Clinton Had Help Losing Drug War
You know it’s the political season when the war on drugs - and who lost it - is back as national bogeyman.
Seems only yesterday Nancy Reagan was purring, “Just say no,” George Bush was on TV brandishing a bag of crack, and Congress was building more jail cells for druggies.
Well, here we go again. The anti-drug war will crackle through the 1996 campaign. And Bill Clinton’s the first casualty.
Deservedly so.
It’s amazing that Clinton, his antennae tuned to public vibrations, left himself vulnerable to the rap that he’s been “soft on drugs.”
But Bob Dole is happily throwing haymakers. And Clinton’s given him a fat target.
Dole got a free shot with the report showing drug use among 12- to 17-year-olds doubling since Clinton took office. The statistics shouldn’t stir hysteria. Ninety percent of kids are drug-free. But network shows, news mags and Republicans paint America’s teens wallowing in drug hell.
“They’ll bang us with this,” moaned a Clinton aide. He didn’t have to wait.
Before stats on teenage use emerged, Dole drew cheers at San Diego: “We’re not the party that, as drug use soars among the young, hears no evil, sees no evil and cannot say, ‘Just say no.”’ Now Dole and Republican bombardiers are savaging Clinton for letting America’s youth go to pot. They have a point.
“The president is AWOL, absent without leadership,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, recited on NBC.
“Clinton long ago waved the white flag in the war on drugs,” echoed House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas.
“He’s sent the message that illegal drugs are no big deal,” said GOP chairman Haley Barbour.
You’ll hear the same blistering bombast - Clinton’s a patsy on drugs - until November. This time Republicans aren’t making empty noise.
It’s beyond argument that Clinton, despite heartfelt preaching about racism, crime and education, failed to use the bully pulpit in the war against drugs.
By one count, of 2,370 presidential utterances his first two years, Clinton mentioned drugs only 24 times. He soft-pedaled the subject in his 1992 campaign.
Far more damning, Clinton made ineffectual Lee Brown his drug czar. Then, intent on cutting White House staff, he gutted 120 jobs in the anti-drug office. It hasn’t helped that ex-FBI agent Gary Aldrich’s semi-fictitious book trashed the White House as a drug-infested den. The fable was given credence by 21 staffers targeted by the Secret Service for drug backgrounds.
Even Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., in a quote Republicans will regurgitate, rapped Clinton: “I’ve never, never seen a president who cares less about this issue.”
Clinton was jolted awake five months ago. He made tough, straight-shooting ex-Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who earned three Purple Hearts in Vietnam and led the tank charge across Iraq, to command the drug war.
“We as a nation took our eye off the ball,” admitted McCaffrey. “We thought we had drugs backed into a corner.”
McCaffrey is a Clinton 10-strike even if Republicans sneer that the appointment was a stunt to cover a political embarrassment. Now the general urges politicians to squelch election-year yammering (no chance). He begs baby boomers to level with young’uns about drug dangers.
He’s right. Somehow - although pot use among the young is up, cocaine and heroin minuscule, and far more teenagers are “binge or heavy” drinkers - there’s a seeping image that drugs are cool.
If Bill Clinton “lost” the drug war among the young, he wasn’t alone. I’d pin more blame on Hollywood and music demigods.
From movieland, you had John Travolta as a dope fiend in “Pulp Fiction” and the summer’s saga of junkieland, “Trainspotting.” From fashion mags comes “junkie chic.”
And rock music blares a blatant sickness. After Kurt Cobain’s heroin-related death, there was a street cry for “the stuff Kurt used.” I disqualify as a rock maven, but I’m told top bands linked to drug use, arrest or overdose include Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blind Melon, Everclear, a dozen others that sell 60 million albums.
Maybe Dole isn’t an MTV fan. But if kids worship rock stars, won’t some emulate their screwed-up lives? Then there are Congressfolk, those sages who grandstand with meaner drug laws, fund more jails (the biggest prison population this side of Russia and South Africa), yet slash money for drug education and treatment.
So Clinton had help if anybody “lost” the drug war. And give him credit for a standup act against that more ubiquitous teen poison, tobacco.
Depends on what you call a drug, right, senator?
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