FLETCHER, CHANDLER CAMPS TRADE POTSHOTS

FRANKFORT - An Ernie Fletcher administration would spend upward of $9
million to expand "drug courts," running mate Steve Pence said yesterday.

He said the money would come from a reordering of justice priorities.
"There is plenty of money there to fight drugs," Pence said in a telephone
interview.

Kentucky now has 22 drug courts serving 35 counties. The courts manage drug
intervention and treatment programs for non-violent drug offenders.
Fifty-four drug courts to serve 58 more counties are in the planning stage,
according to figures from the Administrative Office of the Courts.

Pence, a former federal prosecutor, said that getting users of drugs such
as methamphetamine and the prescription narcotic OxyContin into treatment
is critical.

"The OxyContin problem and the methamphetamine problem are far more
dangerous to a community than other drugs we've seen in the past, such as
marijuana," Pence said.

Pence said he and Fletcher, the Republican nominee for governor, also want
to upgrade a state database that keeps track of who writes and receives
prescriptions. A legislative task force is making a similar recommendation
about the database -- Kentucky All-Schedule Prescription Electronic
Reporting, or KASPER -- which contains 35 million prescription records.

Pence said he fielded questions about drug enforcement throughout a day of
campaigning in Western Kentucky yesterday.

The opposing campaigns traded potshots elsewhere.

Fletcher's people criticized Ben Chandler's handling of the proceeds from a
lawsuit he filed as state attorney general against health insurance giant
Anthem Inc.

Chandler's campaign noted the irony of Pence's having been a criminal
defense lawyer between stints as a federal prosecutor. In 1998, as a
congressional candidate, Fletcher savaged his Democratic opponent for
having been a public defender.

On the Anthem settlement, Fletcher spokesman Wes Irvin said the $45 million
would have been better spent on Medicaid, because the money could have been
leveraged to get more than $100 million in federal matching funds.

The suit was to recover charitable assets Anthem took out of the state when
it acquired a non-profit insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kentucky.

Instead of going into the state's general fund, the money went to the
Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky for public-health use. So far the
foundation has made two grants of $1 million each, to the University of
Kentucky and the University of Louisville for research on health policy.

Chandler's campaign manager, Mark Nickolas, said the settlement was from
Anthem, not from the government, and that it was partly Anthem's decision
to create the foundation.

"Ernie needs to decide what it is he wants out of Frankfort. He criticizes
Ben Chandler for setting up a non-profit that has helped Kentuckians. Then
he criticizes Ben Chandler for government spending," Nickolas said.

The foundation's executive director, Rita Moya, said Chandler is not
involved with the foundation. She said the foundation has been unable to
make further grants because it can do so only from its earnings on
investments, "and there weren't any last year" because of the economy.

The 1998 congressional campaign was resurrected as an issue because of a
dramatic television commercial in which a woman who was raped and shot
spoke on camera about how her assailant was defended in court by Ernesto
Scorsone, Fletcher's Democratic opponent at the time.

In news reports about the commercial, Fletcher campaign manager Daniel
Groves said Scorsone "made a career choice to be a public defender," and
that Fletcher, if in a similar situation, would have refused to accept the
case.

Groves now manages Fletcher's gubernatorial campaign.

Nickolas, of the Chandler campaign, said it was hypocritical of Fletcher to
attack an opponent for past criminal-defense work but embrace a running
mate -- Pence -- with the same background.

"What (Pence) was doing and what Scorsone was doing were upholding the very
fundamental American notion that everyone is entitled to a defense,"
Nickolas said, but Fletcher "didn't seem to think so in '98."