DEA Chief Looks at Calif. Policy as Blueprint for U.S.

The newly installed head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said Monday that California’s landmark approach to rehabilitating drug offenders can serve as a model for the rest of the country--if shortcomings in the program are fixed.

“We need to watch the California experiment. I think it’s a strong statement by the population there that [residents want to] take a look at treatment for nonviolent drug users rather than incarceration,” DEA administrator Asa Hutchinson told reporters on his first official day leading the 9,200-employee federal agency.

But Hutchinson added that he wants to work with California authorities to overcome two potential “difficulties” in Proposition 36, the novel initiative approved by California voters in November and put into effect July 1. It makes an estimated 20,000 nonviolent drug offenders a year eligible for treatment programs instead of getting jail time.

Hutchinson, a former Arkansas congressman, said he is concerned that there is no mandated drug testing component to ensure that offenders are staying the course, and that the state may lack the rehabilitation facilities to make the program work.

“California’s going to have to invest in that,” he said. “It doesn’t do any good to refer [drug offenders] for treatment if there’s not strong programs. I think we need to work with California to make it work” and correct shortcomings in the program.

Hutchinson’s concerns hit on areas that judicial and law enforcement officials in California worry could overwhelm the new system for prosecuting drug offenders.

Hutchinson is “right on the money” concerning the lack of money for treatment facilities and for drug testing, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Michael A. Tynan, who serves on a county commission that has studied Proposition 36, said in an interview.

While a proposed $15-million measure in Sacramento for drug testing would help fill one gap in the program, Tynan said, “I think there’s a possibility the system could just get overwhelmed.”

The problem, Tynan said, is that the numbers of defendants eligible for the program may grossly exceed early estimates. And despite the public perception that the program is largely helping small-time, nonviolent drug users avoid jail time, he said that many of those eligible for rehabilitation have long and sometimes violent criminal histories.

Hutchinson, speaking with reporters just minutes before he was sworn in as head of the DEA, said that treating nonviolent offenders instead of sending them to jail is one of “the new approaches that we ought to be open to” in drug enforcement.

For a man who earned plaudits from fellow Republicans as a House manager during President Clinton’s 1999 impeachment, Hutchinson’s position reflects a fairly progressive attitude that might not play well with some law-and-order conservatives in Washington.

But Hutchinson took a more conservative approach on a more controversial drug issue that also affects California, saying he would seek to enforce a federal ban on “medicinal” marijuana use.

Although California and seven other states allow ill residents to use marijuana for medical purposes, Hutchinson said there is little scientific evidence to suggest any real benefits from the practice.

“You have to listen to the medical community in terms of what is legitimate pain medication and [what] has legitimate health benefits, versus that which is simply a guise for a different agenda in reference to marijuana,” Hutchinson said.

But, as he did during his Senate confirmation hearing last month, Hutchinson left open exactly how the DEA would approach the problem. “You’re not going to tolerate a violation of law, but at the same time there are a lot of different relationships, a lot of different aspects that we have to consider as we develop that enforcement policy,” he told reporters.

Among his other priorities, Hutchinson said he also wants to continue working with Colombia to cut down the supply of cocaine and to focus greater attention on increasingly abused drugs such as Ecstasy, methamphetamine and the painkiller Oxycontin.

And he voiced concerns about “mandatory minimum” sentences that judges are required to dole out in drug cases, saying that Congress needs to find a way to do away with the racial divide between users of crack cocaine and powder cocaine. While he generally supports the mandatory minimum concept, he said the problem is that “it takes the discretion away from the judges” in assessing a case.

On another front, Hutchinson said the DEA also is working to develop tougher safeguards concerning its use of paid informants. The effort comes after the agency paid one undercover informant more than $2 million over a period of a dozen years, despite a history of his having lied under oath.