Editors' Links

THE DRUG CZAR MUST ABDICATE

According to survey data released this month, past-month use of illegal
drugs increased from 6.3 percent in 2001 to 7.1 percent last year. These
numbers can mean only one thing: It's payback time.

"Drug use has gone up significantly during the first full year of the Bush
Administration," crows Bob Weiner, spokesman for the Office of National
Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) for most of the Clinton years. The headline
over the press release reads, "Survey: Bush Reversing Drug Use Reductions."

Weiner says "the new administration needs to quit laying blame and start
supporting successful Clinton era bipartisan drug programs such as the
National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign." He bravely insists that a
"comprehensive strategy" of "education, prevention, treatment, law
enforcement, and foreign policy initiatives must continue to be funded in
full."

Weiner can be faulted for the lameness of his proposals: more money for
anti-drug ads that demonstrably don't work, along with everything else the
government is already doing to stop people from ingesting politically
incorrect substances. But in his eagerness to blame George W. Bush for an
upward blip in drug use that almost certainly had nothing to do with the
president's policies, Weiner is simply aping the behavior of Republicans
who accused Clinton of being soft on drugs.

One of the earliest and most persistent critics of Clinton's alleged
surrender in the war on drugs-marked, oddly enough, by record levels of
spending and arrests-was John P. Walters, the ONDCP's current director.
Walters, who was the office's acting director when Clinton took over in
1993, left in a huff that February, after the president decided to cut his
staff, and immediately began attacking the new administration in op-ed
pieces and interviews.

In a series of op-ed pieces published by The Washington Times in 1995,
Walters and his former boss, Bush I drug czar William J. Bennett, accused
Clinton of abandoning the crusade for a drug-free America. "President
Clinton has shown little concern about the carnage drugs cause," they
wrote. "There is no visible effort by the Clinton Administration to prevent
the complete disintegration of foreign supply control....The Clinton
Administration has made [the ONDCP] largely irrelevant."

Walters and Bennett claimed "the results of the administration's
indifference are now in. And they are not good." Specifically, they cited
an increase in drug use by teenagers between 1993 and 1994, which they
described as "the dangerous resurgence of drugs that has occurred during
President Clinton's watch"

The latest survey results indicate that drug use by teenagers has risen by
12 percent during President Bush's watch. Isn't it time for John Walters to
resign in disgust?