[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 69 (Thursday, May 16, 1996)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5140-S5142]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
THE MORAL CHARACTER OF CONTENT
Mr. GRASSLEY. Madam President, after 3 years of inaudible policy on
drugs, the administration is suddenly trying to find its voice.
Naturally, after not having been used for so long on this issue, the
voice is a bit rusty and unsteady. For those of us not used to the
sound after so long a silence, it is just a little hard to make out the
meaning. At the moment, the meaning sounds a lot like a New Year's
resolution--full of seasonal promises. It is not too clear just what is
being said or how much faith we ought to put in this election-year
resolution. It is also not too clear if what is being said bears any
relationship to the issue being addressed.
The question is, Is the voice speaking from principle or opportunism?
The answer lies in finding clues to see whether we are in the presence
of conviction or convenience. Sincerity, after all, is not measured in
the volume of one's words or the lofty sentiments with which they are
pressed. It is to be gaged by actions that match rhetoric. It is
measured not in sound bites or self-serving gestures but in commitments
made and promises kept. It is signified by candor and stout-
heartedness. It is judged by deeds. It is marked by courage. And it is
generally easy to tell the difference between stage-managed courage and
the genuine article. The genuine article generally has a past and a
future because it is based on substance, on character. Its history is
not one of fair-weather friendships and will-o'-the wist obligations.
The counterfeit tends to swell on cue and to fade when the audience
leaves.
So, as the administration clears its throat on the drug issue, it
might be timely to take a look at the content and context of the
pronouncements that are likely to ensue. At the moment, the new-found
conviction of the President on the drug issue, as I said, looks a lot
like a New Year's resolution. It is probably only a coincidence that
this new year is also an election year. I hope, however, that the
present resolution is a little sturdier than most New Year's
declarations--so full of promise and so short on fulfillment. We do
have some guideposts to go by to decide whether what we have on the
drug issue reflects principle or calculation.
It is no secret to the press or to many in the public that the
President is candor-challenged. He has a problem with consistency when
it comes to what he says. And much of this fidelity deficit seems to
owe a lot to expediency. The question is, Does policy grow from sound
foundations or from what sounds good at the moment? It was one of the
chief advisers to the President who gave us some insight on this. As
Mr. Stephanopolous told us, to this President, words are actions. Just
listen to what I say, don't look at what I do--or say tomorrow.
There is something of the magician in this philosophy. It is, after
all, essential to the illusionists' art that you be distracted by words
from what the hands are up to. Thus, it is possible to have no
consistent policy but to claim one. It is possible to have mismanaged
foreign affairs and assert the opposite. It is possible to have reneged
on a bounty of campaign promises and to call it keeping faith. It is
possible to make a virtue of having offered no fiscally responsible
budgets while blaming others for the lapse. It is possible to have
discovered the drug issue on the eve of an election and then to
denounce critics as playing politics. And all of this with an elegant
turn of phrase.
But there is more involved here than words. We have actions to guide
us, to help us go beyond the sleigh of hand. What do they tell us when
it comes to sincerity on fighting drugs? In this case, actions do speak
louder than words.
The echoes of the Inauguration balls were hardly over before the
President cut the Office of National Drug Control Policy--the Nation's
drug czar--by 80 percent. That gesture was not an economy it was a
massacre. It would also seem to be a statement about the importance of
drug policy in the President's own household. But it was not singular.
The new-car smell of the administration had hardly dissipated when
the Nation's chief medical officer, the Surgeon General, suggested we
could legalize our way out of the drug problem. The tepid condemnation
that followed from the President did nothing to foreclose this line of
thinking. In fact, the idea of normalizing drug use has gathered
strength in the last few years. But this was not all.
The administration also cut interdiction funding. This controlled
shift in the priorities in our interdiction policies produced
uncontrolled muddle here and abroad. We may not have scared our enemies
with this policy, but we successfully confused our friends and our own
people. But the story does not end here.
Along with these actions, the President also abandoned the bully
pulpit. This is, perhaps, the truest measure of intent. If there is one
thing that the President is able to do, it is to talk. He has a gift
for words. We must ask ourselves, knowing this, why the President spoke
virtually not at all on the drug issue for 3 years? What does this say
about a commitment to the drug issue? In over 1,700 utterances in 1994
alone, illegal drugs were mentioned less than a dozen times. As they
say, ``silence is golden.'' This is a silence that speaks volumes. But
there's more.
