FOUR YEARS AGO, IN THE FIRST FEW weeks of the Clinton presidency, a three- star general attached to the Joint Chiefs of Staff was at the White House on official business when he said good morning to a young, female Clintonista. Instead of answering in kind, she scowled and replied: “We really don’t want people in uniform over here . . .”
Isn’t life odd? And, considering the way things have turned out, wouldn’t it be sweet if she were one of the aides now forced to undergo periodic drug testing? For the three-star general she insulted that winter day was Lt. Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the most decorated man in the U.S. armed forces and now Clinton’s drug czar. McCaffrey is the reason the administration has finally articulated a coherent anti-drug policy, and he is the driving force behind the administration’s unexpectedly strong response to two invidious state referenda in Arizona and California that would make it easier for Americans to use illegal drugs. “He’s the man on this issue for us,” one senior White House official says, “and there’s no secret about it.”
The Clintonites need him. One of the few times Bob Dole actually sank his teeth into Bill Clinton in 1996, after all, was in his evocative assertion that the administration was “AWOL in the war on drugs.” According to officials who are most active in fighting drugs, it was a fair characterization.
While presidents get too much credit — and too much blame — for nearly everything that goes on in the nation’s life, there was ample reason in this instance to hold Clinton accountable for the alarming increase in marijuana and other narcotics among America’s teenagers. In 1992, 22 percent of high school seniors reported using marijuana during the past 12 months. This figure has risen in each year of Clinton’s presidency and now stands at 36 percent In 1992, only 2 percent said they were using pot daily; now, it’s 5 percent. The same pattern holds for cocaine, heroin, LSD, and other drugs.
Why does Clinton deserve the blame? Remember that in 1992, the public’s perception of Clinton’s view of drugs came chiefly from his brother’s troubles as a cocaine user, his own claim that he tried marijuana in college but “didn’t inhale,” and the notorious MTV interview in which he chuckled and said he would inhale if he tried pot again. After his election, Clinton’s top advisers mused in public about moving the drug czar’s office out of the White House, and one of his first official acts was to cut the staff of the drug czar’s office from 145 full-time employees to 25. His surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, spoke about the possible benefits of drug legalization, and after her son was busted for cocaine, she said he hadn’t really committed a crime Three months after taking office, attorney general Janet Reno publicly criticized federal sentencing procedures resulting in long prison terms for ” minor participants” in drug deals. And last year, presidential spokesman Mike McCurry finally confessed what readers of the Washington Times knew right off the bat in 1993: that several of those Clinton hired as White House staffers confessed to recent or ongoing drug usage during FBI background checks and had to agree to undergo random testing in order to receive security clearances.
All of this sent a rather unmistakable message. When the New York Times interviewed 30 teenagers from Massachusetts and New York about drug use one month before the ’96 election, Clinton’s name kept coming up. “For him to say, “Don’t do drugs,” then to say he did it, but he didn’t inhale, that’s kind of a far-fetched story,” a blonde 16-year-old from Gloucester identified only as Jennifer told the Times “He must have tried it more than once,” added Isa, a 17-year-old senior from New York. “I bet maybe 50 percent of the Congress has tried it. I mean, adults still use.”
This was the mess Barry McCaffrey inherited early last year when Clinton tapped him to head the drugcontrol office whose personnel and power the president had slashed three years before. With his war record, his button- down demeanor, and his occasional bursts of temper, McCaffrey was seen by his military colleagues as something of a tough guy. They also considered him something of a liberal. In 1970, McCaffrey wrote a 30-page paper while teaching at West Point that predicted — and approved of — vastly expanded opportunities for women at the academy and in the rest of the armed forces. At West Point and various war colleges, McCaffrey was known for teaching young officers the absolute need to avoid human-rights abuses in combat. Among his many decorations and prizes is an award from the NAACP
In the Army, McCaffrey was known as a demanding officer who traveled easily within the two great cultures, the warrior class and the politically correct bureaucracy. In the mid-1960s, he had decided to go into medicine and was prepared to enter the pre-med program at Johns Hopkins when the Vietnam War escalated. The son of a general, McCaffrey did not respond the way so many of his generation did: Instead of hiding out in academia, he left school, enlisted, and volunteered for service in Vietnam.
