To Heat Up Drug War, Turn Down the Rhetoric : If ‘Czar’ Bennett Is to Have an Impact, His Actions Must Avoid Doing Harm

The war on drugs has gone on for so long that the latest presidential initiative, the appointment of a federal drug czar, has evoked little interest and almost no enthusiasm. Perhaps nobody now believes that the drug traffic can be reduced.

Yet the war on drugs of the last several decades has not been a stalemate. There have been gains and losses. The gains are easier to identify--reduced use can be measured in pounds, the amount of the seizures, the number of arrests and convictions. They are significant, hard-won achievements.

The losses are less apparent and less discussed, but perhaps as important. If it is true that the drug problem is intractable, that drug czar William J. Bennett can do no great good, it cannot be said with equal confidence that he can avoid doing harm. Things can get worse. Let me explain.

It is likely that indiscriminate enforcement--that which focuses on the easiest target, the small, unsophisticated dealers--is likely to convert the unorganized and disorganized crime into more efficient and effective criminals. This was the enforcement pattern of the 1920s and resulted in the creation of the highly durable and successful La Cosa Nostra crime families.

Historically, vice enforcement has been almost inseparably linked to police corruption. The sums available to officers today for doing favors for drug traffickers pose novel temptations. Over time, drug dealers win recruits in most large police agencies. In some, corruption may now be of such proportions that it puts the police in the pro-drug as well as the anti-drug business. Although narcotics-related police scandals have erupted throughout the country in the last couple of years, most likely we have witnessed but the tip of the iceberg. Far more attention must be paid to strategies, preventive as well as punitive, for limiting police participation in the drug business.

Because much drug usage and attendant violence is in the inner city, there is necessarily a racial component to enforcement, no matter how law-abiding and sensitive. Drug enforcement poses a danger to whatever uneasy amity in community relations has been earned by professionalized police departments since the urban riots of the 1960. Many in the black community see the federal government’s failure to stop drugs from reaching our shores as the source of the problem. To them, the youths in the neighborhood--sellers and users alike--are more victims than offenders. And anti-drug rhetoric is not only paternalistic but sinister in that it may be a camouflage for re-establishing white hegemony, for taking back dearly won rights. Thus, new initiatives by Bennett will be feared as well as welcomed.

As the drug traffic gains dimension, it becomes increasingly less amenable to constitutional solutions. Constitutional guarantees--the protections against unreasonable searches and seizures in particular--work best in a stable society with tolerable levels of crime. We are willing to risk victimization when the risk is small enough. Occasional instances of criminals escaping justice are accepted in exchange for the bounties of a free society. But when the incidence of violence and disorder appears to transcend the capacity of civilian authorities, then fidelity to traditional values wanes.

It is no accident that those places most beleaguered are considering military-type measures--curfews for teen-agers, preventive detention for drug dealers, deployment of the National Guard. Because it is not possible to meet public expectations for curbing the drug traffic without relaxing constitutional restraints on searches, detentions, use of informants and interrogation--or violating them--we must be especially attentive to how much latitude we allow law enforcement.

Recent Supreme Court decisions expanding police powers are most easily explained against the backdrop of drug trafficking. How else could the court conclude that police helicopter surveillance at 400 feet above a private home is not a search, or that one who fences in his property and conspicuously posts “no trespassing” signs lacks a reasonable expectation of privacy, and that the police may enter freely? Similarly, decisions allowing the police to detain travelers at airports who meet an abstract of quite general characteristics--the so-called “drug courier profile”--make sense as a response to drug trafficking rather than as a generalized expansion of governmental power. Yet our Constitution is not an accordion that can easily be expanded and contracted. Nor can decisions interpreting it have an expiration date like a railroad ticket, “good for this year only.” Thus, caution is warranted in developing new rules and principles.

The lack of success in containing the drug traffic in the last three decades has spawned, surprisingly, a particularly hyperbolic, vacuous rhetoric. The last presidential campaign was noteworthy for its lack of sophistication in addressing the drug problem. Sloganeering and grandiosity stand in the way of sensible planning and innovation. They prevent clear thought. We need more accurate map-drawing, more realistic assessments, more differentiation and particulars.

It is here that Bennett could be most helpful. His contribution could be straight talk. He could be the one that the public looks to and depends upon for reliable assessments of gains and losses, and his agency could take a place alongside the few others whose reputation for candor, rather than manipulation, makes them democracy’s instruments.