Former drug czar lauds progress in war on drugs

NationalJournal.com March 4, 2003 By Mark H. Rodeffer

As the battle against terrorism continues and an invasion of Iraq seems more likely, the war on drugs has received scant attention. NationalJournal.com's Mark H. Rodeffer talked with retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the Clinton administration director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, about the connection between terrorism and illegal drugs, anti-drug efforts in South America and President Bush's plan to give federal dollars to faith-based drug treatment programs.

Q. In this year's recently released update of the National Drug Control Strategy, the White House Drug Office said it has seen "the first significant downturn in youth drug use in nearly a decade." The report cites a University of Michigan study to back up this claim. If this data is accurate, where does the proper credit belong for the downturn?

A. The claims that come out of the various pieces of the drug policy debate are always hard to sort out. Drug use among adolescents and Americans in general peaked in 1979, around 14 percent of the population. It's now around 6 percent. Drug use in America is down dramatically across the board. And almost every other indicator that goes along with that assertion has followed suit: crime rates, teenage pregnancy rates, recreational use of cocaine is down by 75 percent.

Starting in the late '80s there was a dramatic upturn. I think we took our eye off the ball in drug use by adolescents. It doubled among adolescents; it tripled among eighth graders. When I took the responsibility for drug policy in '96, I got in at the height of adolescent drug increase. And we organized ourselves; we got lots of resources flowing into it. We got the Drug Free Communities Act passed. We went from a dozen to more than 1,100 national drug courts. We started a billion-dollar media campaign. And it worked. It came down—drug use among adolescents was down 23 percent. So this year was not—not—the first year....

Basically I think what's happened is the enormous amount of resources and energy and engagement by the nation's leadership—parents, pediatricians, school teachers, law enforcement and the media—has resulted in bringing under control again the problem of adolescent gateway drug-taking behavior. And that ought to continue to work. So I applaud everyone involved in it.... Lots of people have really made a difference because they got horrified at the impact of drugs on our society.

Q. In your final report as the nation's drug czar, you said, "Although wars are expected to end, drug education—like all schooling—is a continuous process"—reminding people that the drug fight is always ongoing. Now the United States is involved in the war on terrorism, which is also seen by many as a never-ending fight. How concerned are you that the drug war will be forgotten by Americans as well as by those on Capitol Hill, and what's the risk if that does happen?

A. It's always a caution. I used to tell people, when you talk about the interagency process, at the highest levels—the principles, the deputies committees, the working groups in the interagency process—normally there's a thousand issues we're working, a hundred of them, we're keenly aware of and are under debate. And at any given time we're trying to solve about three of them.

It's a concern I have that we not forget that every year 100,000 people die of some aspect alcohol abuse. [As drug czar] I had a study done of all death certificates in the United States; 53,000 people a year die of some implication of illegal drug abuse. That is just a massive impact. If you look at our 2 million people behind bars in America, pick a study you believe in, but my personal judgment is 85 percent of those people have a significant drug or alcohol abuse problem.

The country's in great shape, notwithstanding the economic slowdown, notwithstanding the many problems we have. We're the wealthiest, most successful society in history. If you want to get worried about something, the abuse of illegal drugs and alcohol is one of them. So it's worth being concerned that we not forget about this problem. Now, having said that, there's no reason why there ought to be a competition between dealing with drug and alcohol abuse and dealing with al Qaida....

Q. In fact, the White House has worked to tie the two together. What do you think of their argument overall, and what do think about the TV ads saying that if you buy drugs, you're supporting terrorism?

A. I get asked the question all the time. I think, objectively, it's a correct statement.... [Americans] spend too much money on drugs, and we fuel a good bit of the international crime and the terrorism that feeds off that crime. I just wrote a chapter in a book called "Terrorism and Counterterrorism." It's 33 essays. The editors were Col. Russ Howard and Col. Reid Sawyer, brilliant young intel officers, and my chapter was on the convergence of terrorism, crime and drug money. Objectively, I think it's correct to say that when you spend $250 a day on heroin or $5,000 in a weekend on cocaine or you buy $20 bags of marijuana, you are feeding a criminal enterprise that has devastating consequences on foreign democracies and on U.S. law enforcement. So objectively, it's a correct idea.

I'm uneasy about one aspect of it. The media campaign had one purpose, which was to shape adolescent attitudes about drugs. To shape those attitudes, we said, let's get a message that resonates with the target audience. Half those ads were aimed at young people; half of them were aimed at young people's adult mentors. So if you were a parent or a pediatrician or a school teacher, we had a message for you that we thought would be appropriate. So that you, granddad, would feel educated and empowered to talk to your grandchildren about, "In this family, we don't use drugs." And if you were a pediatrician, we were in your medical journals trying to educate you on drugs. We did a lot of this.

I hope they study the effect of these linkage ads of terrorism and drugs, and that they see that the ads are favorably affecting adolescent attitudes toward drug use. If they are, then I'm supportive of them. If they're not, then I'm not supportive of them....

I'm less interested in a Super Bowl ad than I am in being on the Internet, or on rock radio or on rap radio and talking to high-risk youth in a message that's scientifically correct and that resonates with the population....

Q. On Feb. 13, when a plane with U.S. intelligence operatives aboard went down in Colombia and the Americans were kidnapped—and possibly killed—many called it a disaster waiting to happen. The United States has already invested $2.2 billion in an anti-drug campaign in Colombia, but it is widely believed to have been a failure. Do you agree? How can the program be reformed?

A. To some extent, all of us have got to struggle to be objective. I'm basically an engineer by training, so it's always people, dollars, machinery. What we are trying to achieve; what are the measures of effectiveness?

