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Q&A: John Walters, U.S. drug czar
03.11.07|Dallas News

John Walters has been the nation's drug czar since December 2001, coordinating federal anti-drug programs and spending as director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. On the eve of President Bush's trip to Latin America, he spent a half-hour at his office near the White House with Washington correspondent Todd J. Gillman in a conversation that ranged from Andean coca production to the wave of heroin-laced "cheese" hitting Dallas schools. These are excerpts.

Q: How is the war on drugs going? Is it still a "war" on drugs? Is it still a focus of U.S. government effort?

A: The phrase also came to be used by some to suggest that we were going to have a battle, or a fixed set of battles, and we were going to win or lose, and if we still have a problem, we ought to give up – the Vietnam analogy. It's silly. ... This requires balance on reducing supply and demand. It's a health problem, it's an education problem, it's a public safety problem, it's a national security problem. And it's something that – as with education and health and safety – we have to continue to work on, because if you don't work on these things, you stop being a civilized society.

Q: Are we making progress?

A: You see drug use going down in important categories. Use by kids – down 23-plus percent in five years. We're expanding treatment – better treatment, more treatment, treatment within the criminal justice system. ...We're using the health care system to grab on to people at various stages of potential danger.

Q: It's interesting that you emphasize a public health approach, because there's a perception in the academic community that studies drug policy that there's too much emphasis on interdiction and not enough on treatment.

A: The academic community that works on drug policy is almost uniformly second rate. They're fighting battles over dogma that doesn't really exist anymore, that's in the past.

Q: You say that drug use among children is down, but there are alarming developments. In the Dallas area, we've had an outbreak of "cheese" (heroin combined with Tylenol PM and sold for as little as $2 a hit, often to middle school students). How big a problem is that?

A: It's been largely localized. It has been a problem in parts of Texas. We have not seen this visible nationwide. We have a reasonably good sentinel system, so if it was uniformly a problem nationwide, we probably would detect it. ... It's dangerous because obviously these are very powerful, addictive substances. ...Fortunately, it's not that incredibly widespread.

Q: What about drugs coming out of South America, mostly heroin and cocaine? Figures from your office show a decrease in supply and purity, but other studies contradict that. Illegal drugs remain cheap and widely available.

A: I certainly recognize that there are particular places in the United States that won't see the same performance as the aggregate. That's true of education performance and crime and consumer prices. We're a big country, and there are variations. But we have seen declines, through a combination of eradication of both poppy and coca, and record seizures.

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Buzzby

TRANSLATION: The academic community doesn't agree with me. They're asking questions and promoting solutions that don't fit into my policies. I don't want to hear about it!

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SirSmokaALot

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