Enforcement Ranked High on Drug Czar’s Funding List

While declaring that his first priority is drug education and prevention, new federal drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey on Friday listed expensive interdiction and enforcement efforts among principal contenders for $250 million shifted from the Pentagon budget to antidrug activities.

McCaffrey, who was asked by President Clinton to propose ways to spend the additional money, will make his recommendations by the end of next week. “There are way too many claimants,” he said of the funds.

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The recommendations, which would have to be approved by a number of Senate and House committees, have import beyond the dollars involved because they would signal McCaffrey’s emphasis as he tries to regain “credibility” with Congress for the administration’s program to control drugs.

McCaffrey indicated in an interview that a likely recipient of U.S. support would be a new military and law enforcement effort along the Andean Ridge in South America.

Its goal is to interrupt the movement of coca paste in the air, rivers and sea in the growing and processing countries of Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and related areas.

The effort, Operation Laser Strike, is “forming up” now and would broaden a two-month campaign last year that concentrated on air traffic.

That operation, known as Green Clover, succeeded in dropping the price of coca paste by more than 50%. The paste is an intermediate product in the processing of cocaine from leaf to powder, according to McCaffrey.

“We have thousands of people leaving the Huallaga Valley [a principal coca-growing area in Peru], because the cost of growing coca leaf, temporarily though it may be, doesn’t make it worthwhile,” he said. “Now, we’re going to go back at them again.”

Another use for the money would be for greater manpower along the Southwest U.S. border to help Customs “selectively check, sample and protect against smuggled drugs” in the thousands of vehicles crossing the Mexican border under free trade, McCaffrey noted.

Another would be to rebuild two P3V surveillance aircraft for Customs “to take the heat off” the more costly and complex AWACS aircraft, which could then return to assignments in Bosnia and such missions as watching the North Koreans and the Iraqis. The cost of that retrofitting would be about $53 million, he noted.

While a combination of these programs would quickly consume the $250 million, McCaffrey made clear he is convinced that treatment and education must be improved and funded to succeed in combating illicit narcotics.

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Noting that state and local prisons and jails now have 1 million inmates, McCaffrey said that could be extrapolated to 2 million by the year 2000. “I am against putting 2 million Americans in jail as a solution to the U.S. drug problem,” he said.

The United States has about 3 million chronic drug addicts, and 60% of them are in prison or on probation or parole, he said. “If you don’t do drug treatment programs, you repeat the cycle. That’s almost a no-brainer.”

McCaffrey also announced Friday that he would be part of a high-level mission to develop “improved counter-narcotics cooperation” with Mexican officials.