I always hear about the "controversial" Plan Colombia. If it's so controversial, then how come in nine months, I went to get a billion dollars and got $1.2 billion and then got two presidents to meet in Cartagena to sign the agreement and had [Sen.] Joe Biden [D-Del.] and [House Speaker] Denny Hastert [R-Ill.] both there? We have to be careful not to repeat ideological twaddle.

Plan Colombia went through, because [former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs] Tom Pickering and I—both of whom had 30 years of public service, were real smart and knew a lot about the region—went to [President Clinton] and said: "Sir, this thing's going over the edge. It's going to collapse on the next guy's watch. You ought to be held responsible if it goes under." And we said: "These are wonderful people. They're beleaguered. They shouldn't be isolated. This should be an [Organization of American States] problem that involves the U.S., Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela. These people are an operative democracy [but] there's violence and corruption at work here, and a lot it's fueled by drug money, and we're involved in it. Let's stand with them."

If it were 1943, would you say, it's widely believed to be a failure, the way we're dealing with Nazis, and we ought to give up and try something different? We're in a position where we're standing with an ally who's struggling against an incredible threat against their own democratic tradition.

Responding to your words, a plane went down, one American was killed, one Colombian, three were captured, this is a disaster—a disaster—waiting to happen. So what's the disaster? For God's sake, this is a three-hour flight from Miami. It's a democracy that deserves our support. We had 45,000 people in Balkans and had a bunch of people killed and wounded and spent billions of dollars trying to sustain democracy in Bosnia and Kosovo. We went into Afghanistan, and of course we've had incredible good fortune there too. So I don't know what's a disaster about three Americans who've been captured. My God, we've got 900 people down there standing with the Colombian allies struggling against drug cartels. What's the disaster?

Q. How would you respond to the argument that successful drug interdiction just increases crime because it reduces the drug supply, but the demand is inelastic, meaning addicts will do anything to get the money they need to buy drugs?

A. These are either—let me be blunt—these are either extremely good questions, sharp questions designed to fully explore the issue, for which I am grateful, or they are the set of questions of someone who is unalterably opposed to the international component of the struggle against drugs and is picking at the fissures of the issue. That latter question strikes me as illogical. The reason to be concerned about heroin has nothing to do with how much it costs or whether it's legal or illegal....

The price has no relationship because supply exceeds demand greatly, so it's a situational economic product. It's very strange. It's not Chilean wine, German Mercedes cars. There's no value added. It costs almost nothing to make cocaine. Any dummy can grow it. It's a product that destroys human life but produces enormous euphoria. So you don't have to have a big advertising budget, and if you give it away you'll create a market.

That's the reason to try and create prevention and education programs to create attitudes that are resistant to drug exposure. It's why you want to limit the tonnages of these drugs and their availability. We've got extremely good studies that say if they're not available in your school and you make it even slightly harder to get it, less people try it and less people get addicted. Which is why the most devastating impact of illegal drugs are in the areas where they are produced, where they're given away....

The notion that you're trying to spray them where they're grown and kill them, you're trying to take away the chemicals where they're produced, you're trying to catch them in transit, you're trying to arrest people who sell them to your students—that because of that you're making them more expensive, and so if you stop that, you'll be better off, is a nincompoop argument that nobody would make about any other product. And so most people who make that argument are either not very bright or are supportive of making drugs more widely available and don't believe they're as dangerous as some of us would assert.

It's counterintuitive to think that struggling back against evil. And people like me, who work with 5.1 million chronically addicted Americans, believe that drugs' impact on families and individuals and businesses and democratic institutions, are evil. We would say, no of course you have a responsibility to struggle back against that for God's sake.

Q. Part of President Bush's 2003 strategy on drugs is a $600 million voucher program over three years to encourage accountability in the treatment system while making funds available to all providers—including programs run by faith-based organizations. Any thoughts on that proposal?

A. I was glad to hear [President Bush's] intervention in the State of the Union speech. It made all of us very proud who are associated with the issue. I think one of the best things we did in the last administration was prevention education. We had a huge amount of resources and energy going to trying to talk about the dangers of drugs and reduce the exposure to gateway drug-taking behavior. I think the hardest thing we had to do was to educate people on a requirement for science-based drug and alcohol treatment....

Q. So you think it's a good idea because it's putting more money into drug treatment?

A. I sort of like the idea of a voucher program. I think that right now one of the problems is, literally, it's hard work and costs money to get a scientific drug treatment program put together. There ought to be a residential component, there are ought to be a follow-on.

Thank God for AA and NA, the magic of Alcoholics Anonymous and the 12-step process. But you also need cognitive therapy, you must have used a whole array of potentialities. We've got to have methadone, Buprenorphine. I like the idea of having vouchers where the guy doesn't have to say, "I need to be in jail before these guys will give me drug treatment."

I've been to a lot of drug treatment programs across the country, and some terrific ones were run by the Catholics, by ministers in Harlem, by the Baptist Church, so I'm all for the faith-based program. As you know, one of the 12-step processes is acknowledging a higher spiritual presence, and higher power in your life, that you lost control of.

The only concern I would have is I want to make sure that only organizations that are using certified approaches are eligible for vouchers. I want to make sure there's oversight. There's tremendous room for mischief in the drug and alcohol treatment regime. I want to know that they're certified by the state. We want to make sure there are science-based standards to all of this. That would be my one concern.

And then if you take federal dollars, we want to make sure you comply with all appropriate federal legislation. In other words, if I'm a nice little Catholic boy working in the drug treatment field, or a Catholic treatment organization, I want to make sure that if I take federal dollars it isn't restricted to Catholics being in my program. If you're going to take federal dollars, it ought to be equal opportunity. Those are the concerns I shoulder, but I think vouchers have a lot of potential.