DRUG CZAR: GINGRICH 'IRRESPONSIBLE'

WASHINGTON--The White House drug policy chief says House Speaker Newt
Gingrich is playing party politics in the war on drugs. The speaker's
office counters that lives could be lost because the Clinton administration
lacks a strong anti-drug plan.

Barry R. McCaffrey, head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy,
reproached Gingrich as "irresponsible" for declaring that the
administration's long-term plan to reduce illegal drug use was dead on
arrival in Congress.

"I'm sympathetic to partisan wrangling and know that Newt Gingrich is
looking for issues for the midterm election, but that's not what I signed
up to do. I'm afraid he's going to do a disservice to a comprehensive
strategy," McCaffrey said in an interview Monday.

"I think the American people deserve better than a hasty, partisan response
from Newt Gingrich," McCaffrey said.

Gingrich's press secretary, Christina Martin, responded that "there's
nothing hasty or political about Speaker Gingrich's deep disappointment
that the Clinton administration cannot put together a serious strategy for
saving America's teens in a more timely and effective manner. ... "The
speaker worries that the slower, more ineffective America's drug plan is,
the more young lives lost and damaged. It doesn't have to be this way,"
she said.

The jousting over drug policy began Saturday when President Clinton, in his
weekly radio address, outlined his plan to reduce the number of Americans
using drugs by half over the next decade. The administration has budgeted
$17.1 billion for next year to expand prevention programs, hire more border
patrol agents, drug agents and police, and treat more prisoners. Gingrich,
in response, derided that strategy as a "hodgepodge of half-steps and
half-truths" and a "definition of failure." He said he would try to pass a
resolution in the House asking Clinton to withdraw his plan as inadequate.

Gingrich asked why it would take a decade to reduce drug use when the Civil
War was won and slavery abolished in only four, and said Republicans would
push through their own anti-drug agenda. It includes community anti-drug
coalitions, market incentives to help companies fight drug use and a
national clearinghouse for drug information.

Last year Gingrich led efforts to win House passage of a bill that would
have required the drug office to virtually end drug use in America by 2001.

"This strikes me as this brilliant man Newt Gingrich conducting drug policy
by what I would have termed in my last life as "ready, fire, aim,"' said
McCaffrey, a retired Army general. He said the administration, with the
help of Republicans, already had implemented into law many ideas pushed by
Gingrich and when Gingrich rejects out-of-hand the administration's
proposals, "my immediate reaction is that this is irresponsible."

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