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 War on Drugs was sound politics, even though a consensus was emerging among a broad spectrum of informed opinion, that the War on Drugs was having deleterious consequences on the social fabric of American society, diminishing respect for law, overburdening the criminal justice system and infringing civil liberties. Although public opinion polls toward the end of the second Clinton administration showed that a majority of Americans had serious doubts about the ...