The New York Times

Friday, August 27, 1999

ON MY MIND

A.M. ROSENTHAL

Vote on Drugs

Notice to the public:

Vote now on drugs, one of the only two ways.

1. If you support the war against drugs, vote now for pending Congressional legislation designed to wound major drug lords around the world. It cuts them off from all commerce with the U.S., now a laundry for bleaching the blood from drug-trade billions and turning them into investments in legitimate businesses.

Vote by telling your members of Congress that when the House-Senate bill authorizing intelligence funds comes up for final decision, probably next month, you want them to vote for the section called "blocking assets of major narcotics traffickers."

Insist they start now to tell the Administration not to try to water it down to satisfy any country for diplomatic or economic reasons -- including Mexico, the biggest drug entry point for America, already complaining about "negative consequences" of the proposal.

Turn yourself and your civil, labor or commercial organization, or religious congregation, into lobbies for the bill -- counterweight to the lobbies of drug-transfer nations and American companies beholden to them.

2. If you are against the war on drugs or just don't care about what drugs are doing to our country, then don't do a thing. That is a vote, too.

That's the way it is in Washington. Members of Congress introduce legislation, committees discuss it for months, votes are taken and then when the time comes to work out House-Senate differences, administrations on the fence and under professional lobbyists' pressure use their power to try to mold the legislation to their liking.

That is exactly the time for ordinary Americans around the country to do their own lobbying.

The bill targeting drug lords extends throughout their vicious world the economic sanctions already directed at Colombian drug lords, by President Clinton's executive order. It will prohibit any U.S. commerce by specifically named drug operators, seize all their assets in the U.S., and ban trading with them by American companies.

The bill specifies that every year the U.S. Government list the major drug lords of the world, by name and nation. The lists are certain to include top drug traders from countries such as Afghanistan, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Thailand and Mexico.

In the Senate it was introduced by Paul Coverdell, a Georgia Republican, and Dianne Feinstein, Democrat from California, and passed with bipartisan support. In the House it also has support in both parties, including Porter Goss of Florida, a Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Charles Rangel, the New York Democrat. It awaits the final September House-Senate Joint Intelligence Committee vote.

For awhile I heard from within the Administration the kind of mutters that preceded the Clinton certification last year that Mexico was carrying out anti-drug commitments satisfactorily, which was certainly a surprise to Mexican drug lords.

Then, yesterday, the White House told me that it favored some target sanctions.

Its objection to the bill was that the Administration would have to list all major drug lords for the President to choose targets, and that could endanger investigations. The White House said it would be better for the President to select targets without having to choose from a list.

Bit of a puzzle. The bill already gives him the right to decide which of the drug lords to target from the Administration's unpublished list. But some members of Congress think the motive is to avoid a list that might include just a little too many from a "sensitive country."

No one bill will end the drug war. Only the determination of Americans to use every sort of resource will do that -- parental teaching, law enforcement with some compassion toward first offenders and none for career drug criminals, enough money for therapy in and out of jails, targeting drug lords -- and passionate leadership.

That would preclude Presidential candidates who mince around about whether they used drugs when they were younger -- unless they grow up publicly and quickly.

Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal, head of the Phoenix House therapeutic communities, says that the bill "reflects the kind of values that we don't hear enough these days." So vote -- one way or the other.