William Bennett , a GOP architect of the “war on drugs” and the first U.S. drug czar, has praised Joe Biden’s role in helping him craft tougher anti-drug policies and said he was “proud to work hand-in-glove” with Biden in the late 1980s to increase funding to prisons, prosecutors, and local drug enforcement units.
Bennett’s comments, made in an interview with the Washington Examiner, were made at a time when the former vice-president’s tough-on-crime history has put him at odds with many of his potential 2020 Democratic opponents who favor criminal justice reform and reduced sentences for drug offenders. In January, Biden, 76, called his previous support for stricter drug laws a “big mistake.”
But Bennett, 75, whose narcotics crackdown in the late 1980s helped inspire the movie “Traffic” and who once said he wouldn’t object to beheading drug dealers in the public square, recalled Biden’s significant role in the war on drugs while serving as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“Joe Biden and I were hand-in-glove,” Bennett said. “I asked for a lot of money for law enforcement, and he wanted to give me more … I was happy to work hand-and-glove with him, and proud to work hand-in-glove with him.”
The feeling appeared to have been mutual. Biden appeared on the “MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour” with Bennett in 1989 and told the hosts: “I’m in favor of everything [Bennett] wants for law enforcement, except I’d do more.” When Bennett resigned as President George H.W. Bush’s s drug czar in 1990, Biden said he “performed with impressive intellect and success.”
Bennett was tapped by Bush in 1988 to serve as the first director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy, a Cabinet office that was created by a congressional law that Biden co-sponsored. Biden also coined the term “drug czar.”
At the time, crack cocaine use was surging across the U.S. as drugs flooded into cities from foreign traffickers, leading to an uptick in overdoses and street violence. Bennett proposed an $8 billion national drug control strategy to tackle the problem through a combination of stricter policing, anti-drug education, and rehabilitation programs for drug users.
Senate Democrats, led by Joe Biden as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, requested an additional $1 billion for the budget. Bennett said Biden wanted more money for law enforcement measures, including local police departments, criminal prosecutions, and prisons.
“The pushback I had [from Biden] was, ‘Czar, you’re not being tough enough,’” said Bennett. “He told me over and over again, ‘I want you to get after it.’”
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in 1990, Biden proposed an additional budget increase for law enforcement measures.
“I propose a significant increase in the drug enforcement side of this,” Biden said during the Feb. 2, 1990, hearing. “The main reason I do that is I put a good deal more emphasis on the enforcement piece and a larger number on the drug trafficking areas.” Biden said he also wanted more funding for research and for mandatory treatment programs in prisons.
Bennett said he remains proud of what he and Biden accomplished on drug policy, saying that their work contributed to a 59 percent drop in illegal drug use between 1979 and 1992.
“We were in the thick of this crack epidemic, the country was focused on it, and he was the man in the Senate and I was the man in the administration,” said Bennett. “It worked. We got drug use down in this country dramatically in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s.”
