Last summer, Colombian police arrested six of the seven leaders of the Cali mafia, a notorious drug-trafficking organization that controlled 80 percent of the world's cocaine market and almost one-third of its heroin production. Gen. Rosso Serano, the director of the Colombian police, was quick to acknowledge U.S. government assistance: "The help of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)was fundamental," he said.

The CIA had supplied Colombian officials with telephone monitoring devices and had flown surveillance missions to trace the movements of the traffickers. The Drug Enforcement Administration had helped to gather intelligence and plan operations. In September, the DEA persuaded the Cali mafia's chief administrative officer, an insider expected to provide details about the organization's trade routes, security and communications, to surrender to U.S. authorities.

U.S. agency officials heralded the Cali arrests as a good use of federal drug-control dollars: "Taking out the leadership of the Cali cartel was a remarkable achievement," one official told The Washington Post. "It dramatically changes the face of narcotics trafficking."

Back in the United States, citizens groups are not so sure. "The effect of the arrests might be a temporary lessening of supply of illegal drugs in the United States," says Cheryl Anthony Epps, director of governmental affairs at the Drug Policy Foundation, a Washington-based drug policy reform group. "But it will be temporary. That is, until the next rung of traffickers moves up and takes control" of the Cali mafia's old business.

Congress, too, is critical of federal drug control efforts, but for the opposite reason. It thinks federal agencies should be spending more money on the kind of activities that contributed to the capture of the Cali mafia bosses -- investigating drug-trafficking organizations at home and abroad, cooperating with counter-narcotics officials in drug-producing countries, interdicting drugs at the U.S. border. Over the past few years, Congress has done its best to restrain what many members perceive as the Clinton Administration's overeager embrace of treatment and prevention initiatives by refusing to appropriate additional funds for these initiatives.

Whether federal agencies need to support more drug treatment or practice more law enforcement is a hotly debated question because both sides agree on one point: In its present incarnation, the United States' national drug policy, a strategy that engages over 50 federal agencies in programs designed to halt the distribution and use of illegal drugs, has managed to curb neither the supply of narcotics nor Americans' demand for them. Last year alone, Americans purchased $ 70 billion worth of illegal drugs.

The U.S. State Department estimates that the worldwide potential net production of opium increased from 2,590 metric tons to 3,699 metric tons, or by 43 percent, between 1988 and 1994. While the cultivation of coca leaf in South America -- from which the cocaine consumed in the United States is derived -- declined by nine percent over the same period, according to Abt Associates Inc., U.S. officials estimate that coca cultivators are still producing three times what is necessary to supply the U.S. drug market. Based on drug prices (which tend to go down as availability increases) and purity levels (which tend to go up), U.S. agencies report that cocaine, heroin, and marijuana are more readily available in the United States today than they were five years ago.

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) estimates that there are 2.7 million "hardcore" drug users -- those most likely to commit crimes to obtain drugs -- in America today. This is more than triple the estimated number five years ago. Casual drug use among all Americans has remained constant since 1992, according to the 1994 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse, but it is rising sharply among teenagers. The study reports that twice as many 12- to 17-year-olds smoked marijuana in 1994 as in 1992.

Agency heads ascribe the inability of their anti-drug programs to reverse the growth of either the supply of drugs or demand for them to insufficient funding and the lack of political will to make drug control a top priority. "I don't think the war [on drugs] has ever been fought," Drug Enforcement Administration Director Thomas Constantine told Government Executive in an interview earlier this year. "Because, if you're going to fight a war to win and survive, you use tremendous assets, sacrifice, and national will." It may strike some as odd that Constantine and other agency personnel consider their current assets to be insufficient: At a time when most federal agency programs are facing cuts or even elimination, the President's budget request for fiscal 1996 would create the biggest drug-control budget ever, totalling $14.6 billion, or $2.4 billion more than in fiscal 1995. But, Constantine explains, "the drug peddlers can keep spending billions of dollars a year, so they're outstripping us."

