What Could Dole As President Do About Drugs? Fair Question

WHAT COULD DOLE AS PRESIDENT DO ABOUT DRUGS? FAIR QUESTION MY LAST exposure to the American presidential contest, on the eve of my isolation for two trans-Siberian weeks, focused on Bob Dole and the drug question. President Clinton, by his standards, has been deafeningly mute on the question because, indeed, he did reduce the anti-drug staff from 146 to 25, and he has not devoted much time to hectoring the country on the dangers of drug use. Even so, one sighs with despondency at the analytical futility of Dole's call to mobilize to fight drugs. Not because drugs are less than what they are, agents of the destruction of many of their users and all of their abusers, and catalysts of family breakdowns and, of course, crime. But because attempted correlations between money spent enforcing the drug laws and the diminution in their use is a profitless enterprise. But any attempt at precision in talking of the drug war really should begin by distinguishing between marijuana and the hard stuff, notably cocaine and heroin. I have previously noted that when in 1965 then-Rep. Edward Koch of New York introduced a bill to set up a congressional commission to study marijuana use and federal penalties, he found only a handful of fellow legislators who would agree to co-sponsor the measure. Four or five years later, everyone was willing to co-sponsor. "They found out,"he told me,"that their own children had tried pot." That was 25 years ago. Early this year, the 10 millionth American was arrested on marijuana charges. That's a lot of people to arrest. One wonders Is there another crime in the history of the United States for which 10 million people have been arrested? How effective is the law? I have a neighbor whose 15-year-old grows the stuff on the roof of her house. What on earth would President Dole do to stop this kind of thing from happening? Reactivate Alcatraz? But they wouldn't fit there. Where would they fit? Eighty-five million Americans have experimented with illegal drugs. Since the object of criminal law is to detect and punish the wrongdoer, should we reason that 85 million of us should have spent time in jail? An awful problem in presidential politics is precisely this temptation to shrink from careful definition. An adviser to Dole, who is himself wonderfully competent to define, would unquestionably urge the candidate not to make distinctions on the grounds that voters think of marijuana as an evil drug and therefore not fit for conciliatory discussion. All of which means that any war on drugs that lists marijuana as among its targets will be a war lost. So, in fact, is the war against the hard drugs being lost, though that is a complex study. But when one asks what a president can do about drugs, you are asking two things. The first is programmatic What kind of laws can the president recommend that would have the effect of diminishing the use of drugs? ( Answer none. ) The second is What kind of pressure is a president in a position to generate? To attempt even to answer that one requires us to ask Why do people take drugs? Answers ( 1 ) Because they seek sensation. ( 2 ) Because they are undisciplined. Kurt Cobain, the much-lionized rock figure who finally committed suicide after losing the fight to heroin, had an instructive effect on his followers. One would think that the death of an idol would cause his flock to scorn and even hate the agent of death. But this doesn't happen any more than the mortality of AIDS serves to reform all practitioners of unsafe sex. You can struggle to find the self-abuser, try him, and sequester him in prison, but in recommending this course of action confidently, you are required to suppress any attention given to derivatives of anti-drug laws, such as murders and theft and fear and closed city parks and mega-rich criminals and peeping-Tom policemen and bugged telephones and more taxes for more prisons. What Dole can legitimately feel about any connection between the rise in drug consumption and Bill Clinton is that Clinton is a thoroughbred derivative of the Woodstock generation. A man gifted enough to earn a Rhodes scholarship and to climb the legislative ladder from nothing to the White House, but also a man entirely undisciplined in personal behavior. It is never possible absolutely to document social correlations, but it is intuitively persuasive to believe that a society encouraged in the hedonism of Hollywood and Playboy and the welfare establishment, headed up by a pretender to American leadership who is given to self-indulgence, isn't devoting a lot of time to the practice of self-restraint. A political difficulty here is that Bob Dole can't say that kind of thing. In public.














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