Senate Approves Moderate Version of Anti-Drug Plan

The Senate voted 97 to 2 on Tuesday to approve an anti-drug package that contained none of the most controversial and emotional provisions endorsed several weeks ago by the House. It left undecided the question of how to pay for enacting the legislation.

The House and Senate plans, along with a third proposal from President Reagan, seek to answer a perceived election-year public outcry for government action to solve the problem of illegal drug abuse.

Although statistics show that overall drug use has leveled off, concern over it has grown since the deaths of athletes Len Bias and Don Rogers and the proliferation of dangerous new drugs, such as the solidified form of cocaine known as crack.

Both the House and Senate versions would stiffen the penalties for most drug-related crimes, fatten the budgets of agencies charged with interdicting illegal narcotics and allocate funds to state and local anti-drug efforts.

No Death Penalty

Their most significant differences involve provisions in the House bill that would impose the death penalty on drug “kingpins” whose actions cause death, order the armed forces to pursue and arrest drug smugglers and allow prosecutors to use illegally obtained evidence under certain circumstances. None of these provisions are included in the Senate bill.

The heavily Democratic House had passed the controversial amendments by wide margins, but many liberals and moderates had acknowledged privately that they were uneasy about voting for them. Their support, they conceded, was motivated by fear of being portrayed as “soft on drugs.”

Although the Republican-controlled Senate is generally more conservative than the House, under Senate rules, such amendments could have been subject to time-consuming filibusters that could have killed the whole bill in the final days of this legislative session. Thus, Senate leaders opted for a streamlined bill, which they said was better than no legislation at all.

“I think the House is breathing a sigh of relief that this (Senate) bill is passed,” Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said after the vote. He predicted that House negotiators would be glad to discard most of the controversial provisions in the House version.

One aide to the House Democratic leadership said, however, that agreement may not come so easily: “If you drop everything out, I don’t know if the (House) Republicans will buy off on it,” the aide said. Many Republicans and conservative Democrats have argued that those provisions are needed to guarantee that the rest of the legislation works.

Civil Liberties Concern

Jerry J. Berman, chief legislative counsel to the American Civil Liberties Union, agreed that “the fight isn’t over.”

Meanwhile, Senate and House leaders expect a tough fight over how much to spend on the effort. The House plan, for example, envisions $660 million in grants to the anti-drug efforts of state and local governments and educational institutions--more than four times the amount in the Senate plan. The overall cost of the House plan would exceed $2 billion.

The House made room for its drug offensive in its catch-all fiscal 1987 spending bill by trimming most other federal programs less than 1%. The Senate has yet to come up with a means of paying for its proposals.

Senate leaders at first had planned to divert some funds from other social programs, but Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr. (R-Conn.) insisted that “there’s no loose change around to do the job. . . . We’re not going to do it out of existing programs. We’re not going to take it away from the alcoholic, the mentally ill, the disabled.”

Favors Raising Taxes

Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) said that the anti-drug program should be financed out of higher taxes:

“We’re all dancing around the edge. We all want to be tough on drugs; it’s an election year,” he said. “Why aren’t we tough enough to say we’re going to raise taxes, whether the President likes it or not?”

In the end, the Senate approved on a voice vote a non-binding resolution that the “exceptional nature” of the drug problem merits spending beyond the limits of the fiscal 1987 budget, and that the funds should not come from other government programs.

“Yes, we will break the budget,” Senate Budget Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) said. “It’s the right thing to do, unless we want to go home and say we didn’t want the drug bill funded, (that) we went through some kind of charade.”