Dukakis Steps Up Attack on Reagan Drug Fight

Democratic presidential nominee Michael S. Dukakis on Thursday stepped up his attack on the Reagan Administration’s dealings with Panamanian strongman Manuel A. Noriega and called the Administration’s record on fighting drugs “ridiculous” and “absurd.”

“Last year, alone, we spent almost twice as much trying to overthrow the government of Nicaragua as we did in the war against drugs in all of Latin America,” he told an early morning rally at the Cuyahoga County Courthouse. “That’s absurd.”

“And for years, while Gen. Noriega was doing business with drugs in Panama, we were doing business with Gen. Noriega. That, my friends, is criminal.”

Wants ‘Zero Tolerance’

“How can we ask our neighbors in Latin America to crack down on drugs when we have an Administration that’s in bed with one of the biggest thugs on the continent,” he asked. “Zero tolerance begins in the Oval Office.”

Dukakis for months has been using the drug issue as a way of denigrating the foreign policy credentials of his Republican opponent, Vice President George Bush. As Bush’s position in the polls has improved, those attacks have gotten stronger.

Bush has pledged to put his vice president in charge of the war on drugs, Dukakis noted. “Well, President Reagan tried that, and it didn’t work.”

Fitzwater Replies

In Los Angeles, White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater replied to Dukakis’ charges at his morning news briefing.

“Dukakis talks, we deliver,” Fitzwater said, citing increases in federal seizures of drugs and assets of drug dealers, narcotics arrests and convictions in the last nine months.

“More cocaine was seized in the first eight months of this fiscal year than during all of fiscal 1987,” he said.

The number of federal drug investigators doubled from 3,151 in 1981 to 6,230 in 1988, Fitzwater said.

Dukakis, in comments to local reporters in Cleveland, also said he was beginning to see “a pattern” of negative campaigning from Republicans.

Refers to Photo

Earlier this week, a Republican congressman questioned whether Dukakis had acted improperly in using student deferments to avoid combat in Korea, a charge Dukakis denied. And Wednesday, a Republican senator, Steve Symms of Idaho, told reporters that he had heard second- or third-hand of a picture showing Dukakis’ wife, Kitty, participating in a flag burning during an anti-war demonstration in the 1960s.

The rumor has circulated for several years and no such picture ever has been produced. Kitty Dukakis Wednesday denied any such incident ever took place.

(Attempts by The Times to reach Sen. Symms Thursday were unsuccessful. An aide in his Boise office said: “The senator has left town and is not reachable.” The aide said another, higher ranking assistant to Symms would call back, but he did not.)

“I think there is a pattern here,” Dukakis said, expressing some discomfort at being forced repeatedly to “deny non-existent facts.”

Tours Steel Mill

Dukakis on Thursday also traveled to Pittsburgh, where he toured a high-tech steel mill, seeking to draw attention to his arguments that new leadership could help revitalize basic American industries. The Democratic candidate brushed aside Bush’s latest attack on his position on mandatory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.

In 1977, Dukakis vetoed a bill that would have penalized Massachusetts teachers if they failed to recite the pledge every morning. Dukakis relied on a state Supreme Court advisory opinion saying the bill was unconstitutional.

“I believe deeply in the Constitution,” he said when asked about the subject in a Pittsburgh press conference.

Staff writer William Eaton contributed to this story.