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Philosophically wary of Big Government, the President would prefer to see private business and local government lead the way, or at least foot the bill. As they labor to come up with a program to fulfill the goals Reagan announced last month, White House aides realize that in the era of Gramm-Rudman they must fight drugs on the cheap. One top Administration official privately tempered the President's high-flown rhetoric with bottom-line bureaucratese. Said he: "You've got a zero-sum game as far as budgeting goes."
Congressional Democrats apparently feel no such restraints. Under pressure to "do something," they realize that a lawmaker who does nothing about drugs on the eve of an election puts himself at political risk. "If our country was invaded by a foreign force, the Administration would not be raising the question of Gramm-Rudman," says Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel of Harlem. This week the House will take up a $2 billion-to-$3 billion antidrug package that will fund every weapon in the war on drugs, from more radar balloons for the border patrol to more drug-treatment centers in the ghetto.
It is too early to see the shape of the inevitable compromise. But it will surely not satisfy the demands of local officials in drug-plagued cities, like New York Mayor Edward Koch, who has called on the Army, Navy and Air Force to join the war. While calling for more federal help, state and local governments are launching their own crusades. Stiff jail sentences for pushers are in vogue; Alabama's new "drug-barons law," for instance, mandates a life sentence without parole for high-volume traffickers. Where the states will house drug dealers and pushers while they serve out their long sentences is another question. Most prisons are jammed, and urban court systems are rapidly approaching gridlock.
Private businesses and government agencies alike have seized on drug testing to clean up the workplace. About a third of the FORTUNE 500 companies require some sort of drug testing for employees. "By the end of the year," says Peter Bensinger, the former head of the Drug Enforcement Agency and now a Chicago-based consultant on drug abuse, "we will see a quantum leap in the number of companies that are testing for drugs."
Inevitably, the antidrug crusade is producing some ludicrous results. A best-selling toy in the U.S. is Madballs, a set of eight rubber balls adorned with gross names and faces. One of the more grotesque Madballs, depicting a creature whose skull has been split wide open, was called Crack Head. Fearful that this charming toy might be accused of glorifying drug use, the toymakers last month changed the name to Bash Brain.
The rush by lawmakers and government officials to pass antidrug legislation and prove their own purity by submitting to urinalysis has provoked the mirth of columnists and the sighs of weary legislators who have lived through earlier drug crises. New York Times Columnist William Safire writes mockingly of "drugocrats" waging "jar wars." Says Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: "We're all going to drug conferences and making the Secretary of State pee into a paper cup."