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THE DRUG WAR
An upstart choice for W’s drug czar

BY IAN DONNIS

Conservative-turned-populist-columnist Arianna Huffington has a winning suggestion for George W. Bush’s choice as drug czar: Gary Wilson, the popular Republican governor of New Mexico, who advocates prevention and treatment over punishment and incarceration. As Huffington points out in a recent column at www.overthrowthegov.com, Wilson would represent a remarkable change, since Barry McCaffrey, the most recent drug czar, “lauded treatment over incarceration, but, in fact, 69 percent of his budget went to law enforcement and interdiction, while 60 percent of addicts who needed help didn’t get it.”

The drug war’s failure is all too evident. Illegal drugs remain cheap and widely available, reflecting little diminution in supplies. Countless studies have demonstrated that treatment is more cost-effective than imprisonment in reducing drug use and related crime. And there’s growing recognition — as evidenced by cultural indicators like the Hollywood movie Traffic and political shifts like Republican governor George Pataki’s proposal to soften New York’s harsh Rockefeller-era drug laws — that our current priorities are misguided. During a recent trip to Mexico, Bush even acknowledged to the New York Times that American consumption is “the main reason why drugs are shipped through Mexico to the United States.”

Citing this statement, the Times holds out hope in a February 27 editorial that Bush may be willing to shift the focus from eradicating the supply of drugs to reducing the demand for them. Certainly, stranger things have happened. It was actually Richard M. Nixon who fostered the most effective recent drug policy (which prioritized treatment over imprisonment), before the balance started to reverse under his successors, according to Michael Massing’s The Fix (Simon & Schuster, 1998). And, as Massing writes, the nation’s previous drug czars — William Bennett, Bob Martinez, Lee Brown, and McCaffrey — were picked mostly for political reasons and “have all lacked even rudimentary experience in the treatment, prevention, and epidemiology of drug abuse.”

Despite abundant need for a new approach, it may be too much to believe that Bush will lead the way. Attorney General John Ashcroft, after all, is on record as saying, “A government which takes the resources that we would devote toward the interdiction of drugs and converts them to treatment resources ... is a government that accommodates us at our lowest and least.”

Then there’s the fact that Johnson, Huffington’s suggested choice, is less than diplomatic when it comes to the propaganda of the drug war. “The first thing I would do is institute truth-in-advertising rules at the Office of National Drug Control Policy, because a lot of what has been coming out of it is pure hogwash — especially the claims of victory,” he tells Huffington. “It would be too bold a statement for Bush to choose me. I’m a little radioactive. But I definitely think that a bold choice is what is needed.”