taken from DRCnet - the link that PjS put up.
Meet the New Czar, Worse Than the Old Czar
President Bush's quasi-nomination of John Walters as the new head
of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (the "drug czar?) was an
act of stealth politics. No press conferences, no fanfare, no White
House garden ceremony marked his annunciation. Instead,
anonymous sources fed the story to Dan Forbes and Salon.com, the
wire services picked it up, and more anonymous officials confirmed
the story.
This subdued approach to the Walters nomination is entirely in
keeping with the tactics of a president who talks reasonably about
drug policy -- against racial profiling, against mandatory minimums,
for more treatment -- but who then appoints arch-conservatives, such
as Attorney General John Ashcroft, to key drug policy positions.
With John Walters, Bush has found a drug czar who will bravely take
drug policy forward to the last century.
Mentored by man of virtue Bill Bennett, first at the Department of
Education and then as Bennett's right-hand man during his tenure as
drug czar, the 49-year-old Walters seems never to have met a
mandatory minimum sentence he didn't like or a drug user he did.
As head of the drug czar's office of supply reduction under Bennett
and Bush the senior, Walters made frequent Capitol Hill
appearances to cheerlead for ever more drug interdiction funds.
Upon leaving office, Walters became president of the New
Citizenship Project, which promotes an increased role for religion in
public life. He co-authored the book "Body Count: Moral Poverty
and How to Win America's War Against Crime and Drugs," which
created the bogeyman of the youthful "superpredator" with Bennett
and John J. DiIulio, who is currently running Bush's faith-based
initiative campaign. Later, Walters moved to the Philanthropy
Roundtable, an organization that steers potential donors to properly
conservative charitable causes.
Once the Clinton administration took over, Walters emerged as an
insistent critic of Clinton's drug policies, especially in the campaign
season of 1996, when he surfaced as Sen. Bob Dole's spokesman
on drug issues. In testimony given to the Senate Judiciary
Committee in September 1996, Walters held the Clinton
administration responsible for the cyclical uptick in drug use that
began in the last years of the Bush administration.
The reason for the increase in drug use in the 1990s was "a failure
in federal policy," Walters testified, strangely accusing the
Clintonites of "de facto legalization" for failing to stop all drugs from
entering US borders. (The charge approaches the absolute zero of
absurdity given the record numbers of Americans arrested and
imprisoned for drug crimes under the Clinton administration.)
Not one to merely carp, Walters also presented the senators with a
six-point anti-drug policy of his own device, one that may be viewed
as a blueprint of a Walters czardom:
The president must use his "bully pulpit" to propagandize
against drug use.
Get tough in Latin America. (In his testimony, Walters
criticized Clinton for temporarily halting US aid for one of his
favorite programs -- the Peruvian "fly and die" airplane
shoot-down program. In oddly non-prescient words, Walters
wrote, "This is an opportunity to save American lives by
helping the Peruvians press their attack on traffickers.")
Increase US military involvement in the drug war. (Walters
wrote "set more sensible budget priorities," but devoted his
argument to complaints that the military was not getting
enough money for drug interdiction.)
War on marijuana. ("Federal marijuana penalties need to be
stiffened," Walters testified, "and federal eradication efforts
need to be invigorated.")
Keep the crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparities in
place. (In his testimony, Walters railed against US Sentencing
Commission efforts to reduce the crack penalties, saying such
"irresponsible proposals from the Sentencing Commission
should be blocked, and the Commission should be barred
from proposing changes in criminal penalties where Congress
has established mandatory minimum sentences.")
Favor confrontational and faith-based drug treatment
programs. (Walters cited Phoenix House as the sort of "tough
program" addicts need, and added that, "Religiously based
programs should be eligible for funding, and addicts who seek
publicly funded treatment should be required to enter rigorous
programs and face real sanctions if they fail to complete
them.")
Walters has also spoken out on other drug policy-related issues. He
harshly criticized Gen. McCaffrey for insufficient efforts to snuff out
the medical marijuana rebellion in California in 1996. In particular,
he scoffed at McCaffrey's assertion that the administration would
collect data to demonstrate the harms of medical marijuana. "One
thing they want to do is watch the body count in California," he told
the Los Angeles Times. "Why don't they prevent the body count in
California?"
He was equally skeptical of drug courts. In a 1997 article on drug
courts in Connecticut in the Christian Science Monitor, Walters said,
"You can have change for the sake of novelty. Connecticut can do
whatever it wants, but if you want to know what works here, it's tough
enforcement, hard-headed adequately-funded treatment, and
hard-headed adequately-funded prevention."
But he likes drug testing. He told the House of Representatives in
March 1996 that "pre-employment testing ought to be able to be
done everywhere, Congress, the Judiciary, the Executive Branch,"
and that federal employees should be subjected to "random testing."
To give Walters the benefit of the doubt, we note that all of his
remarks above came from the dark ages of the mid-1990s. Much
has occurred in drug policy since then, and perhaps Walters' views
have evolved over the years. Not likely, if his March 2001 article in
the conservative Weekly Standard, "Drug Wars: Just Say No... To
Treatment Without Law Enforcement" is any indication.
In his article, a jeremiad against the "therapy-only lobby," Walters
writes that "law enforcement and punishment would be natural
partners of the treatment providers" if only people quit treating drug
addiction as a disease. After all, he asserts, "coerced treatment
works at least as well as voluntary treatment." He also notes
approvingly that "if anything, the trend of anti-drinking and
anti-smoking efforts today is to criminalize certain aspects of use
and attack availability."
But all of this is just the warm-up for his main argument against some
of the "great urban myths of our time." Those myths, writes Walters,
are (1) we are imprisoning too many people for merely possessing
illegal drugs, (2) sentences are too long and harsh, and (3) the
criminal justice system is unfairly punishing young black men.
Walters goes through some statistical legerdemain to argue his
case and it is beyond the scope of this report to refute him in detail.
It is sufficient here simply to note that Bush's nominee for drug czar
is proudly harsh and retrograde in his views, willing not only to
defend punitive policies but to make affirmative arguments for them.
Has anybody here seen my old friend Barry?
|
Threaded
Previous
Index
Next
Shop: All-In-One Bags That Don't Suck, Certified Organic All-In-One Grow Bags by Magic Bag
MOoKie 
PjS 
Edit 
Reply 
1 2 all )
40oz
silversoul7
pattern
Anonymous
Baby_Hitler
HarveyWalbanger
Viveka