ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, September 22, 1996 TAG: 9609240100
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: JULIA MALONE COX NEWS SERVICE
The blank-faced teen-ager swivels away from the camera as ominous music plays in the background and the scene shifts to a youngster apparently injecting drugs.
``The stakes of this election? Our children,'' says the narrator, adding that cocaine and heroin use among teen-agers has doubled during the Clinton administration.
The Bob Dole TV ad, one of the toughest Republican attacks of his presidential campaign, took aim at one of President Clinton's most vulnerable spots - his record on combating drugs.
Although the Clinton campaign has favorable economic statistics galore to flaunt and even a new survey indicating a drop in violent crime, there is one set of figures that the White House does not brag about: a dramatic jump in drug use by teen-agers.
The drug problem, which Clinton pushed to the back burner early in his presidency, has boiled over in this election year.
When he arrived at the White House, Clinton almost immediately slashed the Office of National Drug Control Policy from 145 to 25 staff members. He chose as his ``drug czar'' former Atlanta police chief Lee Brown, who remained almost invisible during his tenure.
Clinton, who had once dismissed President Bush's war on drugs as ``phony,'' announced that his strategy would be to focus on drug treatment more than interdiction of drug trafficking.
For the first two years of his administration, he cut back the U.S. military's effort to combat drug smugglers by about $200 million a year compared with the Bush budget. During that time, the federal budget cut 227 agent positions from the Drug Enforcement Administration.
On the drug treatment front, the administration won some new funding for programs, but not enough to satisfy then-drug policy chief Brown or others who advocate a major effort to treat hard-core addicts.
Even some Democratic lawmakers began to criticize the White House. And late last year, Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, proclaimed Clinton to be AWOL (``absent without leadership'') on the drug issue.
By early 1996, the Clinton administration was regrouping. In January the president introduced his new drug policy coordinator, Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and Desert Storm veteran with a reputation for toughness and several years' experience as a drug buster in Latin America.
After taking criticism for failing to deliver aid to neighboring governments to fight drugs, the White House is preparing to announce an aid package of $100 million in military equipment, including helicopters and communications gear, for Mexico and about a dozen other nations.
Clinton's 1997 budget includes a substantial increase in the military budget for interdiction of drugs and dropped mention of the treatment-oriented policy.
Such measures helped cushion Clinton in August when the Department of Health and Human Services issued the latest drug-use survey showing a 105 percent increase in drug use by 12- to 17-year-olds since 1992.
``This is a source of real concern to the president,'' White House press secretary Michael McCurry said of the findings, ``He's talked about it a lot. We've got General McCaffrey out running around'' addressing the issue.
McCaffrey, who is almost continually on the road discussing the problem, points to the total picture in the national survey, which shows that drug use is generally down for adults.
In an interview, he blamed the upsurge in teen drug use on the lack of general lack of attention to the problem, especially by the news media and private groups that mobilized against the drug epidemic that peaked in 1979.
``The nice thing about the election is, it's got the American people debating the drug issue,'' he said. ``And I think what they'll arrive at is they're going to end up supporting the strategy'' of the Clinton White House. McCaffrey's approach centers on drug education and prevention efforts.
However, the upturn in teen drug use has provided an opening for Dole's anti-crime offensive, which he launched last Monday at the University of Villanova with a pledge to ``cut teen-age drug use by 50 percent in my first term.
``When I am president I don't intend to wink at drugs,'' the Republican nominee said in a clear allusion to Clinton's light-hearted comments about his own marijuana use, beginning with the president's famous 1992 remark that he had once tried marijuana but didn't inhale.
Dole vowed to escalate the war on drugs, bringing in the National Guard to watch the U.S. borders. But he drew his sharpest comparison on the issue of presidential leadership.
``Most of all I want to change the message coming from the White House,'' he said. ``I will make the moral issue clear: There is right and there is wrong, and drug use is wrong.''
The Clinton campaign fired back with a TV spot pointing to Dole's past voting record on the drug wars. As a senator, Dole voted against the bill that first created the so-called drug czar. The ad also pointed out that Dole favored cutting back the Safe and Drug-Free Schools, a program in which police officers tell students about the dangers of drugs.
White House spokesman McCurry suggested that the drug problem should be left out of the presidential campaigns.
``The best response according to the experts is not to turn it into a political issue because then kids get the message that this is all politics and it's not really serious,'' McCurry said.
But drug policy expert Kenneth Sharpe, co-author of a new book, ``Drug War Politics,'' counters that the drug issue has been in the center of campaigns ever since President Nixon put crime on the national agenda a quarter-century ago.
``That's the name of the game for politicians ever since: can you show your get-tough bona fides,'' Sharpe said. ``That's what the appointment of General McCaffrey is all about.''
Even so, Sharpe and some other critics suggest that the political heat has not produced solutions to the drug problem from either Republicans or Democrats, because the number of hard-core users has remained static despite billions of dollars spent during the past 15 years.
``The public hasn't been shown the price'' of the federal effort, said Dan Baum, a journalist who covered drug issues and authored a book on the failure of the drug wars.
``Bill Clinton has spent more money on the drug wars in four years than Ronald Reagan did in eight,'' Baum said. Federal budget figures show that the Reagan administration spent nearly $23 billion during two terms and the Clinton White House will have spent about $54 billion by 1997.
``The drugs are just as easy to get as they ever were,'' Baum said. ``Any way you want to measure it, the drug war is a catastrophic failure.''
However, John Walters, a drug policy official in the Bush White House, argued that concentrated efforts to stop the drug flow did disrupt supply in 1990-91.
And Walters said that leadership from the top makes a difference: ``I don't think we should blame the president for everything, but he has set the wrong tone and he's not making federal institutions work."
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