In these years of just say nothing, the nature of our drug problem
began to change. Although we still had a hardcore addict population
largely resistant to our efforts to treat them, we had made major
strides in reducing use, particularly among our young people. Between
1980 and 1992 we had succeeded in reducing so-called casual use by more
than 50 percent for all drugs, and over 70 percent for cocaine. We had
succeeded in persuading young people that drugs were both dangerous and
wrong to use. That is now changing.
Since 1992, teenage drug use has surged. The age of people using
drugs has dropped. The belief that drugs are dangerous and wrong has
reversed. Popular culture once again abounds in drug glorification
messages. The legalization movement is better funded and organized, and
has found allies like William Buckley. Much of the media has declared a
moratorium on discussing drugs--unless it is to give space to
legalization arguments. All of this in 3 years, and all of it with
hardly a word from the Nation's leading wizard of words.
If the past is any guide, then, we need to approach the present born-
again resolution on drug policy with some questions about its meaning
and purpose. In this regard, I was struck by comments in several
leading periodicals about the new resolution on drugs coming from the
White House this election year. These may give us a hint about the
future, about whether the President's new found voice speaks from
principle or poetic license.
The Weekly-Standard, a policy journal, recently editorialized that
``Bill Clinton is mostly talk. He enjoys daily political combat and
negotiates its demands with rare talent. But he has never been much for
actual, week-in, week-out government. Over any given administrative
term in his long career, the Clinton record is thickly stained with the
evidence both of his personal disengagement and of the ideological
inclinations of his loosely supervised appointees.'' The piece further
notes, ``So the early months of a Clinton election year always look the
same: He mounts a slick and furious propaganda offensive to muddy that
evidence, the better to confuse and silence his opponents. What looks
bad, Clinton knows, can often be made to look good--if you jabber about
it enough.''
If this view is any indication of the depth of the recent
pronouncements on drug policy by the President, then we are in the
presence of a pretty shallow reservoir. We have words filling in for
action. But this was not the only comment on the President's newly
found vocabulary on drugs.
A recent piece in the Wall Street Journal noted that ``Bill Clinton's
retreat in the drug war is among the
[[Page S5141]]
worst sins for which his administration should be held accountable.''
The editorial reminds us that the President didn't inhale. It also
reminds us that ``some dozen White House employees, including senior
staff, had been `requested to be part of an individual drug testing
program' because of their prior drug history.'' But past indiscretion
may be no guide to the future.
The Journal piece, however, touches on something more fundamental.
Something that I have talked about before that may be more telling.
This involves the character issue. The Journal notes, `` * * * we would
like to know exactly why Bill Clinton took a powder on the drugs wars *
* * .'' It then adds, `` * * * the heart of our complaint with this
President's attitude on drugs has to do with what we would call its
character, its moral content.''
It goes on to make the following point: ``Unlike the Reagans, you
will never see the Clintons articulating the war on drugs as an
essentially moral crusade * * * the Clintons, like the generation of
liberal constituencies that they lead, are going to be rhetorically
correct, believers in the powers of bureaucratic healing--and
nonjudgmental.'' In other words, Clinton is unable to be a leader on
this issue because his opinions on the subject have no fixed address.
If this is an accurate assessment, then the President's newly found
fervor on the drug issue is likely to have moved on by next November.
If true, the present commitment will not last much beyond the echo of
his pronouncements. It is not based on principle but on opportunism.
There are many more news accounts about the President's election-eve
conversion. These provides us with more insight on how we are to judge
the present situation. They do not give us a definitive answer. We must
judge for ourselves. But there is not much in the past to indicate that
strong principle informs the present sincere-sounding rhetoric. It must
have content not just context. For the content to be serious, it must
be backed up by character. Without principle what confidence can we
have in the words? What we need, what we are looking for, is not
resolutions but resoluteness. We do not live by words alone. But it
seems that words are all we are likely to get.
Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that these news items be
printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Wall Street Journal, May 2, 1996]
Waiting to Exhale
Now, in April 1996, with eight months left on a four-year
term, Bill Clinton flies the press into Miami so he can be
seen standing shoulder to shoulder with General Barry
McCaffrey, a decorated war hero he's enlisted to lead a war
on drugs. Standing among school children Monday, the
President poured his great rhetorical heart onto the drug
war. Along the way came these key words: ``Make no mistake
about it, this has got to be a bipartisan, American,
nonpolitical effort.'' Translation: Don't blame me for this
problem, especially during an election campaign.
