Clinton Administrations' Drug Policies

DRUG WAR AND CLINTON ADMINISTRATION

This research paper examines the policies pursued by the administrations of President Bill Clinton with respect to the War on Drugs. Clinton inherited from his Republican predecessors, Ronald Reagan and George Bush, aggressive foreign and domestic antidrug policies, which were primarily oriented toward the interdiction of illegal drugs supplied from abroad and criminal punishment of domestic drug offenders, including drug users as well as drug dealers. Those policies were rooted in, and the Republicans took political advantage of, public perceptions of a strong link between the use of illegal drugs, especially crack cocaine, and the rise of violent street crime.

After some hesitations during his first term, Clinton, faced with strong Republican opposition to policy changes, essentially continued the Reagan-Bush antidrug policies, foreign and domestic, even though the available evidence suggested strongly that they were making little impact on the foreign supply or domestic availability and use of illegal drugs. In foreign policy, the War on Drugs assumed an even more important role in furthering American national security interests, but was applied somewhat more selectively in Latin America than it had been under Bush. Despite token gestures to members of his electoral constituency, such as African-Americans, who bore the brunt of drug-related criminal prosecutions, Clinton and his top advisers calculated that continuation of the Wa

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spending for FY 2000 is estimated to be 17.8B, a further increase of 4.3 percent (Executive 1). Spencer reported that by 1997 the federal government had spent $215 billion on the War on Drugs since the early 1980s (3). Clinton has essentially remained silent while Congress has refused to permit physicians to issue sterile syringes to drug addicts, such as heroin users, which the Callahans says may lead to as many as 20,000 new cases of HIV infection per year (5). He has ordered his Secretary of Housing to evict teenage drug dealers from public housing projects. And he has even threatened to removed a federal judge who acquitted a drug dealer who was prosecuted on the basis of an illegal search, but subsequently relented. Overall, there is nothing in his record on the domestic War on Drugs to suggest that he has serious reservations about that policy or is willing to expend any of his political capital to push for reforms. His one proposed reform smacks of tokenism. In 1997 McCaffrey and Attorney General Janet Reno recommended that the disparity in sentencing between users of crack cocaine and powder cocaine be reduced from the present ratio of 100:1 to 10:1. The 1986 and 1988 federal laws mandated that possession by first

Category: Government - C