Deputy Drug Czar Gets Earful of Frustrations : Narcotics: Administration’s No. 3 man in the battle tours the Southland for some give-and-take. He is able to promise little.

“I have a very thick skin,” Reggie B. Walton tells 60 Los Angeles-area mayors and city council members seeking federal help in solving their communities’ drug problems. “I can, I think, ward off most attacks that are made.”

And so they come at the former hard-nosed judge who for the last eight months has served as a lightning rod of sorts for U.S. drug czar William J. Bennett. Several mayors plead for more money for treatment programs. Another wants relief from the red tape that is delaying the return to local police of cash seized from cocaine dealers. And a councilman from Long Beach tears into the Bush Administration’s policy on high-powered assault rifles.

“Our police officers don’t know what they are going to come up against with the drug dealers on the street,” says Councilman Evan Anderson Braude.

Walton does not try to defend the logic of the Administration policy, which bans the import of Uzis and AK-47s but allows American companies to continue making similar weapons.

“As I’m sure you are aware,” he says, “there is a considerable constituency out there that is opposed to putting any restrictions on the possession of those weapons. . . . We have to continue to look at that problem.”

“That is an unacceptable policy,” Braude retorts. “I know you continue to assess it, but I want you to bring home a strong message: We should stop it!”

It’s another day on the road for Walton, who stepped down from the Washington, D.C., bench after he was named last May to the third-ranking job in the Office of National Drug Control Policy. He heads the office’s Bureau of State and Local Affairs, a position that has sent him traveling 150,000 miles through 28 states, following a schedule rivaling that of a presidential candidate on the stump.

This week, the 40-year-old “deputy drug czar” has been on a swing through Southern California, with stops in Los Angeles, Orange County, Palm Springs and San Diego. The primary issue is whether the region will soon be designated a “high-intensity drug-trafficking area” and thus receive more federal aid to fight the scourge.

But Walton can promise little--”We are still in the process of assessing what a designation will mean,” he cautions officials hoping for a windfall--so mostly he listens, offering himself as a sounding board for ideas, from the conventional to the far-out, on how to attack the drug problems that have baffled the nation.

He hears the mayor of one town suggest that all cash be eliminated to foil drug pushers, another official call for “tubal litigation” for mothers of crack-addicted babies and a third ask, “Has anyone considered reinstating the draft?”

On Monday, his first day in the area, each of Los Angeles County’s 86 cities was invited to send its mayor or another representative to a 90-minute meeting. Before the discussion began, Walton announced that they would have to wait until month’s end, when President Bush reveals his latest drug-fighting initiatives, to find out if the county will be classified as a high-intensity drug-trafficking area.

Although a large part of Southern California, if not all of it, is considered certain to be included on the list of perhaps half a dozen such drug hot spots, Walton makes it clear that no one should expect a quick fix.

He notes that although the targeted areas will get additional federal prosecutors and DEA agents, “it takes time to get those people on line. The reality is that before we can put those people on the street, we’re probably talking about 18 months, maybe a little longer.”

He concludes, “I think it would be a mistake to think that we can rely only on the federal government to solve the drug problems existing in the country.”

The audience does not disagree, but prods him nonetheless. Braude, the Long Beach councilman, says cities such as his need more money to treat thousands of homeless people with alcohol and drug problems. Carson Mayor Mike Mitoma says it might help if the government required drug testing of employees of communities receiving federal aid. “We have a very difficult time when we propose this to our employees,” he explains.

Walton responds that the federal government is not about to impose such rules on states or cities. That reminds him of another deterrent that can be imposed only at the state level--revocation of the driver’s license of motorists caught under the influence of drugs: “I understand that California doesn’t have in place that kind of legislation,” he says, doing some prodding himself.

When someone proposes that “tubal litigation” be done on women convicted of drugs, he lets another member of the audience explain that the proper term is “ligature,” then comments, “Regarding sterilization, the Administration has not thought of that as an acceptable alternative.”

