THE DRUG WAR: BACK TO THE STONE AGE

Think General McCaffrey Is Wrong?

Wait Till You Meet John Walters, Bush's Choice For Drug Czar.

Last May, when President George W. Bush strolled into a Rose Garden
ceremony to introduce John Walters, the man he had chosen to be his new
drug czar, did anyone wonder why it had taken so long to announce a nominee
for his unfilled Cabinet post? Walters was reportedly the first choice, and
if one took the president's somewhat balanced statements on the Drug War at
face value, Walters certainly seemed a surprising selection. After all, in
January Bush had said, "I think a lot of people are coming to the
realization that maybe long minimum sentences for first-time users may not
be the best way to occupy jail space or heal people from their
disease." DId the acknowledged problem drinker, who had spoken of
prevention, treatment, and empathy during his presidential campaign, cringe
just a bit as he present Walters, a bomb-'em-back-to-the Stone Age Drug War
protege of William Bennett?

A clever and personable Republican apparatchik, Walters has been working in
the trenches of right-wing social policy the heady days of the Reagan
Administration. He served under Bennett the National Endowment for the
Humanities from 1982 to 1985, then followed Bennett to the Department of
Education from 1985 to 1988 while Bennett was its chief.. When Bennett
became the first drug czar in 1988, Walters again tagged along.

He stayed with the Office of National Drug Control Policy until 1993, and
briefly served as acting director,

For most of the Nineties, Walters kept a low profile, running a pair of
conservative think tanks. in 199b, he co authored with Bennett and John
DiIulio (who worked briefly as head o Bush's faith-based social-welfare
initiative) one of the most controversial books of the last decade, decade,
Body Count: Moral Poverty and How to Win America' War Against Crime and
Drugs (Simon Schuster). The book raised a ruckus for its now-discredited
warning that the deterioration of the social fabric was creating a
generation of "super-predators," a class of underprivileged (i.e.: black
youth who had "a higher incidence serious drug use, more access to powerful
firearms and fewer moral restraints than any such group in American history."

A quick look at Walters' record reveals ardent opposition to the drug law
reform agenda.

He's against needle exchange programs.

Following the 1996 initiatives legalizing medical California and Arizona,
Walters called for the federal government to strip prescription-writing
privileges from doctors who advocated pot for patients.

Though Bush had said that sentencing discrepancies for crack and powder
cocaine are ripe for review, Walters is against changing the rules.

Where drug policy intersects with foreign policy, he has been equally hawkish.

Between 1995 and 1999, the Peruvian air force, with U.S. military
assistance, forced or shot down 123 planes suspected of ferrying drugs
(earlier this year, the Peruvians shot down a plane carrying American
missionaries); Walters has been a major cheerleader for the program and
castigated the Clinton administration for briefly shelving the policy for
review.

He favors the bitterly resented certification process, whereby the U.S.
annually passes judgment on the anti-drug efforts of such countries as
Mexico. He has also called for using the National Guard to catch smugglers.

Walters believes, too, that all federally funded drug treatment should be
under supervision. According to William McColl, director of national
affairs for the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation, Walters has
proposed that anyone who utilizes public alcohol and programs should face
sanctions if they fail a drug test. This also applies to those who seek
treatment voluntarily. He has been quoted as saying, The health people say
'No Stigma.' I'm for stigma."

"He's against anything but prohibition and incarceration," says David J.
Theroux, president of the Independent Institute, an Oakland, California
think tank.

He'll pursue policies more individuals are jailed in the inner city," says
McColl.

Critics don't have to sift ancient sands to find the most damning blot on
Walters' record.

Just this past March Walters declared in the Weekly Standard, "What really
drives the battle against law enforcement and punishment however, is not a
commitment to treatment but the widely held view that (1) we are
imprisoning too many people for merely possessing illegal drugs; (2) drug
and other criminal sentences are too long and harsh; and (3) the criminal
system is unjustly punishing black men. These are among urban myths of our
time."

Not only are Walters' facts wrong, but by stating his erroneous theories so
clearly, he gave his critics ammunition to skewer his nomination.

The Coalition for Compassionate Leadership on Drug Policy comprising the
American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, the Justice Policy Institute and
the National Black Police Association, among others formed last spring in
response to the nomination of Walters, as well Asa Hutchinson, who was
confirmed during the summer as head of Enforcement Administration CCLDP
offers a point-by-point of Walters' charges.

Citing FBI statistics, the coalition says that of 1.6 million drug arrests
in 1998, about seventy-nine percent were for possession. As to Walters'
discounting of "long and harsh" sentences the group states that, there were
"over 450.000 nonviolent drug offenders incarcerated, with an average
federal sentence of seventy-eight months.

Walters' scoffing at racial bias, the coalition states, "African-Americans
are rested for drug offenses six times the rate of whites." in fact, while
blacks have been found to use drugs at blacks at the same rate as whites,
more seventy percent of incarcerated drug offenders are black.

Walters' avowed positions fly in the face of the mood of the American
people. Following last November's election, the Lindesmith Center noted,
"In five out of six states, where drug policy issues were on the ballot,
voters decided in favor of major changes regarding treatment instead of
prisons for nonviolent offenders, medical marijuana for patients when
recommended by a doctor; and civil-asset forfeiture law reform." What's
more, according to Lindesmith, "Since 1996, seventeen out of nineteen
initiatives an referendums have passed around the country in favor of
drug-policy reform.

With attitudes about drugs in flux, why would it benefit the president to
choose a drug czar so clearly resistant to new ideas?

Lindesmith's McColl speculates that the drug-czar post is a convenient
place to stash a cultural conservative, thus shoring up right-win support.
"Bush threw a bone to his right-wing base with this relatively low-profile
Cabinet post," he says.

Walters' first Stint at ONDCP give a good indication of what he will do a
drug czar. Mike Males, a senior searcher at the Justice Policy Institute
has written that ONDCP's 1989 strategy, articulated by Bennett and Walters
"specifically targeted drug 'use itself, not abuse or addiction. 'Casual
users [were targeted] because it is their kind of drug use that is most
contagious,' said the strategy document.

Since addicts "make the worst possible advertisement for new drug use,"
treating them got short shrift, as it has ever since. Walters has referred
to treatment as "the latest manifestation of liberals commitment to a
'therapeutic state' in which government serves as the agent of personal
rehabilitation." Walters however, will have to work to implement a
treatment policy, because President Bush has pledged $1.6 billion for drug
treatment in the next five years.

While acknowledging that is a "not insubstantial" amount, McColl says, "It
won't affect demand."

So much for hard drugs what of marijuana?

Kevin Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy, believes that
Walters doesn't differentiate ,between marijuana which he sees as a
dangerous drug and heroin. Zeese adds hat there is some coerced, legally
mandated treatment for marijuana users, and that it will likely increase
under Walters' aegis. In fact, according to the Department of Health and
Human Services, fifty-four percent of pot smokers in treatment in 1998 were
referred by the courts.

Like most things in America, drug policy reform is reeling from the
September 11th terrorist attacks.

It's a certainty that Walters will stress the links between terrorism and
drug trafficking. But what he will mainly do is it all of his predecessors
in the post have done: win fat annual increases in drug-fighting budget.

As Males writes, "Walters' record reveals the consummate double-talk skills
necessary to fill the office's task of redefining disaster as success while
simultaneously warning that worse disaster looms."