TOP ANTI-DRUG OFFICIAL ATTACKS CRITICS

WASHINGTON -- The White House's top drug-policy official accused critics of
the United States' zero-tolerance drug laws Wednesday of pursuing an agenda
to legalize drugs, from marijuana to heroin and cocaine.

In written testimony before the Senate foreign relations committee, the
official, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, charged, "There is a carefully camouflaged,
exorbitantly funded, well-heeled elitist group whose ultimate goal is to
legalize drug use in the United States."

While McCaffrey named no names, 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 U.N.
secretary-general as the General Assembly opened a three-day special
session on drugs.

The letter, whose 500 signers included the former U.N. secretary-general,
Javier Perez de Cuellar, former Secretary of State George Shultz and two
former senators, Alan Cranston and Claiborne Pell, argued that by focusing
on punishing drug users, the United States and other countries had helped
create a worldwide criminal black market that had wrecked national
economies and democratic governments.

The letter's signers also included George Soros, the billionaire investor
and philanthropist, who has spent as much as $20 million supporting
research and advocacy groups working to change Americans' views on how to
deal with drug use. Soros, who signed the open letter, said in an interview
last week that he hoped that it would foster an open discussion of the
issue.

But McCaffrey, the administration's director of national drug policy, said
the critics were disguising their true purpose because Americans
overwhelmingly oppose legalizing drugs. "Through a slick misinformation
campaign," he said, "these individuals perpetuate a fraud on the American
people, a fraud so devious that even some of the nation's most respectable
newspapers and sophisticated media are capable of echoing their
falsehoods."

His assertion prompted the judiciary committee's ranking Democrat, Sen.
Joseph Biden of Delaware, to propose hearings into the issue of legalizing
drugs. "Let's expose it for the fraud that it is," Biden said.

Soros could not be reached Wednesday because he is traveling in Sweden. But
one of the most prominent advocates of less punitive approaches to drug
use, Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center, a drug-policy
institute in New York supported by Soros, called the general's criticism
"an attempt to smear what's a very responsible approach to dealing with
drug abuse in our society."

At the core of the disagreement is the concept of harm reduction, which to
advocates like Nadelmann, means finding ways short of abstinence to reduce
the harm that drug abusers cause themselves and society. Needle exchange,
in which addicts are given clean needles to try to stem the spread of AIDS,
is a prominent example.

Kevin Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy, a group in Falls
Church, Va., that also wants drug laws changed, said, "The reason why there
is an upsurge of people advocating reform is because the current policy is
not making for a safer or healthier society,"

But McCaffrey called harm reduction "a hijacked concept that has become a
euphemism for drug legalization."

"It's become a cover story for people who would lower the barriers to drug
use," he said.

Nadelmann responded, "The majority of harm-reduction advocates oppose drug
legalization, and that includes George Soros."

Until Wednesday, the retired four-star general had ignored the drug-reform
lobby, so his sharp attack marked a change in strategy.

After his testimony, McCaffrey said he was suggesting a debate about
legalization, not a witch hunt. "It's a legitimate subject of debate in our
society if you do it openly," he said. He predicted that the notion would
be "rejected resoundingly" once Americans discovered what was involved.

Nadelmann said: "I would welcome the opportunity to debate him anytime or
anyplace. His trying to equate all forms of harm reduction with a
free-market approach to drug legalization is both false and duplicitous."

But Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of
California at Los Angeles who follows drug issues, expressed concern that
such a debate would detract from the more crucial task of finding ways to
make the current anti-drug strategies work more effectively.

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)