More of the Same

Federal anti-drug programs cost taxpayers $13.2 billion in fiscal 1995, with supply-reduction initiatives -- domestic law enforcement, interdiction, and international programs -- consuming 64 percent of the drug-control budget. Demand-reduction initiatives -- treatment, prevention, and research programs -- shared the rest.

Still, it is commonly held that the Clinton Administration's most significant departure from the drug-fighting strategies of the past is in its anti-drug rhetoric rather than in its policies. While President Bush spoke of federal agencies waging a "war" against drug users as well as drug traffickers and promised Americans that his policies would ensure that "this scourge will stop," Clinton Administration officials strike a less draconian pose. Lee Brown, then director of ONDCP, announced in 1993 that he would not use the term "war" to describe federal anti-drug activities since, he said, it implies the government is fighting "a 'war' against its own people." The 1995 strategy document promotes education and treatment rather than prosecution and punishment as the way out of the drug crisis. Attorney General Janet Reno has spoken out against mandatory minimum sentences, criticizing them for filling prisons with small-time drug offenders when space is needed for violent criminals.

Congress has repeatedly denied Clinton White House attempts to turn such new rhetoric into a new emphasis in federal drug-control programs. For example, when the Administration proposed to increase funds for treatment programs by $355 million -- the largest increase ever -- in its drug control budget request for fiscal 1994, Congress appropriated only $57 million worth of new funds; when Administration officials wrote a provision authorizing $100 million to be spent on drug courts in fiscal 1995 into the 1994 Crime Act, Congress appropriated only $11.9 million.

Malthea Falco, a former assistant secretary of state for international narcotics matters and president of Drug Strategies, a nonprofit drug policy reform group, says that because the treatment and prevention programs that "the strategy itself talks quite eloquently about" aren't backed up by increased funding, Clinton era anti-drug programs only offer "more of the same." Unfortunately, as drug policy reformers see it, that means more programs that don't work.

The Small Picture

Many federal anti-drug initiatives are successful in arresting drug peddlers and seizing contraband. Nevertheless, three-quarters of the American public thinks the drug war is a failure, according to an August 1994 CBS poll.

Drug policy reformers such as Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke argue that the federal effort "has not borne fruit; that is, it has not made the United States even close to drug free. Millions of Americans continue to violate our drug laws every year by using or selling illegal drugs."

Agency heads say that the fruit of their anti-drug programs is to be found in the small picture. "To those who say we've spent $100 billion, what do we have to show for it," says David Mactas, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment at the Department of Health and Human Services, "I say tens of thousands of lives restored to people, some of whom are now legislators, judges, counselors, bus drivers."

DEA Director Constantine sees success in the neighborhoods that federal law enforcement agencies have helped reclaim for residents. He offers New Haven, Connecticut, as an example. In 1992, the DEA, Bureau of Tobacco and Firearms, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and U.S. Marshals Service combined forces with New Haven municipal law enforcement agencies to squelch drug-related violence and drug trafficking in New Haven's crime-ridden neighborhoods. The group, called the New Haven Drug Gang Task Force, used intelligence gathered by the New Haven Police Department and stiff federal sentencing laws to dismantle or disrupt three gangs in two years. New Haven's murder rate dropped from a high of 34 in 1991 to 20 in 1993, its lowest point since 1986.

Critics also contend that federal agencies fail to fight the drug war cost-effectively. A recent report by the Drug Strategies group asserts that agencies could get more bang for their buck if they increased spending on treatment programs and research. The report cites a 1994 Rand Corp. study that found that every $1 spent treating cocaine users is worth $7 spent on law enforcement. The report argues that more research is needed to ensure that the programs agencies fund are the programs that produce the best results.

Presently, four percent of the federal drug-control budget supports research, and agencies spend only one-tenth of this funding to evaluate law enforcement and interdiction programs, even though such programs comprise the bulk of federal agencies' anti-drug efforts.

