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Although Congress is stretching its fiscal imagination, juggling budget figures to stay below the $144 billion debt limit set for next year by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Deficit Reduction Act, there was little talk of restraint on the subject of curbing drug abuse. House Speaker Tip O'Neill last week said he would favor new taxes to pay for the plan. "I'm afraid this bill % is the legislative equivalent of crack," said Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank, one of the handful of Congressmen who voted against the package. "It yields a short-term high but does long-term damage to the system. And it's expensive to boot."
The President's plan, which will probably form the basis for the Senate's version of a bill, was touted by the White House as containing $2.5 billion for the drug war. In fact, it would probably authorize only $250 million in new spending and it does not contain grants to local governments for programs, like prison construction, that made the House bill so politically popular.
One controversial part of the President's plan is the recommendation for random drug testing of 1.1 million federal employees. In discussing the proposal last week, a Cabinet counsel agreed that a worker who flunks his first test should undergo drug treatment, but there was some dispute over whether a second failure should result in firing. Presidential Counsel Peter Wallison objected that dismissal "would be punitive." Shot back Education Secretary William Bennett, a hawk in the drug war: "It's meant to be punitive." Noting that his own plan for getting rid of drugs in schools called for expulsion of second-time offenders, Bennett asked: "How can you be harder on kids than you are on tax-supported federal workers?" In the end, the proposal won unanimous approval.
Amid the preparations for her joint television address Sunday night, Nancy Reagan carried her campaign against drugs to Harper's Ferry, W. Va., site of John Brown's 1859 rebellion. Calling drugs a "silent killer," she said they had the "potential of tearing our country apart, just like the Civil War did." Although most officials sincerely support that sentiment, even within the Administration there are some who are becoming cautious about turning the war on drugs into something resembling the Civil War's Wilderness Campaign, with a lot of frenetic and random shooting in all directions.
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