NEWS ANALYSIS : No Magic Bullet or Stark New Strategy in Plan

In the words of drug czar William J. Bennett, the Bush Administration’s long-awaited plan for a new war on drugs contained no “magic bullet”--no dramatic new strategy for pressing the battle.

Instead, President Bush proposed Tuesday night to reinvigorate the war on drugs by pressing existing efforts harder, more consistently and with significantly more money than ever before--confronting drug users and traffickers at every point in the system and ensuring that they face certain punishment when they are caught.

“This plan is as comprehensive as the problem,” Bush declared in his speech to the nation.

Yet while some specialists praised the Bush plan for its comprehensiveness, others criticized it as politically appealing but ultimately ineffectual--”more smorgasbord, something on everybody’s plate,” as George Washington University law professor Gerald M. Caplan put it.

And in its details if not its overall goals, the Bush plan faces intense and critical scrutiny from a Congress eager to play a visible role in combating what millions of Americans now consider the nation’s most pressing problem.

“The program doesn’t have a philosophy. There’s no underlying theory,” said Caplan, who headed the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, a research arm of the Justice Department, when Richard M. Nixon was President. “It’s simply more resources for every function and purpose, and it’s unlikely to do either much harm or much good.”

What the Administration has done, complained Ronald Goldstock, director of New York’s statewide organized crime task force, is merely to consider “what are all the ways to affect drugs and then put a little bit (of resources) in each. I don’t think that’s realistic.”

In the Administration’s view, a nation determined to tackle the drug problem head-on and willing to provide an unprecedented level of resources for the effort can deal a wounding blow to a national epidemic that has proven resistant to past federal crackdowns.

Punitive Emphasis

And even though the Bush plan calls for more spending on treatment of addicts as well as more educational efforts to dissuade potential new users, the emphasis is decidedly punitive:

First-time offenders could face loss of their driver’s licenses, for example. To house convicted dealers, the Administration wants an 85% increase in the capacity of federal prisons. And to encourage foreign governments to crack down on drug producers and processors, Bush called for more than $250 million in new U.S. aid.

Even for those needing treatment or education, it is “no more Mr. Nice Guy.” New federal guidelines call for a more aggressive and confrontational approach as part of the program that boosts federal treatment funding by some 50%.

This frontal approach--the result of six months of planning at the highest levels of the Administration--is certain to inflame critics of “police-prosecute-punish” solutions, who argue that law enforcement solutions have already failed the test, and that more attention should now be devoted to public education and treatment.

Some specialists, however, praised the Bush approach for what they saw as a more realistic assessment of the problem.

Goals ‘Scaled Down’

“The promising part is that Bennett realizes you can’t win this war in a hurry, and the goals have been scaled down dramatically,” said James Fyfe, a professor at American University.

In financial terms, the Bush blueprint’s $7.9-billion price tag is a full 10 times the amount the nation was spending on anti-drug programs a decade ago, and the $2.2-billion spending increase proposed for next year alone would have funded the federal government’s entire drug budget as it stood only four years ago.

Whether such spending is likely to strike an immediate blow against the nation’s drug epidemic--and to quickly fulfill Bush’s inaugural pledge that “this scourge will end”--remained a subject on which many analysts were skeptical.

Reason for Optimism

But most said they saw reason for optimism that the strategy--particularly when bolstered by trends that are already showing a rapid decline in drug-use, at least among middle-class users--could succeed in meeting its first objective, which calls for a 10% decline in drug consumption in the next two years.

“The trend is with them,” said one independent congressional analyst. “That’s certainly within their reach.”

Experts who expressed admiration for the Bush strategy gave the Administration high marks for having developed what they called a coherent approach that chose its targets well.

In particular, they voiced support for its determination to carry the war against drugs to long-neglected fronts--so-called casual users in the United States and drug traffickers in Latin America, both of whom have remained largely off limits to law enforcement efforts.

“A dollar directed toward law enforcement is going to have more effect on the drug problem than spending it on anything else,” said Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Praise Decision

And they praised the Administration decision to shift away from the Ronald Reagan Administration’s heavy emphasis on border interdiction by providing only scant new funding for such programs. A flurry of studies have concluded that such efforts--coordinated by Bush when he was vice president--were wasteful and ineffective.

“This is a virtual confession that it failed,” Kleiman said.

Beyond these specifics, the dispute among experts over whether the Bennett plan represents anything more than business as usual foreshadows what now appears likely to be an extraordinarily contentious debate in Congress, which takes up the program later this week.

While legislators are unlikely to dismiss the program out of hand, they may well attempt to put their own stamp on the program and many have made clear that it contains provisions they would like to see revamped.

Some have raised objections, for example, to the planned crackdown on casual users, arguing that such effort would be wasted when the bulk of the drug problem is posed by hardened addicts.

Voice Skepticism

Others have voiced skepticism about the new emphasis on new South American aid--13% of the total package. Citing expert analysis, they argue that such a costly new plan is likely to have little effect on cocaine supplies in the United States.

And perhaps most significantly, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. has made known his concern that the plan--with 70% of new spending devoted to supply-side measures, and a full 55% devoted to the Justice Department--is skewed far too heavily toward law enforcement.

In addition to building prisons at home and providing military aid abroad, Biden argues, a well-conceived drug control strategy should also include a roughly equal percentage aimed at reducing demand for drugs through education and treatment programs.

Such a view is bolstered by the analysis of experts like Goldstock, the New York organized crime task force director.

“We should decide that the real issue is demand and then develop a strategy for dealing with demand . . ., “ Goldstock said. “As a practical matter, cutting supply is not going to be effective.”

Bennett Responds

In response, Bennett and other Administration officials contend that their approach has been misunderstood: Tough-minded law enforcement programs may be the most effective way to reduce the demand for drugs.

For example, they say, an anti-drug crackdown in a blighted urban area not only reduces the supply of drugs in the area but it also curbs demand by driving away potential buyers fearful of being arrested.

And because demand for drugs is often fed by easy access to them, they argue, a successful anti-cocaine campaign in Peruvian jungles can reduce an American demand that has been fed by the easy availability of the drug.