Moments later, Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich rises and explains that it’s time to leave for a tour of the Central Jail, designed in large part to illustrate jail overcrowding caused by a proliferation of drug arrests.

In his previous job, Walton sent many defendants to such places. A former federal prosecutor, he gained a reputation as a tough-minded judge after he was appointed to the District of Columbia Superior Court in 1981. In one prominent case last January, he lamented that local laws would allow eventual parole--even with the maximum 20-year-to-life sentence--of a man convicted of sodomizing and strangling a nurse, then rolling her body in a rug and setting it on fire.

“I think people who sit in high places should come here to the court and see the violent, vicious, cruel, inhuman things that people do to other people,” he said from the bench.

On Tuesday, he wakes at 5:30 a.m. to make a breakfast meeting with Orange County officials. They are anxious to lobby for inclusion in any Los Angeles-area drug zone designation. Speaking generally of such zones, Walton promises: “The boundaries will be regional, not municipal.”

Wearing a “Drug Use Is Life Abuse” pin on his lapel, he is ushered by Sheriff Brad Gates into the “War Room” at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. There’s a large map of the county on which more than 500 small crosses mark the locations of drug-related deaths.

Walton is transfixed by the tale of an 82-year-old man who died of a cocaine overdose, and by the other crosses for people in their 50s and 60s. He’s seen countless law enforcement headquarters in his travels, but never before evidence of such a drug problem at those ages. “An eye-opener,” he calls it.

Walton is falling behind schedule. During the hurried drive to a luncheon at UC Irvine, he recalls the variety of programs he’s viewed in recent months: one in Detroit, run by a minister, where former drug addicts are taught carpentry by refurbishing former crack houses; another in Boston using intensive counseling to get pregnant women over their drug addiction before they give birth; and a clinic in Florida that uses acupuncture in drug treatment.

“Some of these ideas are worth considering,” he says, “and some of them are not.”

Walton is 45 minutes late to the lunch with 60 university professors and researchers, so there’s no time for questions and answers. Instead, he simply gives a short talk on an issue frequently raised these days--drug legalization.

He has a stockpile of anecdotes from his hometown to pull out whenever the subject comes up, and at this stop he tells of a Washington woman who went wild on crack cocaine and killed two children. “How can we legalize stuff like this?” he asks.

Walton clearly is not an idealist when it comes to why people use drugs. “They use drugs because they get high and like to get high,” he says.

From Irvine, he flies to Palm Springs for a meeting of the Organized Crime Law Enforcement Task Force. By 7 p.m., he is back in Los Angeles, touring gang turf in a sheriff’s patrol car.

Wednesday morning, there’s a tour of yet another “exposed babies ward,” at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance. Fog delays a hop by helicopter to the Santa Clarita Valley.

But he finally sees a sheriff’s deputy there try to show 35 fifth- and sixth-graders the impairing powers of marijuana. The deputy has the kids switch hands and try to write.

Walton heads downtown for a meeting of the county Task Force on Drug Abuse. There, a DEA official says “I need double the manpower.” An FBI representative gives a similar report and a public defender complains of a six-month wait in getting drug offenders into treatment programs. “If you wait six months, you’re going to lose them,” he says.

Forty minutes pass before Walton says a word. “I know there’s a lot of frustrations out there,” he finally says, “but it’s frustrating to me to hear your frustrations . . . .”

He promises only, “We’ll fight to get you as much as we can.”

When they’re done, Superior Court Judge David A. Horowitz, the panel’s chairman, apologizes to Walton for “the marathon here.” It is, in the end, a bleak scene he sees: the convulsing babies, the jails, the crosses on a map.

“It’s tough,” Walton agrees. “You never get to see the good parts of the city.”

“Well,” says Horowitz, “go see Magic.”

Walton pauses only a moment. “I am,” he says.

Indeed, he’ll be heading to San Diego this morning for more talk about drugs. But right now there’s a detour of sorts--to the Forum in Inglewood. Magic Johnson. The Laker Girls. The whole show.

The deputy drug czar smiles, a big, broad, honest smile.