Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 22, 1990 TAG: 9004220045
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
That might still be the case today, as the Bush administration and its opponents squabble over how to assess the nation's war on drugs.
In defending its drug-control policies, the administration draws on statistical charts and maps that, it says, offer evidence of real progress.
The federal budget for drug programs has quadrupled in five years' time and now approaches $10 billion a year. Drug seizures by law-enforcement officials are up - way up - over a few years ago.
The percentage of high school students saying they have used illegal drugs continues to fall. Newly disclosed federal investigations have put several large drug rings out of business.
Yet numbers can be manipulated. To critics of the administration's drug policy, the progress has been insignificant, if not downright nonexistent, with figures flawed and sometimes misleading.
The government's arsenal, they say, has failed to control the drug war, especially in the large cities where many neighborhoods have been destroyed.
State and local officials complain that they are overwhelmed, unable to control the flood of narcotics pouring onto their streets through the nation's porous borders. The federal effort, they say, has been too little and much too late.
The administration's own much-trumpeted battle to make the nation's capital a test case for its drug-control policies has been described as largely a failure.
Washington's homicide rate remains at a record level; 438 people were murdered last year. Most of the deaths were drug related, police officials say.
Last January's arrest of the city's mayor, Marion Barry, on cocaine charges has only heightened the fear among Washington residents that the drug problem is out of control.
In court papers released last week, federal prosecutors described Mayor Barry as an experienced crack smoker who had used drugs on "scores of prior occasions."
President Bush, like President Reagan before him, has focused federal drug-control efforts on law enforcement. The Justice Department budget has grown sharply, particularly for prison-construction programs that will permit the incarceration of thousands of drug criminals.
Hundreds of new federal drug agents have been hired. The newest combatant in the war against drugs, the Pentagon, has seen its budget for narcotics interdiction double over the last year.
In what the administration has promoted as perhaps its most important victory against narcotics, American soldiers and prosecutors cooperated to bring General Manuel Noriega, the former Panamanian leader, to the United States for trial on drug charges.
The invasion of Panama, the administration hopes, will put an end to that country's reputation as a haven for drug traffickers.
But even as Bush vows to devote an extra $1 billion next year to anti-drug programs, his opponents on Capitol Hill and elsewhere point to figures suggesting that without more spending on drug treatment, such efforts will fail.
Bush's promised budget increase, they note, is a fraction of the $2.5 billion that must now be spent annually just to provide special care for the damaged children of cocaine-addicted mothers.
And there is another set of numbers that is clearly of concern to Bush and public officials around the country. Opinion polls show that American voters now consider drugs the nation's most pressing problem.
The public is putting politicians on notice that if they fail to make quick headway in the war on drugs, they may not be around when, and if, a victory is declared.
by CNB