GOP Slams President’s Drug Policy

A Republican senator speaking for his party chided President Clinton for what he termed a too-little, too-late strategy for ending teen drug use and blasted his proposal to ease prison-sentencing guidelines for small-time crack cocaine dealers.

“It would be a catastrophe to let any drug dealer think the cost of doing their deadly business is going down,” Sen. Spencer Abraham of Michigan said Saturday in the GOP’s weekly radio broadcast.

Abraham noted that over the last seven years the percentage of high school seniors admitting to illegal drug use has risen by half, while drug use among 10th-graders has doubled.

“Faced with this bad news,” Abraham said, “the president has finally submitted a long-range national drug strategy to Congress. It has taken him nearly five years to begin action.

“And as the numbers show, our children are paying the price.”

Senior White House advisor Rahm Emanuel defended the work of Clinton and his top drug-policy advisor, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey.

“This is not an issue that should fall prey to political finger-pointing,” Emanuel said. “The policy that Gen. McCaffrey and President Clinton have been implementing was developed in conjunction with law enforcement officials and neighborhood drug-fighting groups.”

In Clinton’s weekly address, he called teen tobacco use a “national tragedy” and asked Congress to act now on legislation to raise cigarette prices and penalize cigarette companies for hooking kids.

Clinton’s address is part of a stepped-up effort by the White House to push for tobacco legislation, now stalled in Congress.