Drug talk across the way - column

National Review, May 5, 1989 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

THE KENTUCKY Center for the Arts brought together four men of varied experience to discuss the question whether drugs ought to be legalized, and Dr. Robert DuPont, a psychiatrist, gave the impression that he had disposed of any question by his initial asseveration. To wit, "Name me one politician in the United States who has run successfully for political office who believes in legalizing drugs."

There are two preliminary difficulties with that statement. The first is that Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore believes in drug legalization, as does Marion Barry, the mayor of Washington, D.C. or so it was contended by the moderator, National Public Radio's Bob Edwards-and they are successful politicians. But the second difficulty faced by Dr. DuPont is that a politician may well believe in legalizing drugs, which does not mean that he will disclose his private belief other than to his wife or his priest. One participant asked how many politicians running for office in 1800 came out for abolition? A third participant (a professor) favored legalization, a fourth opposed it for non-addicts, favored it for the addict population.

What proved most curious is that there was a substantial lobby that night, among the literati of Louisville, for every position. For rigid, diehard, call-in-the-Marines suppression; for complete legalization, together with heightened educational efforts to cure and to dissuade; for submitting everyone to random testing; for not submitting anyone to random testing; for executing certain classes of drug vendors; and for not doing so. If Louisville is representative of the nation, on the drug issue the people are divided.

Are we absolutely certain that the candidate who came out for drug legalizationon the grounds that to do so would permit government agents rather than criminals to dole out the poison to those who will not do without it-would automatically lose in any political race? Certainly he would lose, and would deserve to do so, if he were identified as a drug-lover. For a generation, anyone running in the South identified as a "nigger-lover" would automatically lose an election. Gradually it became clear that a so-called nigger-lover was someone who believed that blacks were human beings entitled to civil liberties. Not inconceivably, in years ahead it will dawn on reluctant intelligences that those who wish to legalize drugs may be just as heartily opposed to their consumption, but are more highly mobilized than the prohibitionists concerning the mounting problem of drug crime.

The gentleman who ventured the opinion that legalization is hardly worth talking about given the unanimity of political opinion opposed to it is not merely a practicing psychiatrist, but also a former public servant who was himself what they now call William Bennett, th"Drug Czar." His title was director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. What does he propose doing?

How are we doing in our war on drugs? Michael Massing writes in the current issue of The New York Review of Books "(Prosecutor] Giuliani's office spent five years gathering evidence in the [Pizza Connection] case. . . . His associates videotaped meetings, gathered airline passenger seat lists, recovered ticket stubs, pored over hotel registers, kept surveillance logs, and retrieved immigration records. Teams of six agents listened to 47 telephones around the clock, taping a total of 55,000 conversations; the nine hundred most important were transcribed and collated in nine bound volumes. So vast was the evidence that it took a full year to be presented in court.

"In the end, the government was rewarded for its pains. All but two of the defendants were convicted, and most were sentenced to long terms. Still, as [author Shana] Alexander observes, the case 'did not make the slightest dent in the nation's desperate drug problem. More heroin, and more cocaine, is on the streets today than before [the trial began]. The trial severely overtaxed every branch of our legal system-law enforcement, bench, and barand taxed the unfortunate jurors most of all."'

THE MEETING in Louisville took place one night after William Bennett, the new Drug Czar, went on Meet the Press to announce his much-heralded recommendations. But that morning, Meet the Press was pre-empted in Louisville; NBC instead showed a high-school debate.

What is gathering in America is a deep frustration. The people do not listen any more to a George Bush promising at his inauguration to do away wit"scourge" of drugs. They do not tune in to hear the new Drug Czar. And, listening to four points of view on the subject, they can only agree that no politician can be elected who recommends the one thing that hasn't