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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
"He had a mantra -- 'Frequently wrong, but never in doubt'" Bergman recalls. "He said that all the time."
Although McCaffrey was cordial toward outside critics, he wasn't willing to openly debate them in a forum that might have encouraged broader thinking about drug issues. "The guy does not debate. He's pulled out of TV programs when he heard I would be there," says Ethan Nadelmann of the Lindesmith Center, a Soros-funded policy institute that favors drug decriminalization. "He'll never get himself into a situation where he's debating anyone who knows anything about the subject."
McCaffrey showed a general reluctance to share podiums with other opinions. Cabinet members typically invite members of Congress to events they are holding in the member's home district. Not so McCaffrey, according to a former legislative aide. If the drug czar was planning a speech in Massachusetts, for example, "I'd say, Senator Kennedy is going to want to speak at this event, and he'd say, 'I don't care, it's my event.' So then we'd notify the congressman [or senator] about the event, but we wouldn't invite them. Occasionally we'd have the heartburn of someone saying, 'I'd like to be part of the event,' and we'd say, 'Sorry, it's all set up already -- but the general can meet you for coffee at the airport.'"
For this and more mundane reasons, McCaffrey tinkered endlessly with his schedule. "It's a joke," another former staffer said. "His trip itineraries were redone a dozen times a day. Reprinted each time. Six times a day he'd change his 10-month personal calendar. Each time it was photocopied and handed out. The minor point here is the amount of trees butchered. The bigger point is the inordinate time, talent, energy and resources that went to making him comfortable." Sometimes staffers would be called in Saturdays to do logistics for one of the innumerable military events McCaffrey attended, annual reunions of retired 82nd Airborne officers and the like. Although McCaffrey's staff passed out drug office literature at these events, they really had nothing to do with drug policy, and much to do with promoting McCaffrey's image.
"It's all for the mission but not for McCaffrey of course," one former military man said with a shrug. "It happens that McCaffrey is the messiah, carrying the banner forward. And he believes that. He could take a lie detector test on it. And he may be right -- at least some of the time."
Over the past years the drug office, at taxpayer expense, has distributed thousands of copies of a letter exchange between McCaffrey and Daniel Garcia, who served as a platoon leader under McCaffrey in Vietnam and went on to become a Warner Bros. executive. The letters, which originally ran in Army magazine, contain raw and terrifying accounts of battles the two men fought together. But they have nothing to do with drugs. Rob Housman, one of McCaffrey's senior aides, says such handouts help create "a branding effect -- creating name recognition for the anti-drug effort." The letters "establish McCaffrey as a role model. Kids these days are looking for heroes, and when they see what this man has done in his life, their eyes light up. He's not a manufactured hero, he's someone who really stands for something. And that has impact on the substance of the message he's trying to get across."
But the letters seem equally important in allowing McCaffrey to extol himself. Garcia's letter is a paean to McCaffrey's bravery and determination, his skill and devotion to human life amid a sea of slaughter. When he refused McCaffrey's offer of promotion to lieutenant, "You said you understood," Garcia writes. "I remember seeing your pain, your isolation, the humanity in your eyes and in the expression on your face ... From you I learned that leadership, particularly in times of great crisis, is a demanding and isolating experience."
It may be this sense of duty and isolation, at once paternal and charismatic, that has allowed McCaffrey to connect solidly with one his most weighty political constituencies -- former drug addicts and the people who minister to them. In writing this story I spoke with six drug treatment activists. While some grumbled about inadequate funding, and McCaffrey's opposition to federal needle exchange programs, they were nearly unanimous in their appreciation of McCaffrey himself.
"I think he's a great guy," says Peter Kerr, a former New York Times reporter who works for Phoenix House, the country's largest residential drug treatment operator. "I've taken him to our facilities when there are no reporters around and he watches and listens and asks questions. He talks straight here."
McCaffrey has spoken cogently and movingly on the need to treat addiction as an illness rather than a moral failing. And he seems to understand that "treatment," as former Nixon administration drug aide Jerome Jaffe said, "is the lubrication that keeps the wheels of justice from grinding so excessively on the citizenry."
Under McCaffrey, treatment money -- including research -- grew by $733 million from 1996 through fiscal year 2001, an average of $197 million per year. It was significant growth, though slower than under the Bush administration -- when it increased $305 million per year. In the meantime, the number of drug addicts has stayed about the same, as has the gap between those who want and can get treatment. Some of McCaffrey's decisions sit uneasily with his stress on the public health aspects of drug abuse. In 1997, as President Clinton, under the urging of Donna Shalala, was about to approve federal support for needle exchanges, McCaffrey squashed the idea. Although dirty needles are responsible for half the new AIDS cases in America each year, McCaffrey was not convinced needle exchanges were an effective way to stop AIDS, Housman says, though he "supports funding for needle exchanges if local communities want to fund them."
