by Richard Cohen
n retrospect,
that one marijuana cigarette Bill Clinton famously did not inhale has cost
America plenty. It left the president with the unfortunate image of being
some sort of 1960s-era liberal, and it left the country with a drug policy
that Clinton can scarcely afford to question. If only he hadn't had that
one non-drag, America might now have a drug policy that made some sense.
It doesn't at the moment, though. The government continues to concentrate mostly on law enforcement both at home and abroad, going after the bad guys in a wonderfully telegenic, but ultimately futile, effort to put all the drug biggies in jail.
At home we have stacked the jails with petty pushers and the occasional kingpin. Abroad, we have inadvertently managed to corrupt the police and the military -- Mexico and Colombia being the two most prominent examples.
Mexico, it now seems, is one vast Chicago, circa 1929. Police corruption is rampant. Last month, the director of the National Institute to Combat Drugs, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested for corruption -- which is like Eliott Ness being on the take. What's more, the good general had recently been briefed by U.S. anti-drug officials.
The war on drugs is a good fight, but it is a stupid one as well. It would be good to rid the world of drugs, lock up all the narco-banditos and rehabilitate all the addicts. But the folly of that effort is in the math. A Mexican police commander earns around $900 a month, a cop around $300, and a soldier a little more than half that.
In contrast, U.S. News & World Report says that a narcotics bodyguard makes $2,000 to $3,000 a week and probably gets to wear those swell Ray-Bans as well.
The logic of the war on drugs must be hard for your average Mexican policeman to understand. For the sake of Newark or Detroit, Washington or Los Angeles, he's supposed to turn down the sort of money that could keep his family in groceries for a very long time.
When, for instance, the Mexican police arrested the cocaine drug lord Oscar Malherbe de Leon last week, he was said to have offered the arresting officers a mere $2 million to be let go. The cops declined, leading me -- cynic that I am -- to conclude that Mr. de Leon did not have the cash on him.
But who can believe that, in due course, de Leon's place in the Gulf cartel will not be taken by someone else -- or that another cartel will step into the void. The profit in cocaine is so vast that the Mexican barons are estimated to spend $500 million a year in bribes. Should you like to compare numbers, that's about 50 percent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's annual budget.
It's utterly naive to believe that non-Americans will turn down vast riches or, even, moderate bribes so that American drug users will have to pay a bit more -- maybe even go without drugs. After all these years of the so-called war on drugs, you would think we had learned a thing or two about corruption. A better policy has to be developed.
But it is clear by now that the Clinton administration will not develop it. Back before the last presidential election, the administration moved to immunize itself against charges that it was soft on drugs. In fact, it had been -- not in law enforcement, where efficacy is in doubt, but in its education effort, which is a different matter entirely.
The world's most famous non-inhaler clearly had an understandable problem with the entire subject and did not -- until he was pressed -- tape a single public-service anti-drug massage.
Bob Dole and the GOP campaign opened fire anyway. Once again, we saw that grainy video of a younger Clinton laughing off his one-time marijuana experience. The result has been sadly predictable. Clinton became Narc-in-Chief, and when California and Arizona passed referendums permitting the medicinal use of marijuana, the administration proved that it would not allow a little scientific knowledge to sully its new anti-drug image.
Given that, it's too much to expect that the administration will reexamine U.S. policy toward the countries we used to call "our friends south of the border." If it is true that only a certified anti-Communist like Nixon could have gone to China, then only an anti-drug zealot or a truly brave politician could change the U.S. drug policy. Wherever that man is, he's not in the White House.