Riding The Drug Issue

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Let's face it, none of the candidates is in favor of drugs. Assailing crack and coke is a little like supporting apple pie and motherhood -- except that voters rarely get passionate about apple pie. Usually in a campaign, such unanimity on an issue would make it about as important as the debate over the Law of the Sea Treaty. But not so with drugs, especially not last week in New York.

The state primary was an appropriate setting for an antidrug message; sometimes it seems that New York City is Ground Zero for drug abuse in America. Last week, as the Democratic presidential campaign moved into high gear in anticipation of New York's critical voting, all three Democratic candidates trumpeted their own fight against drugs. Republican George Bush, not to be outdone, came to town to tout his credentials as a leader in the war against drugs, providing a rehearsal for the opening skirmish in the general election campaign. In Washington, meanwhile, the Senate was getting into the act with a measure authorizing increased spending in the drug war and cracking down on Mexico with a political fervor that belied common sense.

In a primary season that has lacked emotional issues, drugs is the one subject thus far that seems to touch the voters directly, viscerally. Unlike the national debt and the trade deficit, it is neither abstruse nor abstract. It is a backyard issue. It is also one with wide appeal: it allows a candidate to sound tough in both domestic and foreign affairs while arousing passions among all economic groups, from the mean streets of the South Bronx to the manicured lawns of Westchester County. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll showed that Americans believed, 3 to 1, that fighting the flow of drugs into the country was more important than fighting Communism.

For a long time, the war on drugs was Jesse Jackson's signature tune, his issue. Fifteen years ago, Jackson was decrying drugs as America's public enemy No. 1. The drug issue is -- and has been -- the strongest, the most reassuring, the most universally appealing part of his populist message, the theme that seems to take some of the sting out of his radicalism. He speaks more convincingly, more plainly about drugs than about any other subject. No other candidate comes close to the reaction Jackson gets when he calls out "Down with dope. Up with hope." None can match his personal urgency. As the other candidates have incorporated an antidrug theme into their campaigns, Jackson has mocked them for stealing his drug message. His rivals, he says -- and he puts George Bush in that camp -- have recently become "sergeants and lieutenants" in the antidrug war. "I am a five-star general," he explains.

The Democrats are pretty much preaching similar messages; the contest concerns who can sound the most convincing. They all castigate the Reagan Administration for big talk but little action in the war against drugs. All of them threaten to cut off aid to foreign nations that refuse to cooperate in stopping the flow of drugs. All urge more support for the Coast Guard, Customs and the Drug Enforcement Agency. All endorse the idea of a drug czar and increased funding for drug treatment and rehabilitation programs.