Bear in mind as you read Ashcroft's
statements in this interview with Larry King that President Clinton spent more
on the drug war in his first year and a half in office than Presidents Reagan
AND Bush spent in their combined terms (12 years)! Yes, he cut the staff in the
Drug Czar's office, but every other aspect of prohibition funding increased
substantially with record numbers of arrests, the result. Nevertheless, drugs
are cheaper, purer, and more plentiful than ever before on the streets of
America.
I guess we're in for more of
the same old thing...if something doesn't work, just keep doing
it.
CNN - Larry King
Live
John Ashcroft
Discusses His New Job as Attorney General
Aired February
7, 2001 - 9:00 p.m. ET
[EXCERPTS ON DRUGS ONLY]
KING: War on
drugs, any change?
JOHN ASHCROFT: Well, I want to escalate the war on
drugs. I want to renew it. I want to
refresh it, relaunch it if you will.
KING: Is it a failure?
JOHN ASHCROFT: Well, we haven't done what
we need to do. When the Clinton administration
came in eight years ago, they
took the drug czar's office and cut the staffing there from about
140 down to
about 25. And frankly, the war on drugs requires leadership, and when
the
president of the United States says, I maybe didn't inhale but I wish I
had, and he says that on
MTV, you have to understand it -- drug use began to
come back up, substantially. We've had
tremendous...
KING: Do you
think that affects people, a president making...
JOHN ASHCROFT:
Absolutely. I think when it is signaled -- of course, we had a
surgeon
general of the United States who said, hey, we ought to just legalize
all these drugs. When
you've got the president saying, I probably wish I had
inhaled, and the surgeon general saying
these things ought to be made legal,
I think that sends the wrong signals.
KING: So you're going to be what?
Tough, tougher?
JOHN ASHCROFT: We want to relaunch the war on drugs and
we want to bring parents into
the equation. You know, it's hard for a
government to direct children (UNINTELLIGIBLE) for
parents. And if we can
help parents be better parents -- and the president sure has an
interesting
program called the Parent Drug Corps. So he wants parents to be educated and
to
help them make presentations to their kids, that's a good idea.
But
we'll enforce the law with vigor and with intensity. We've got to stop this
upswing in drug
use. And the statistics are alarming.
Let me just --
I've got some of them on a piece of paper here. The number of high
schools
seniors who have tried drugs is at its highest level in over a
decade. Compared to 1992, daily
use of marijuana -- within the previous 30
days, pardon me, increased by 700 percent
between '92 and '97.
KING:
What do you do, General, though, about demand? I mean, you have to have
demand.
JOHN ASHCROFT: Well, one of the things you do about demand is
that for -- particularly, in
young people -- you get their parents involved,
and you try to educate children away from
demand, and you try to lead
children away from demand. That's why I think it's so important to
have a
president who will speak forcefully against drug use than -- rather than wink
and give
the nod in some sense like saying, "Well, I didn't inhale but I wish
I had." That's just the wrong
signal to send.
--
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