Prosecuting the U.S. Drug War: Hard Policy Versus Soft Politics

The newest chapter in the unresolved donnybrook of a U.S. drug war began with President Bush last week when he publicly promised that new “drug czar” William J. Bennett will have the tools, powers and funding to unify the battle against dealers, users and smugglers. Whether those powers include such invasive techniques as aerial interception or foreign intervention is not clear. Whether such prickly matters will be part of the Administration presentation of the new plan on Sept. 5 was also not clear.

Less than a month ago, one of the government’s toughest anti-drug warriors quit, protesting that beyond ringing proclamations, the strategy and tactics of this war have never been clear. Departing U.S. Customs Commissioner William von Raab faulted the government for irresolute commitment to battle. His complaints still echo in the parts of Washington that wonder how determined the White House is to prosecute its declared war, both at home and overseas.

Von Raab left with a blast against “political jockeying, back-stabbing and malaise” in the drug-enforcement trenches. He singled out Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh as the captive of a turf-fighting palace guard and called his own boss, Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady, a political coward. The only compliment he could muster went to the legislative branch: “I hate to say it’s Democrats, but I will say Congress certainly has carried the ball on the funding of drug initiatives over the past seven years.”

As a chief deputy of the National Narcotics Border Interdiction System during the Reagan years, Von Raab knew exactly what George Bush did or didn’t do when he was Ronald Reagan’s top drug-fighter. Through NNBIS, Customs and the Coast Guard were to coordinate federal drug-smuggling operations under the eye of the then-vice president.

“Unfortunately, NNBIS was just a political artifice,” said Von Raab right after resigning.

When a reporter asked if the program went to an unmarked grave, Von Raab recalled Dorothy Parker’s response to the news that President Calvin Coolidge had died: “How could they tell?”

At least one customs spokesman has labelled Von Raab’s public parting shots as “sour grapes,” and surely Von Raab was frustrated in his desire to attain a more powerful position. At various stages in his customs career, the commissioner’s inner circle floated his name as a potential assistant secretary of the Treasury for enforcement, as a federal Court of Appeals judge and as Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Virginia.

His last reach for a higher rung was the new drug czar position, but it went to former Education Secretary Bennett. Critics claim that Von Raab’s pouting over not being named czar was what pushed him out at customs.

But the former commissioner, however undiplomatic, was never less than candid in his stewardship of the agency. At worst pugnacious, Von Raab also appears a little naive in having taken Administration war rhetoric at face value.

Allied with such hard-liners as former Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and Sen. Jesse A. Helms (R-N.C.), Von Raab was sure to produce headlines for one initiative or another--a proposal to shoot down aircraft suspected of smuggling drugs, one to establish “drumhead courts” in the field to try narcotics offenders or one to send uninvited incursions across foreign borders in Latin America.

Perhaps his most notorious initiative was his 1988 “zero-tolerance” campaign, aimed at the most casual drug users; autos, boats and airplanes might be seized if so much as a gram of marijuana was discovered on board. Many people thought this sort of search-and-seizure was carrying things too far.

What Von Raab meant to do was increase the risk for anybody who tolerated drugs, socially or otherwise. Niceties of civil liberties and diplomacy must be suspended in times of war, the Von Raab philosophy went; tolerance was a form of treason. Out of such combat mentality came the drumhead courts and the notion of imprisoning drug convicts at abandoned military bases.

His was a scary agenda and it was meant to be. Unfortunately for Von Raab, the people it scared most were the new attorney general and secretary of the Treasury. They were fresh enough from real life outside Washington to recoil at the costs of such policies, politically and otherwise. Does the United States really want to make itself a garrison state to eliminate its drug problems?

Maybe not, but there is an endearing earnestness about Von Raab that reminds some Americans of Gen. George “Blood and Guts” Patton, the hard, guileless commander in World War II.

“I always thought a lot of George Patton,” said Von Raab after being compared with him. “Listen, if he’d gotten those goddamn Russians out of Eastern Europe, we would have solved that problem.”

Perhaps the most valuable service Von Raab rendered was setting himself up as one of the antipodes in the drug debate--a tough adversary wanting to do more than just talk the hard line. Narcotics policies make strange alliances: Jesse Jackson also calls for radical military action in the drug war. Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) is another black leader who admires Von Raab’s interventionist, internationalist approach to stopping drug traffic.

Von Raab did not confine his valedictory remarks to Justice and Treasury; he called State Department officials “conscientious objectors.” The two Administration figures he admits to admiring are HUD Secretary Jack Kemp and Bennett. He still reserves some mercy for Bush: “I think we always have to give the President the break, and the position I’ve taken is that Congress has basically challenged the Administration to come up with a drug policy. That’s Bennett’s job. It is then the President’s job to accept that or reject it. Once that drug policy has been accepted or rejected by the President, then all gloves are off with respect to the Administration. What I have done is take the position that what I see moving toward Bill Bennett is Pablum . . . . Our real problem is lack of toughness abroad--horrendously runaway production--and lack of toughness at home on users.”

Drafts of Bennett proposals circulating in Washington reveal plans to nearly double federal prison space and to expand local law enforcement. The Senate voted in early August to authorize the Coast Guard to intercept and fire on drug-carrying aircraft crossing the U.S. border, but questions of validating an intercept remain; so do thorny questions of dealing with foreign nations.

Ironically, a federal report on drug use, released the day Von Raab resigned, showed a 37% decline between 1985 and 1988, suggesting that education efforts may have been more successful than expected.

Von Raab is not appeased, not with “crack” cocaine and attendant killings imperiling U.S. cities. His questions of commitment to policy, not politics, persist.