DRUG WARS

Attorney General William Sorrell has put his finger on one of the
difficulties facing the new Douglas administration as it seeks to address
pressing issues in a time of tight budgets.

Last month Sorrell launched a salvo at Gov. James Douglas for shifting
money from the state's tobacco fund toward the fight against heroin and
other addictive drugs. Sorrell made some telling points.

The state receives about $24 million annually from the tobacco industry as
a result of the settlement of a multi-state lawsuit. Out of that money, the
state spends about $5 million for tobacco control programs.

Sorrell is dismayed because he has been watching the money pledged to the
anti-tobacco campaign shrinking even before Douglas put forward his plan to
use the money to fight heroin. Now Douglas wants to make cuts in the
tobacco program that would reduce it by about half.

Tobacco kills more Vermonters than any other drug and, if anything, the
state should be spending more money, not less, on fighting its lethal
effects. Yet the tobacco settlement money is a tempting pot to dip into for
other purposes. Sorrell argues that there will always be important needs
requiring state money, and so there will always be reasons to deplete the
tobacco fund. And once it is depleted, it will be hard to scrape up the
money to build it back up to an adequate level.

At the same time, Sorrell went too far in calling the heroin problem "the
political issue du jour." The problem of addictive drugs - heroin and crack
in particular - has become acute in recent years, and Douglas is taking
important steps to address it.

Douglas' anti-drug program will include the funding of substance abuse
counselors in schools, who presumably would be able to spread the word
about tobacco. So money shifted to combating drugs other than tobacco
cannot be said to be lost altogether to the cause of fighting tobacco.

But the Legislature must make sure that Douglas' $4.5 million anti- drug
initiative does not do excessive damage to other existing anti- drug
programs, including the fight against tobacco. Douglas was able to boast
that his drug program did not involve new spending; some of the money he
proposes to use will be gained by keeping Vermonters in state for drug
treatment. But some legislators are worried that important anti-drug
programs will be gutted as Douglas shifts money around in the fight against
drugs.

It is interesting to note the sharp words that came from Sorrell on the
topic of tobacco. Sorrell has an interest in continuing the fight against
tobacco, in part because he was involved in the lawsuit that secured the
money from the tobacco companies in the first place.

It is also interesting to note that, as one of the leading Democratic
officeholders, Sorrell appears willing to challenge the Republican
governor. The attorney general has not assumed a challenging role in
relation to the governor since the days back in the late 1970s when
Attorney General M. Jerome Diamond gave Gov. Richard Snelling fits. Neither
Attorneys General John Easton nor Jeffrey Amestoy sought to make themselves
independent power centers, challenging the governor politically. Sorrell's
statements about tobacco suggest he doesn't mind being a thorn in Douglas' side.