As a young lieutenant, McCaffrey was wounded in battle and sent home. He volunteered for a second tour and was wounded again, this time seriously, shot in the left arm at point-blank range. After the war, he stayed in the service, rose through the ranks, and was serving as a two-star general in command of the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division when it was deployed to the Persian Gulf. McCaffrey led his tank division on the fabled 200-mile “left hook” maneuver through the desert, in which the 24th cut off, and then annihilated, the cream of the Iraqi fighting forces. The move was accomplished 15 hours ahead of schedule, with the loss of only eight American lives.
When the Gulf War ended, McCaffrey was given a third general’s star to go along with his two service crosses, two Silver Stars, three Bronze Stars, and three Purple Hearts. He was assigned to the staff of Colin L. Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which is how he found himself at the White House the day of the fateful snub. An incredulous McCaffrey reported the incident back to headquarters, and word of it spread quickly. Embarrassed by his handling of military matters in the first months of his administration and seeking to make amends, the president asked McCaffrey to go jogging with him during a Vancouver summit with Boris Yeltsin later that year. The two men hit it off, and soon McCaffrey got another promotion, a fourth star, and, ultimately, the drug czar’s job.
McCaffrey took the post in an election year. By law, the drug czar is forbidden to participate in partisan politics, and so McCaffrey remained silent when Dole blistered the Clinton administration for its record on drugs. What he didn’t take sitting down, however, were the initiatives in Arizona and California that eased the drug laws under the guise of allowing the terminally ill to smoke marijuana as a way of alleviating their suffering.
The “medicalization” of the drug debate is the latest strategy employed by Arnold Trebach, founder of the Drug Policy Foundation, and billionaire George Soros, both of whom have legalization as their ultimate goal. The legalization forces are now cleverly invoking the pain and suffering of the terminally ill to demonstrate their view that making the sale and use of drugs a crime causes far more problems than the drugs themselves.
Arizona’s Prop. 200 has the effect of moving all federally categorized Schedule I narcotics such as LSD, marijuana, and heroin into Schedule II. Schedule I drugs are those with no recognized medicinal value at all. Schedule II drugs are deemed dangerous but have some legitimate medical use, like morphine.
Television advertisements trumpeting the initiative made no mention of these changes, since the makers of those ads clearly understood that voters would balk. Instead, the ads said Prop. 200 would actually require violent criminals to serve their full terms without parole. One ad even attacked ” drug legalizers and liquor lobbyists.” It was a cynical and dishonest pitch. ” I defy anyone in Arizona to know what they were voting on,” McCaffrey told me in a post-election interview.
In California, the ads for Prop. 215 tugged on heartstrings with images of cancer patients allowed access to marijuana in order to increase their appetites after chemotherapy. What the ads didn’t say was that Prop. 215 was tailored to allow any “caregiver” not just physicians, but anyone who classifies himself as a caregiver — to “recommend” pot to sufferers. There is no description of what constitutes a sufferer in need of marijuana relief. And it protects growers who are producing marijuana for such exempted users.
McCaffrey scoffs at the theory that any knowledgeable physician would prescribe a medicine ingested through the lungs. “Smoked marijuana — as a medicine is sort of a joke,” he says. Clinton, who campaigned extensively in both Arizona and California — and carried them both said nothing against either proposition when his words might have changed the minds of voters (McCaffrey did, to no avail).
The day after the election, McCaffrey assembled his staff to formulate a response. The first step was to team up with transportation secretary Federico Pena and issue a warning that anyone involved in federal transportation would still have to remain drug-free or be fired.
The second was to bring a series of recommendations to the president, including one urging the DEA to pull the prescription-writing privileges of any physician who starts prescribing pot to his patients. McCaffrey and Health and Human Services secretary Donna Shalala are also getting ready to give official warning to any state that considers following the Arizona and California examples that to do so would jeopardize federal funding of drug- treatment and education programs.
Even before the announcement was made, top aides predicted that Clinton would sign off on whatever McCaffrey brought him. “The president trusts him,” McCurry says. Of course, if Clinton had chosen not to trust McCaffrey on this one, that snubbing of the general might have made the 1993 snub seem like a nice walk in the park on a sunny, cloudless day.
Carl M. Cannon covers the White House for the Baltimore Sun.