The biggest increase in treatment under McCaffrey has been carried out through the justice system. Federal prisons currently provide more than 10,000 inmates with residential drug treatment -- compared to 1,135 treated behind bars in 1992. Attorney General Janet Reno, with McCaffrey's support, has funded more than 500 drug courts, which have successfully lowered recidivism by giving arrested addicts the choice of treatment or jail. Still, only a fraction of the estimated 1.2 million people behind bars with drug problems are offered treatment. And while treatment advocates believe the drug courts are a good way of breaking the cycle of arrest, prison time and drug abuse, some consider it odd that for a poor addict seeking treatment today, committing a crime may be the quickest way to get into a clinic.
"There aren't nearly enough beds on the outside, especially for adolescents or women with children. Once you get into the system, people care about doing something because you're a 'threat to society' who will 'cost society money,'" says Linda Wolf Jones of Therapeutic Communities of America. "They don't stop to think that if you can stop someone before they enter prison, it will cost society even less."
One can hardly blame McCaffrey for all of this. From the start, aides say, he could see that shifting the drug war's focus to treatment was a non-starter in the Gingrich-Hatch-Delay Congress. Instead, he decided to focus hardest on prevention -- the other prong of the "demand" side of drugs. That's what led to the youth media campaign, with its offers of lucrative ad space and time to media companies that run politically correct drug abuse images. Unlike the other parts of the drug war, the media campaign is run directly out of McCaffrey's office.
Many of McCaffrey's anti-drug messages are awfully similar to the ones broadcast under GOP administrations. Instead of, "This is your brain, this is your brain on drugs," with eggs sizzling in a skillet, there's a self-referential replacement that depicts a young woman taking a skillet -- representing heroin -- to a raw egg, representing the brain, and a room full of dishes -- representing your family, job, future, etc. Other ads reinforce the idea that parents worried about drug use need to spend time with their kids -- a wholesome and truthful enough concept, but not one that a drug czar can back up with funding.
Last year, in a front-page USA Today headline and elsewhere, McCaffrey trumpeted a 13 percent reduction in teenage drug use in 1998. Statistics to be released Thursday are expected to show a continued decline in drug use. But it takes a real optimist -- or an opportunist -- to attribute all of this to McCaffrey's media campaign.
Although youth drug use did fall from 1997 to 1998, according to federal surveys, it was still higher than it had been in 1996. According to data in the most recent strategy report put out by McCaffrey's office, in 1996 7.1 percent of teenagers had smoked dope in the past 30 days. In 1998, the figure jumped to 8.3 percent. In cocaine use the rise was even more dramatic, with the percentage rising from .6 in 1996 to .8 in 1998. Meanwhile, attitude surveys showed that while more eighth graders than four years ago regarded drug-taking as risky, fewer 12th graders believed that.
Does this mean that the media campaign's targeting of middle-schoolers has been effective, as McCaffrey argues -- or that 12th graders are more sophisticated consumers of media? Or that drug abuse, which has always had cyclical trends, has simply leveled off? In some drug categories, the leveling off of use began even before McCaffrey took office. In others, such as methedrine and ecstasy, use is still increasing.
Once, McCaffrey hoped that the drug office would be a steppingstone for him to become someone's vice presidential candidate. More recently, he looked into running for Senate from Virginia, but was turned off by the fundraising, according to one former intimate. This same person believes McCaffrey would stay in the drug office if Al Gore offered him the job. The two are said to get along OK, although Gore, notably, did not mention progress against drug abuse in his acceptance speech last week.
"Life without sergeants," McCaffrey told Retired Officer magazine, "is brutish and mean. That's my strongest impression of being a civilian."
Jerome Jaffe, whose federal treatment program was chronicled in Michael Massing's recent book "The Fix," was running a small methadone program in Illinois when President Nixon made him the country's first drug czar in 1971. Jaffe, recently retired, has a good impression of McCaffrey. But he recalls with a laugh that when he was the czar, "I use to make my own schedules. But then again, I was an assistant professor from Chicago, not a four-star general. My expectations were somewhat lower. I carried my own bag."
Perhaps the next drug czar won't have as much baggage.