Agency heads, however, say they are seeking to improve their programs' cost-effectiveness by increasing interagency cooperation rather than by adjusting spending priorities. As Constantine sees it, law enforcement, treatment, and prevention programs are intertwined: "Community groups can only be effective if you stabilize the community. You can't infuse rehabilitation and prevention programs in the middle of chaos." Therefore, he argues, law enforcement, treatment, and prevention initiatives all "have to be funded adequately to be successful. To take money from rehabilitation or prevention to increase law enforcement would be a mistake. And to take money from law enforcement to increase rehabilitation or prevention would be a mistake."

Mactas attributes the public's poor assessment of federal drug-control programs to unrealistic expectations. Federal drug control programs "are held to a standard that no one else is," he says. "'Solution' is a goal to which no other agencies are working. I believe this is all rooted in the way people feel about substance abusers -- they're dirty, they're no one I know, they threaten my safety." Compare this to assessments of federal cancer research, Mactas says. "Does that receive the stigma that it has wasted money because it has failed to find a solution?" Yet some drug policy reformers maintain that all they expect from federal anti-drug programs is that they grapple with what Colombian attorney general Gustavo de Grieff has called "the central fact of the drug trade": In de Grieff's words, the fact that "as long as a kilo of cocaine changes in value from $ 500 to perhaps $ 20,000 by virtue of the short flight from Colombia to the United States, there will always be people who will be willing to enter the business." Drug Policy Foundation president Arnold Trebach says he believes federal drug policy "is wrong, root and branch, because it attempts to enforce prohibition" and argues that "there should be a broader debate" on what constitutes effective drug control. Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke has called for the federal government to create a national commission to study how all drugs, legal and illegal, might be regulated.

Meanwhile, agency heads expect the impact of their programs to become more apparent in the future. Says Mactas, federal agencies "haven't been fighting very long." The DEA's Constantine agrees. "The best I can see," he says, "it took us 30 years to get into this. It might take 10 or 15 years of tremendous effort to get out."

The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, headed by a cabinet-level director, coordinates the federal government's anti-drug programs by issuing a national drug-control strategy each year and ensuring that agencies comply with the strategy's guidelines.

Agencies wrestle with the drug crisis on three fronts. Inside the United States, the Justice Department (primarily through the Bureau of Prisons and the Drug Enforcement Administration), the Treasury Department, and the federal courts run law enforcement programs that target drug traffickers, financiers, and users. Other domestic efforts include programs operated by the departments of Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, and Justice to expand and improve the drug-treatment system, research medications for treating addiction, and incorporate drug treatment into the criminal justice system. And HHS and the Department of Education administer federal prevention initiatives, which include disseminating prevention information and ensuring that federally funded educational institutions implement drug prevention programs.

Along the U.S. border, the Coast Guard, the Customs Service, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service attempt to interdict and destroy drugs entering the country by land, air, and sea. The Defense Department provides detection, monitoring and intelligence support.

Outside the United States, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development run programs that support, train and assist foreign drug-law enforcement and crop-eradication units and encourage foreign farmers to switch from growing drug crops to growing legal crops. The State Department also annually reviews the anti-drug actions taken by the governments of major illicit drug-producing nations and grants them "certification" if it deems that the governments are fully cooperating with U.S. counter narcotics efforts. Only certified countries may receive foreign aid from the United States.

Inter-agency initiatives are a growing trend in federal drug control. For example:

• The DEA and Internal Revenue Service set up a private bank in Anguilla, British West Indies, in 1994, where, for six months, DEA special agents William Malarney, Albert "Skip" Latson, and IRS agent Bill Bruton laundered drug proceeds for members of the Cali mafia. The initiative, dubbed Operation Dinero, resulted in 88 arrests and the seizure of about nine tons of cocaine and more than $ 50 million in cash and property, including paintings by Picasso, Rubens, and Reynolds.

• Last November, the DEA and the Department of Health and Human Services' Center for Substance Abuse Prevention teamed up to host a conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, to promote partnerships between law enforcement and prevention agencies and community-based anti-drug organizations.

• The FBI and the DEA have established DRUGX, a common drug index database which combines information on counter drug investigations from FBI databases with data in the DEA's Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System.