McCaffrey Warns Senate Committee of Legalization

McCaffrey Warns Senate Committee of Legalization

Drug Policy Official Warns Panel of Effort to Legalize Drugs

WASHINGTON, June 17 -- The White House's top drug policy official today accused critics of the nation's zero-tolerance drug laws of pursuing an agenda to legalize drugs from marijuana to heroin and cocaine.

In written testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the official, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, asserted, "There is a carefully camouflaged, exorbitantly funded, well-heeled elitist group whose ultimate goal is to legalize drug use in the United States."

While General McCaffrey named no names, he was clearly referring to a coalition of advocacy groups that argues that the global war on drugs has cost society more than drug abuse itself. Some of those advocates attracted attention last week with an open letter to the United Nations Secretary General as the General Assembly opened a three-day special session on drugs.

The letter -- whose 500 signers included the former Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar, former Secretary of State George P. Shultz and two former Senators, Alan Cranston and Claiborne Pell -- argued that by focusing on punishing drug users, the United States and other countries had helped create a worldwide criminal black market that wrecked national economies and democratic governments.

The letter's signers also included George Soros, the billionaire investor and philanthropist, who has spent as much as $20 million supporting research and advocacy groups working to change Americans' views on how to deal with drug use. Mr. Soros said in an interview last week that he hoped that it would foster an open discussion of the issue.

But General McCaffrey, the Clinton Administration's director of national drug policy, said the critics were disguising their true purpose because Americans overwhelmingly opposed legalizing drugs.

"Through a slick misinformation campaign," he said, "these individuals perpetuate a fraud on the American people, a fraud so devious that even some of the nation's most respectable newspapers and sophisticated media are capable of echoing their falsehoods."

His assertion prompted the Judiciary Committee's ranking Democrat, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, to propose hearings into the issue of legalizing drugs.

"Let's expose it for the fraud that it is," Senator Biden said.

Mr. Soros could not be reached today because he was traveling in Sweden. But one of the most prominent advocates of less punitive approaches to drug use, Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy institute in New York supported by Mr. Soros, called the general's criticism "an attempt to smear what's a very responsible approach to dealing with drug abuse in our society."

At the core of the disagreement is the concept of harm reduction, which to advocates like Mr. Nadelmann, means finding ways short of abstinence to reduce the harm that drug abusers cause themselves and society. Needle exchange, in which addicts are given clean needles to try to stem the spread of AIDS, is a prominent example.

Kevin Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy, a group in Falls Church, Va., that also wants drug laws changed, said, "The reason why there is an upsurge of people advocating reform is because the current policy is not making for a safer or healthier society,"

But General McCaffrey called harm reduction "a hijacked concept that has become a euphemism for drug legalization."

"It's become a cover story for people who would lower the barriers to drug use," he said.

Mr. Nadelmann responded, "The majority of harm reduction advocates oppose drug legalization, and that includes George Soros."

Until today, General McCaffrey had ignored the advocacy groups' lobbying, and so his sharp attack was a change in strategy.

After testifying, he said he was suggesting a debate about legalization, not a witch hunt.

"It's a legitimate subject of debate in our society if you do it openly," said General McCaffrey, who is retired from the Army.

He predicted that the notion would be "rejected resoundingly" once Americans discovered what was involved.

Mr. Nadelmann said: "I would welcome the opportunity to debate him anytime or anyplace. His trying to equate all forms of harm reduction with a free market approach to drug legalization is both false and duplicitous."

But Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Los Angeles who follows drug issues, expressed concern that such a debate would detract from the more crucial task of finding ways to make the current anti-drug strategies work more effectively.