Bennett Gives Preview of Drug Strategy, Says Inner Cities Will Be Target Areas

William J. Bennett, director of the Administration’s war on drugs, Tuesday described what he said are the highlights of his national anti-drug strategy, saying it will focus on blighted urban areas and attempt to recapture them from “the bad guys.”

The projected focus would mark a departure from previous federal efforts, which were aimed primarily at seizing narcotics being smuggled into the country and combatting drug cartels.

Although Bennett made it clear that he still regards such efforts as essential, he suggested that they will remain largely irrelevant so long as “anarchy and chaos” reign in the inner cities.

“The top priority for this strategy will be to focus on those places in America where the good guys are not in charge,” Bennett declared in a speech to a convention of local prosecutors here.

Cross-Country Trip

Bennett’s disclosure was made as he started on a cross-country trip designed to rally public sentiment behind the comprehensive effort, which is expected to be a subject of intense debate when it is announced in September.

Although he did not describe in detail the kinds of anti-drug programs that would be given prominence in the plan’s urban focus, he hinted strongly that they would involve significant new spending in the form of federal assistance to beleaguered state and community law enforcement agencies.

Such a program almost certainly would call for the deployment on a national scale of the kinds of emergency assistance that the Bush Administration granted earlier this year to Washington, D.C., in attempting to overcome an unprecedented rash of drug-related crime. The U.S. marshals and other federal agents dispatched to the district as part of the package have since staged impressive raids on the city’s most drug-plagued areas.

“You make life difficult for the bad guys,” Bennett said of the goals of his strategy. “You make life difficult for the people who are making life difficult for the community.”

In an interview, Bennett also indicated that he has advocated a new approach against drug trafficking in Latin America. While he again declined to provide details, a senior Administration official said later that Bennett had urged that additional military resources be devoted to the effort and asked the National Security Council to grant up to $300 million in military aid to anti-drug campaigns in Peru, Bolivia and other cocaine-producing countries.

The planned emphasis on stepped-up policing of American streets and Latin American jungles would attempt to put into practice Bennett’s view that the drug war can be won only when traffickers and users are confronted directly by authorities and made to face severe consequences for their actions.

In amplifying on that theme Tuesday, Bennett made it clear that a principal priority of his strategy would be to ensure “that the person who’s dealing drugs or selling drugs has a more palpable fear of punishment than he has now.”

The familiar yardsticks federal authorities use to measure progress in the anti-drug effort, Bennett suggested, have provided little indication of whether use of illegal drugs is really being deterred.

“It’s a good thing to capture kingpins,” Bennett said. “It’s a good thing to recover assets. It’s a good thing to break criminal organizations.

“But when you do all these things, if people are still living in anarchy and chaos in the inner city, if drug use is still as high as it used to be, if innocent people still feel the threat, what’s the point of doing all these things?. You haven’t gotten to the bottom line.”

Bennett told his audience here that his Office of National Drug Control Policy is “very near to closure” in drafting the anti-drug strategy that has been its principal focus since it was established four months ago.

The plan must still win the approval of the NSC and the White House Domestic Policy Council before it can be unveiled by President Bush, as scheduled, on Sept. 5.

Among the proposals most likely to engender opposition within the Administration is a stepped-up military role in the anti-drug effort in Latin America. Both the Pentagon and the State Department are said to have raised objections, and Bennett said Tuesday that consensus has been far “trickier” to secure on that issue than on domestic aspects of the plan.

With most of his work on the draft completed, Bennett--who has declined invitations to testify before Congress about the strategy--Tuesday began a calculated effort to “get the American people behind us.”

“I’m doing some things unabashedly to get public support,” Bennett confessed as he began a three-day, campaign-style swing from coast to coast.

“I’m even going on the Oprah Winfrey show,” he said.