Bush's Drug War Strategy: Escalate It

Don Hazen and Daniel Forbes, AlterNet

May 28, 2001

It can't get worse. That's what many scientists, health advocates and drug war reformers thought while doing battle with hyperactive drug crusader General Barry McCaffrey, the head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the Clinton administration. McCaffrey took a fierce stance that helped produce skyrocketing arrests for drug possession, steady militarization of the drug battle and short shrift for treatment. The bellicose nature of the Clinton drug effort was sometimes difficult to understand, since the drug warrior image was a tad out of step with the overall tone of the Clinton-Gore administration.

No matter what Clinton's motivations, collateral damage from his policies was extensive: the seven-month-old shot from the skies over Peru; the teenagers caught smoking reefer and denied a college loan; Patrick Dorismond, killed on the streets of New York because he took umbrage at a quota-driven cop gripped by the equation: black man on the streets = drugs; or the nearly half million nonviolent drug offenders locked up for years or decades. There's so much more. The impact was immense.

But any hope for relief, for a respite from the toll of the Clinton years, was hopelessly naïve. Make no mistake, the drug war is about to get worse under Bush, maybe a whole lot worse. But at least some of the underlying rationale is becoming clearer. In fact, as the Bush administration's troika of backward generals -- Ashcroft, Walters and Hutchinson -- take command of the drug war, new revelations are exposing just how corporate-run and profitable the drug war has become.

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