Bush to Call for $2-Billion Boost in Anti-Drug Funds

While Administration officials are still thrashing out the final elements of their new anti-drug strategy, President Bush has signed off on a hefty budget increase of more than $2 billion for the next fiscal year and a goal of slashing consumption of illegal drugs by 50% over the next decade, officials said Thursday.

Bush plans to unveil the new program Tuesday in a speech that a White House aide said essentially will be “a call for the nation to go on a warlike footing” against major drug traffickers and smaller dealers and to punish even casual users.

In what is being billed as “a heart-to-heart talk” with the American people, the President is expected to appeal directly to drug users and people who look the other way or ignore a problem that polls show has become the nation’s No. 1 concern.

The President’s anti-drug strategy closely follows the draft of a program prepared by William J. Bennett, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, although aides are still working on Bush’s final message.

“It will be the most important domestic policy speech by the President this year and probably will be the only one he will deliver on television in prime time,” a White House aide said. The speech is scheduled for 6 p.m. PDT.

Bush’s speech has been scheduled for some time. But it coincides with a crisis in Colombia, where the government is locked in a deadly struggle with drug cartels that have assassinated judges and other officials and “declared war” on the government.

Bush last week announced $65 million in anti-drug aid to that country. And aides said his program overall will provide about $300 million in increased aid to Colombia and two other major drug-producing countries, Peru and Bolivia.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department said Thursday that as many as 100 U.S. military personnel will be sent to Colombia over the next four months to help train police and military units in that country’s battle against the drug cartels.

Administration officials also confirmed that, after a seven-month hiatus, Drug Enforcement Administration agents working with police forces in Peru will resume paramilitary strikes in the next few days against drug traffickers in the country’s coca-growing Upper Huallaga Valley. U.S. officials said the valley is “effectively controlled” by leftist guerrillas.

White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu, discussing the President’s upcoming speech, confirmed that Bush plans to outline an anti-drug budget of about $7.8 billion for the next fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. That would be an increase of about one-third over the current budget.

Even though that would represent the largest boost ever for the anti-drug program, Sununu, talking with reporters in Kennebunkport, Me., where Bush is vacationing, said: “If folks are going to focus on the price tag, they’re missing the boat.”

Sununu and other Administration officials emphasized the broadening of the war on drugs to include all aspects of what Bush has called “a national menace.”

With the Administration under tight budget restraints and Bush pledging not to raise taxes, officials have not yet said how they expect to find the $2 billion in new anti-drug money. But Sununu, asked if the funds would come from reductions from the departments of Housing and Urban Development or Health and Human Services, said: “No, that’s not fair.”

White House Budget Director Richard G. Darman, who has been preparing a proposal to shift money from other departments into the drug plan, has declined to name any specifics in hopes of avoiding heavy lobbying of Bush by department heads and interest groups who would oppose the cuts.

Aides said that Bush, in preparing his drug strategy, has been heavily influenced not only by the Colombia drug crisis, but also by stark statistics of cocaine use in this country. Although surveys show that the number of casual users has decreased recently, the number of addicts or habitual cocaine users has increased sharply, by 50% over the last three years.

“Surveys show 8 million people in this country have used cocaine in the last year and a lot of them--about 3 million or so--used it almost daily,” said a White House aide familiar with Bush’s drug strategy.

In his decision to call for enforcement of drug laws against casual users, Bush may have been influenced by Mitchell Daniels, a Bush adviser and former political aide to President Ronald Reagan, who recently declared that “any public official who shrinks from user sanctions should be disqualified from further participation in the drug debate.”

Daniels, who discussed Bush’s drug policy with him at a private White House luncheon recently, disclosed last week that he himself had been caught smoking marijuana in college. The arrest and subsequent $350 fine had had a sobering effect on him, he said.

In a column published in the Washington Post, Daniels, now head of the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote: “The effect was immediate, and it has been enduring. My young Midwestern tail was jerked back into line, where it has remained through 20 years of law-abiding, rather conventional life, which has included marriage and fatherhood.”

Staff writer David Lauter contributed to this story.