Bennett Assails Intellectuals on Legalized Drugs

In an angry blast at those who would legalize narcotics, National Drug Control Policy Director William J. Bennett on Monday accused American intellectuals of advocating a “scandalous” surrender in the national war on drugs.

“Get with the program,” Bennett urged an audience at Harvard University, “or, at the very least, get in the game.” He said that the failure of scholars and pundits to “get serious” about drugs reflected a lack of “civic courage.”

The strongly worded address was clearly intended to counter what Bennett has described as a disturbing trend of resurgent support among influential Americans for the idea that the drug problem might best be addressed through legalization.

Although the plain-spoken drug czar had never made a secret of his disgust for that approach, his decision to elevate the public scoldings to the status of a full-fledged speech appeared to signify increased concern that the growing visibility of the idea might undermine the Administration’s harder-line anti-drug policies.

Bennett, sounding like the professor he once was, assailed the arguments offered for legalization as “very thin gruel indeed.” Rather than being a solution to the drug problem, he said, they represent what “more sober minds recognize as a recipe for a public policy disaster.”

Advocates of legalization include such notable figures as former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman, American Civil Liberties Union President Ira Glasser, Princeton University Prof. Ethan Nadelmann and syndicated columnists William F. Buckley and Anthony Lewis.

Their particular arguments vary, but a common theme holds that to make drugs legal would put an end to profit in drug trafficking--and, with it, the violent crime it spawns. Consumption of drugs, they argue, would be unlikely to change.

In his response, Bennett contended that criminal sanctions provide a vital “incentive to stay away from a life of drugs.” With legalization, he said, “drug use will go up, way up.” And, even in a world in which drugs were legal, addicts would continue to rob and steal, and street traffickers would sell to minors or try to undercut the legalized price.

In his remarks at Harvard, Bennett held both the right and left of the political spectrum at fault for giving short shrift to anti-drug efforts.

Some conservatives, he noted, regard the drug problem as a malady limited to the inner city and believe it calls for nothing more than “quarantine.” At the same time, liberals assert that the problem is not drugs at all but rather poverty or racism. The common result, Bennett said, is a “policy of neglect.”

But his most forceful criticisms were directed at liberals, who he suggested had been hypocritical in complaining endlessly about the effects that the Ronald Reagan Administration policies had exacted on the “defenseless poor” while ignoring the disproportionate burden that the drug problem imposed on the underclass.