In fact, Bill Clinton's retreat in the drug war is among
the worst sins for which his Administration should be held
accountable. After years of decline in drug use, recent
surveys make it clear that a younger generation of Americans
is again at risk (see the chart nearby). The number of 12-to-
17-year-olds using marijuana increased to 2.9 million in 1994
from 1.6 million in 1992. Marijuana use increased 200% among
14-to-15-year-olds during the same period. Since 1992,
according to large surveys of high school students, there has
been a 52% increase in the number of seniors using drugs
monthly. One in three report having used marijuana in the
past year. Private anti-drug advocates such as Jim Burke of
the Partnership for a Drug Free America and Joe Califano of
Columbia University's Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse
have been running alongside this drug fire, yelling for help
to anyone who'd listen.
Better late than never, of course, and it is good that Mr.
Clinton wants to mend his ways with General McCaffrey. We
applaud the appointment and think General McCaffrey has
sounded many right notes. Legalization, he says, ``is out of
the question.''
A quarterly regional analysis put out by his office brings
the problem up to date: ``A recent New York State high school
survey reports that 12% of New York teens said that they
smoked marijuana at least four times a month, double the
number in the 1990 survey,'' Discussing ``Emerging Drugs,''
the report notes methamphetamine's popularity in the San
Francisco area: ``in addition to its use by young users who
combine it with heroin (`a meth speedball') it can also be
found in `biker's coffee,' a combination of methamphetamine
and coffee popular among young, fairly affluent urbanites.''
Additionally, the report notes that ``Club drugs, a name
which generally includes MDMA, Ketamine, 2c-B, LSD,
psilocybin and a range of other hallucinogens, are
increasingly mentioned in this quarter.''
These recent events are not a coincidence. The drug retreat
was the result of a series of explicit policy decisions by
Mr. Clinton and those around him. Which is why we think it is
worth focusing on the meaning of his wish that the anti-drug
war be ``bipartisan, American, nonpolitical.'' This means
that between now and November's election no one is allowed to
utter the phrase ``didn't inhale.'' No one is allowed to
remember Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders talking about drug
legalization, even as her own son was arrested and convicted
on drug-sale charges.
Nor should anyone be allowed to bring up White House deputy
personnel director Patsy Thomasson's admission to a
congressional committee that some dozen White House
employees, including senior staff, had been ``requested to be
part of an individual drug testing program'' because of their
prior drug history. Ms. Thomasson's experience in these drug
mop-up duties extends back to her days in Arkansas when she
took over the business of Dan Lasater--Little Rock bond
dealer, Clinton campaign contributor and friend-of-brother
Roger--while Mr. Lasater served prison time for ``social
distribution'' of cocaine. This week Mr. Lasater is
testifying before the Senate Whitewater Committee, and we
assume he will be asked to enlighten the committee about the
millions of dollars of mysterious trades that his firm made
through an account without the knowledge of the account's
owner, Kentucky resident Dennis Patrick.
On matters of pure policy, among Bill Clinton's first acts
was to cut spending on the war. The staff of the Office of
National Drug Control Policy was cut to 25 from 146. Drug
interdiction funds were cut. The number of trafficker
aircraft seized by Customs fell to 10 from 37 in FY '93-'95.
Drug czar Lee Brown wandered the nation's editorial pages
seeking the public support he rarely got from his President.
New York Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel announced: ``I
really never thought I'd miss Nancy Reagan, but I do.''
Finally, about a year ago, Mr. Clinton received a stinging
letter from FBI Director Louis Freeh and DEA director Tom
Constantine, charging that the President's anti-drug effort
was adrift. So now we have General McCaffrey, who says,
``There is no reason why we can't return America to a 1960s
level, pre-Vietnam era level of drug use.''
Sorry, General, but pre-Vietnam America is not coming back.
General McCaffrey's current President is a founding member of
the generation that transformed America in the years of
Vietnam and those that followed. It bequeathed to all of us a
culture and ethos of such personal and moral slovenliness
that we must now enlist a battle-hardened soldier to save the
children of the anti-Vietnam generation from drugs. It is
perhaps the most perfect, bitter irony that when these
parents now exhort their children to stop using marijuana (of
a strain that is significantly more potent than anything they
dabbled in), the kids reply: ``Why should we? We're not
hurting anyone.''
Basically, we'd very much like to know exactly why Bill
Clinton took a powder on the drug wars after he became
President. There was in fact a rationale of sorts offered at
the time for the change in tone and direction. In contrast to
what was thought to be the Republican approach of throwing
people in jail for drug offenses, the Clinton approach would
emphasize prevention and treatment. There is a case to be
made for prevention and treatment, but the heart of our
complaint with this President's attitude on drugs has to do
with what we would call its character, its moral content.
Unlike the Reagans, you will never see the Clintons
articulating the war on drugs as an essentially moral
crusade. With its emphasis on treatment and programs and
prevention, it is mainly the kind of effort that the
sociologist Philip Rieff identified as the triumph of the
therapeutic. Rather than the school-marmish Nancy Reagan, the
Clintons, like the generation of liberal constituencies that
they lead, are going to be rhetorically correct, believers in
the powers of bureaucratic healing--and nonjudgmental. In
their world, no one is ever quite caught for disastrous
personal behavior or choices. Instead of absolution, there
are explanations.
This, in our opinion, is the real reason the drug war waned
when Bill Clinton became President. The message this new
President sent to his young, yuppie, MTVish audiences was
that he was just too cool to go relentlessly moralistic over
something like recreational drugs. Sure he had an anti-drug
policy in 1992 and a czar and speeches, but Bill Clinton
wasn't going to have any cows over the subject. Surely, the
drug-testing White House staff understood that much.
We don't doubt that a lot of people in this country,
especially parents of teenaged and pre-teen children, would
very much like to rediscover General McCaffrey's pre-Vietnam
world of less constant cultural challenge. But the people who
turned that culture upside down, making it a daily challenge
for parents, have at last been given the chance to run the
government. But this death-bed conversion on drugs simply
lacks credibility. As much as we applaud General McCaffrey's
new offensive, only a triumph of hope over experience could
lead anyone to believe it would be sustained past November if
Mr.
[[Page S5142]]
Clinton and his crowd are returned to the White House.
____
[From the Weekly Standard, May 13, 1996]
General Clinton, Losing the Drug War
(By David Tell)
Bill Clinton is mostly talk. He enjoys daily political
combat and negotiates its demands with rare talent. But he
has never been much for actual, week-in, week-out government.
Over any given administrative term in his long career, the
Clinton record is thickly stained with the evidence both of
his personal disengagement and of the ideological
inclinations of his loosely supervised appointees. So the
early months of a Clinton election year always look the same:
He mounts a slick and furious propaganda offensive to muddy
that evidence, the better to confuse and silence his
opponents. What looks bad, Clinton knows, can often be made
to look good--if you jabber about it enough.
This is your president's brain. And this is your
president's brain on drugs: Clinton is justifiably nervous
that his credibility gap in the nation's drug war--still a
major public preoccupation--might be exploited by Republicans
in the fall.
Candidate Clinton didn't inhale. President Clinton's
surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, made repeated
pronouncements on the virtues of drug legalization. Before
the ink was dry on his presidential oath, Clinton gutted the
White House drug office with a two-fold, shabby purpose:
satisfying a campaign pledge to trim his staff, and purging a
hundred-odd career civil servants whose only sin (shades of
Travelgate) was to have worked under a Republican
administration. That massacre remains the president's best
known drug-war initiative; three years later, he has spent
very little time on the effort. ``I've been in Congress for
over two decades,'' Democratic Rep. Charles B. Rangel grumped
late last year. ``I have never, never, never seen a president
who cares less'' about drugs.
So it is now, predictably, ``inoculation'' season, as the
Clinton campaign embarks on a weeks-long media tour designed
to portray the president as fully and effectively engaged in
the war on drugs. Much of it is typical hokum. A talk-show
schlockmeister has been recruited to produce anti-drug
television commercials; ``Montel Williams's leadership on
this crucial effort is inspiring,'' burbles the White House.
A Gallup poll on the drug war has been commissioned, as the
White House admits without embarrassment, ``to demonstrate
thinking which will support our efforts.'' And the president
himself--in a spare Miami moment between rounds of golf and
multimillion-dollar Democratic fundraisers--has unveiled a
``new'' drugfighting strategy. He is ``working hard in
Washington,'' he tells a group of network cameramen and
middle-school students. And his work is paying off, since
``every year for the last three years. . . . drug use has
dropped.''
We'll come back to this falsehood in a moment. Were the
Clinton drug-fighting record purely a matter of Elders-like
bloopers and mere inattention, the president's current show
of concern--and the debut of his newly minted tough-guy
``drug czar,'' retired army general Barry McCaffrey--might be
sufficient protection against GOP election-year complaints.
But it really isn't true that Clinton has done ``nothing''
about drugs, as Republicans may want to charge. It's worse,
far worse: His administration has engineered the most
significant redirection of federal drug policy in several
decades. This is a poorly reported story. And an alarming one
that begs for informative political debate.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the federal
government pursued what might fairly be described as a ``do
everything'' strategy against illegal drugs. Executive-branch
agencies conducted crop eradication and criminal
investigative efforts in foreign countries. They launched
``interdiction'' programs against smugglers operating in the
so-called transit zone between those countries and the United
States, and on our borders. They undertood a dizzying variety
of law-enforcement, drug-prevention, and rehabilitative-
treatment initiatives here at home. It was a richly funded
campaign; total federal spending on the drug war rose nearly
700 percent between 1981 and 1992. And it roughly coincided
with a more than 50 percent decline in the rate of overall
drug use nationwide, from its historical high in 1979 to its
subsequent low in the final year of the Bush administration.
There was a standard Democratic critique of government drug
policy during this period of Republican presidencies: The
executive branch was supposedly placing exaggerated emphasis
on efforts to reduce the supply of illegal drugs to American
neighborhoods, and shortchanging an equally necessary
therapeutic approach to addicts and schoolchldren. The drug
war's most visibly warlike aspects--its overseas and
interdiction programs--were subjected to particular scron. As
the Customs Service was spending millions of dollars to get
radar balloons tangled in high-tension electical wires on the
Southwest border, the scoffers said, cocaine addicts went
homeless and died for want of bed-space in federally funded
treatment facilities.
Of course, it is a simple fact that federal law can only be
enforced by the federal government, and that effort--G-men
and prisons, most obviously--is intrinsically more expensive
than even the most lavish education and drug-treatment
programs could ever be. And so the federal drug budget will
always be heavily weighted toward ``supply reduction'' (and
away from ``demand reduction'') activities. Even in a
Democratic administration. President Clinton still spends
twice as much money on restricting drug supply as on ending
demand.
But he is spending it very differently. Democratic
hostility to drug-war ``militarism'' is alive and well in the
Clinton administration. Under his supervision, the federal
government is now conducting an anti-drug effort almost
exclusively inside the United States. At our borders and
beyond, the drug war has, for the most part, been canceled.
By formal White House directive.
In 1993, the administration instituted what is technically
called a ``controlled shift'' of federal drug-war assets.
Money and personnel devoted to anti-smuggling efforts in the
Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, and on the U.S.-Mexican border
were ostensibly redeployed directly to the Latin American
countries in which most illegal drugs originate. But that
redeployment has never actually occured. The federal drug-
budget accounts from which any new Latin American initiative
could be funded are 55 percent smaller today than in 1992.
The old-fashioned anti-smuggling effort has been ``shifted''
to nowhere. It has been eviscerated.
The result? Coast Guard cocaine and marijuana seizures are
down 45 to 90 percent, respectively, since 1991, In 1994, the
Customs Service let two million commercial trucks pass
through three of the busiest ports-of-entry on the Mexican
border without seizing a single kilogram of cocaine. Between
1993 and early 1995, the estimated smuggling ``disruption
rate'' achieved by federal drug interdiction agencies fell 53
percent--the equivalent of 84 more metric tons of cocaine and
marijuana arriving unimpeded in the United States each year.
Drug Enforcement Agency figures suggest that cocaine and
heroin are now available on American streets in near-record
purity--and at near-record-low retail prices.
Which can only be evidence that the supply of illegal drugs
on American streets has significantly expanded on Bill
Clinton's watch. Because the only other possible explanation,
that the demand for drugs has fallen, is at variance with the
facts. The president was sadly mistaken--or, well, he lied--
when he told those Miami schoolchildren that American drug
use ``has dropped'' every year since he took office. Drug use
has steadily risen since 1992, especially among the young.
Overall teenage drug use is up 55 percent. Marijuana
consumption by teenagers has almost doubled.
This is a pretty striking picture of deliberate government
decision-making gone disastrously awry. It's the president's
fault. He has proposed nothing to correct it, Gen. McCaffrey
and Montel Williams notwithstanding. And he should be called
to account. All the president's facile election-year
speechifying aside, there are serious differences of
personnel and policy that divide this Democratic
administration from the Republican administration that would
replace it in 1997. Where the drug war is concerned, as in so
many other respects, those differences should be clear. They
do not flatter President Clinton.
Mr. GRASSLEY. Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Kempthorne). Without objection, it is so
ordered.
Mrs. BOXER. Mr. President, the Senator from Iowa has made a 10-minute
attack on the President on an issue dealing with the fight on drugs. I
ask that the same courtesy be extended and that I be permitted to speak
in morning business for 5 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
____________________