Bill Clinton is mostly talk. He enjoys daily political combat and negotiates its demands with rare talent. But he has never been much for actual, week-in, week-out government. Over any given administrative term in his long career, the Clinton record is thickly stained with the evidence both of his personal disengagement and of the ideological inclinations of his loosely supervised appointees. So the early months of a Clinton election year always look the same: He mounts a slick and furious propaganda offensive to muddy that evidence, the better to confuse and silence his opponents. What looks bad, Clinton knows, can often be made to look good — if you jabber about it enough.
This is your president’s brain. And this is your president’s brain on drugs: Clinton is justifiably nervous that his credibility gap in the nation’s drug war — still a major public preoccupation — might be exploited by Republicans in the fall.
Candidate Clinton didn’t inhale. President Clinton’s surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, made repeated pronouncements on the virtues of drug legalization. Before the ink was dry on his presidential oath, Clinton gutted the White House drug office with a two-fold, shabby purpose: satisfying a campaign pledge to trim his staff, and purging a hundred-odd career civil servants whose only sin (shades of Travelgate) was to have worked under a Republican administration. That massacre remains the president’s best known drug-war initiative; three years later, he has spent very little time on the effort. “I’ve been in Congress for over two decades,” Democratic Rep. Charles B. Rangel grumped late last year. “I have never, never, never seen a president who cares less” about drugs.
So it is now, predictably, “inoculation” season, as the Clinton campaign embarks on a weeks-long media tour designed to portray the president as fully and effectively engaged in the war on drugs. Much of it is typical hokum. A talk-show schlockmeister has been recruited to produce anti-drug television commercials; “Montel Williams’s leadership on this crucial effort is inspiring,” burbles the White House. A Gallup poll on the drug war has been commissioned, as the White House admits without embarrassment, “to demonstrate thinking which will support our efforts.” And the president himself — in a spare Miami moment between rounds of golf and multimillion- dollar Democratic fundraisers — has unveiled a “new” drug-fighting strategy. He is “working hard in Washington,” he tells a group of network cameramen and middle-school students. And his work is paying off, since “every year for the last three years … drug use has dropped.”
We’ll come back to this falsehood in a moment. Were the Clinton drug- fighting record purely a matter of Elders-like bloopers and mere inattention, the president’s current show of concern — and the debut of his newly minted tough-guy “drug czar,” retired army general Barry McCaffrey — might be sufficient protection against GOP election-year complaints. But it really isn’t true that Clinton has done “nothing” about drugs, as Republicans may want to charge. It’s worse, far worse: His administration has engineered the most significant redirection of federal drug policy in several decades. This is a poorly reported story. And an alarming one that begs for informative political debate.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the federal government pursued what might fairly be described as a “do everything” strategy against illegal drugs. Executive-branch agencies conducted crop eradication and criminal investigative efforts in foreign countries. They launched “interdiction” programs against smugglers operating in the so-called transit zone between those countries and the United States, and on our borders. They undertook a dizzying variety of law-enforcement, drug-prevention, and rehabilitative- treatment initiatives here at home. It was a richly funded campaign; total federal spending on the drug war rose nearly 700 percent between 1981 and 1992. And it roughly coincided with a more than 50 percent decline in the rate of overall drug use nationwide, from its historical high in 1979 to its subsequent low in the final year of the Bush administration.
There was a standard Democratic critique of government drug policy during this period of Republican presidencies: The executive branch was supposedly placing exaggerated emphasis on efforts to reduce the supply of illegal drugs to American neighborhoods, and short-changing an equally necessary therapeutic approach to addicts and schoolchildren. The drug war’s most visibly warlike aspects — its overseas and interdiction programs — were subjected to particular scorn. As the Customs Service was spending millions of dollars to get radar balloons tangled in high-tension electrical wires on the Southwest border, the scoffers said, cocaine addicts went homeless and died for want of bed-space in federally funded treatment facilities.
Of course, it is a simple fact that federal law can only be enforced by the federal government, and that effort — G-men and prisons, most obviously — is intrinsically more expensive than even the most lavish education and drug- treatment programs could ever be. And so the federal drug budget will always be heavily weighted toward “supply reduction” (and away from “demand reduction”) activities. Even in a Democratic administration. President Clinton still spends twice as much money on restricting drug supply as on ending demand.
But he is spending it very differently. Democratic hostility to drug-war ” militarism” is alive and well in the Clinton administration. Under his supervision, the federal government is now conducting an anti-drug effort almost exclusively inside the United States. At our borders and beyond, the drug war has, for the most part, been cancelled. By formal White House directive.
In 1993, the administration instituted what is technically called a ” controlled shift” of federal drug-war assets. Money and personnel devoted to anti-smuggling efforts in the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and on the U.S.- Mexican border were ostensibly redeployed directly to the Latin American countries in which most illegal drugs originate. But that redeployment has never actually occurred. The federal drug-budget accounts from which any new Latin American initiative could be funded are 55 percent smaller today than in 1992. The old-fashioned anti-smuggling effort has been “shifted” to nowhere. It has been eviscerated.
The result? Coast Guard cocaine and marijuana seizures are down 45 and 90 percent, respectively, since 1991. In 1994, the Customs Service let two million commercial trucks pass through three of the busiest ports-of-entry on the Mexican border without seizing a single kilogram of cocaine. Between 1993 and early 1995, the estimated smuggling “disruption rate” achieved by federal drug interdiction agencies fell 53 percent — the equivalent of 84 more metric tons of cocaine and marijuana arriving unimpeded in the Unitied States each year. Drug Enforcement A gency figures suggest that cocaine and heroin are now available on American streets in near-record purity — and at near- record-low retail prices.
Which can only be evidence that the supply of illegal drugs on American streets has significantly expanded on Bill Clinton’s watch. Because the only other possible explanation, that the demand for drugs has fallen, is at variance with the facts. The president was sadly mistaken-or, well, he lied — when he told those Miami schoolchildren that American drug use “has dropped” every year since he took office. Drug use has steadily risen since 1992, especially among the young. Overall teenage drug use is up 55 percent. Marijuana consumption by teenagers has almost doubled.
This is a pretty striking picture of deliberate government decision-making gone disastrously awry. It’s the president’s fault. He has proposed nothing to correct it, Gen. McCaffrey and Montel Williams notwithstanding. And he should be called to account. All the president’s facile election-year speechifying aside, there are serious differences of personnel and policy that divide this Democratic administration from the Republican administration that would replace it in 1997. Where the drug war is concerned, as in so many other respects, those differences should be clear. They do not flatter President Clinton.
David Tell, for the Editors
