamned entertaining, huh? We like to picture him clenching his jaw
and making a squinty-eye at the panel while he speaks, maybe with a stub of
slobbery cigar between his teeth. "We got dopers in our wire, gentlemen!"

McCaffrey was coy, but The New York Times filled in the blanks the next day.
"While McCaffrey named no names," wrote Times reporter Christopher Wren, "he
was clearly referring to a coalition of advocacy groups little-known to the
public that argues the global war on drugs has cost society more than drug
abuse itself. Some of those advocates attracted attention last week with an
open letter to the UN secretary-general as the General Assembly opened a
three-day special session on drugs."

This would be the cabal of secret legalizers. There's no reference to
"legalization" in their letter, but remember that they're a sneaky sack of
bastards. And just who are they? Well, George Schultz signed the letter. You
may remember George from the notoriously subversive, pro-drug Reagan
administration, for which he served as secretary of state. Then there were
Alan Cranston and Claiborne Pell, former colleagues of the very senators
McCaffrey was addressing. George Soros, who is rich and gives money to
influence political discussion, like Richard Mellon Scaife, is scary and
bad. And so is Javier Perez de Cuellar, a former secretary-general of the
United Nations and a known foreigner. Plus 495 others.

In fact, the suggestion floated by Schultz and company is simply that the
longstanding hit-with-stick throw-in-cage approach to drug use isn't
working, while the consequences of both US drug use and the effort to
suppress it are making life in other countries - Colombia, to name one
example among many - kind of unpleasant. They go on to wonder if, without
making drugs legal, it might be possible to simply moderate the
law-and-order approach. Alternatives go by the names "medicalization" - long
favored by lunatic outsiders like Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke - and harm
reduction. (Different advocates define the term medicalization differently.
To some, it means offering a limited menu of drugs - marijuana, really - for
the treatment of pain and chemotherapy-induced nausea, with a doctor's
prescription. To others - Schmoke among them - it means viewing addiction as
a treatable illness, rather than as a crime, within limits.)

And, yes, quite a few groups involved in that coalition favor the
legalization of marijuana. Horror of horrors. It leads straight to children
buying heroin at the corner store.

Whatever.

McCaffrey needn't worry, since there's precisely no danger at all that the
dope-loving anarchists are going to be heard over all the screaming. The
current US government budget allocates more money than ever to federal
anti-drug efforts. If the Clinton administration's plan to hire 1,000 new
border-patrol agents - plus 100 new DEA agents, which should fix this drug
thing PDQ - seemed like a bit much. Note that some of the people in a
position to do something about it thought it wasn't enough. House Speaker
Newt Gingrich, who has called for the death penalty for people repeatedly
caught smuggling drugs over the border, called the US$17 billion
Clinton-McCaffrey anti-drug plan, "a hodgepodge of half-steps and
half-truths." Which is half a truth too much for the ol' Newtster.

So, why bother to squawk like a squashed rooster over some letter that
offers precisely no threat at all? Well, because you're the nation's leading
anti-drug official, and it's hard to make sense when you've been assigned
the task of selling a dubious product. The tendency is to overstate things
in fairly predictable ways. Like the announcement of a plan "that will
subject all suspicious cargo and vehicles to non-intrusive inspections" in
an effort to make the US-Mexico border "open to trade, but impermeable to
drugs." You try to say any of this with a straight face. If you can pull it
off, there may be a job in law enforcement with your name on it.

One nicely entertaining example of the profound silliness that arises out of
trying to fight an obviously unwinnable war as though it meant something is
the press release sent out back in November by McCaffrey's agency, the White
House Office of Drug Control Policy: "A new study released by Barry R.
McCaffrey, Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy, found that in 1995, Americans spent $57.3 billion on illegal drugs."
The release went on to quote McCaffrey as pointing out that $57.3 billion
could have paid for such I-love-mommy-and-America niceties as "22 billion
gallons of milk to feed undernourished infants ... or a year's worth of
child care for 14 million kids." Children born to drug addicts
unquestionably suffer horrifying deprivation, but to toss that monthly $20
marijuana purchase (yes, we do know your personal habits - we're Suck) into
the starving baby bin is a bit of a stretch, huh?

But it gets better. Inspired to act by the barrage of bullshit, we called
the Macebearer office and got a copy of the complete 109-page report
described in the press release. And, yes, we did have to ask several times.
The Associated Press story on the report played it straight, but we were
wondering how on earth a government agency could possibly know how much
money its constituents spend breaking the law. The answer is: They can't.

Page 5: "First, the secretive nature of drug-crop production and
manufacturing prevents accurate assessments of drug production. Second, with
some exceptions, drug dealers and their customers transact business away
from public view. Finally, drug users often misrepresent their drug use when
interviewed. Thus estimates of retail expenditures must be based on
incomplete, inaccurate, and often inconsistent data, as well as assumptions
that occasionally lack strong justification."

No kidding, no kidding, no kidding, and no kidding. But it's good to hear it
straight from the mouth of the milk-'n'-babies source. Especially since the
press release didn't make any mention of all those maybes.

Similarly amusing language appears throughout the report, by the way. On
page 31, an estimate of cocaine shipped into the United States puts that
figure at "372 to 458 metric tons" in 1994 and "421 to 513 metric tons" the
following year.

This much - plus or minus a hundred metric tons. Close enough for government
work, guys.

And plenty good enough for the war on drugs, where sober thinking pretty
clearly misses the point.

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett