[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.

                          ____________________