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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Another drug czar leaves a failed tenure in office, declaring victory with a mess of skewed statistics.
Oct 20, 2000 | Gen. Barry McCaffrey: He came. He failed. He quit.
But not without taking an unearned victory lap. What is it about the job of drug czar that causes its occupants to heed Sen. George Aiken's advice regarding the Vietnam War -- "Declare victory and withdraw"?
That's what McCaffrey did this week when he announced that he would resign his post on Jan. 6. "I'm enormously proud of what we've done," crowed the general. "We had exploding rates of adolescent drug use, and we've reduced it." This ludicrous assessment echoed Bill Bennett's upbeat tenor as he ended his stint as drug czar in 1990, when he predicted that drug use would be cut in half "in five years."
The truth is, in the decade since Bennett whistled past the drug war graveyard, things have gone from bad to abysmal. Despite McCaffrey's repeated claims that we are winning the fight, the use of illegal drugs by junior high kids has increased by 300 percent, it's easier than ever for high school students to get drugs, drug prices are at an all-time low and drug purity is climbing.
This is an impressive litany of failures. But still more damning is McCaffrey's unequivocal success in convincing both President Clinton and Congress to approve $1.3 billion in mostly military aid to Colombia, dragging the United States into a three-way civil war.
McCaffrey's "triumph" is already looking like a disaster. According to the General Accounting Office, in a report to Congress last week, "the Colombian government has not demonstrated it has the detailed plans, management structure and funding necessary" to implement the U.S. aid.
McCaffrey's other major claim to shame during his tenure has been the massive escalation of our government's billion-dollar anti-drug media campaign. Despite the saturation of our airwaves with ads designed to promote the horrors of illegal drug use, research indicates that a rising number of young people see less harm in using drugs.
Yet President Clinton responded to McCaffrey's resignation by singling out as a sign of the "significant progress" made under the drug czar the fact that "we have dramatically increased our counter-drug spending and launched a $1 billion public-private media campaign to educate young people about the dangers of drug use." As if the mere act of throwing good money after bad represents sound drug policy.
As Kevin Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy, put it: "Gen. McCaffrey clearly preferred funding TV commercials to investing in America's youth. We are spending nearly twice as much on the ad campaign, the glittering jewel in his drug-war crown, than the federal government spends on after-school programs for kids -- even though research shows alternative activity programs to be the most effective way to prevent adolescent drug abuse." This is more like a war on common sense -- which we're definitely winning.
