Barry R Mccaffrey

National drug czar Barry McCaffrey offered an olive branch Thursday to Hollywood, saying he would like to make the industry a stronger player in the nation's war on illicit drugs. Although he said films and television send mixed messages, he avoided attacks on specific movies, programs or the people who produce them. The retired Army general spent an hour with about 30 network and studio executives, producers and actors at a meeting sponsored by the Entertainment Industries Council.

Doctors in California and Arizona who prescribe drugs like marijuana to patients under new state laws could lose their licenses and be prosecuted, a top Clinton administration official said. National Drug Control Policy Director Barry R. McCaffrey also warned federal workers on CBS-TV's "Face the Nation" program that they would still be breaking the law if they used marijuana or heroin prescribed by doctors.

Visiting U.S. drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey said that Marxist rebels are working in an "unholy alliance" with powerful drug gangs that threaten democracy here. A day earlier, two police officers were killed during a raid on a jungle cocaine-processing complex 125 miles south of Bogota, the capital. The deaths brought to 44 the number of police killed in such operations over the past 3 1/2 years.

Government officials told Congress on Tuesday that coca production in Colombia is up sharply, and the Clinton administration's efforts to deal with the problem drew fire from both Republicans and Democrats at a congressional hearing. Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, the head of the White House drug control office, said cocaine production in Colombia reached 520 metric tons last year compared with 435 in 1998 and 230 in 1995.

Americans spent $57.3 billion on illegal drugs in 1995, a catastrophic amount but down from previous years, according to a report from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. The report said estimated spending on cocaine, heroin, marijuana and other illicit drugs compared with $57.5 billion in 1994. It continued a downward trend from 1988, the first year of the study, when drug sales were estimated at $91.4 billion.

U.S. and Peruvian drug enforcement officials said Wednesday that efforts to restrict the flow of cocaine from Peru to Colombia have been highly successful but pledged broader cooperation to slow illicit drug shipments to the United States. Interdiction of drug flights from Peru to Colombia has been a crucial first step, officials said, because Peru is a major grower of coca plants that are processed into cocaine in Colombian laboratories operated by narcotics traffickers.

Former Assemblyman Tom Umberg will be sworn in as deputy to drug czar Barry R. McCaffrey in a White House ceremony today. Umberg, 42, will be the deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in charge of supply issues, dealing with law enforcement and foreign policy aspects of the nation's drug policy. He will earn $125,000 a year and will be the only Orange County resident serving in the Clinton administration.

With cocaine use waning, authorities waged the war on drugs this year with strategies tailored to the regional battlegrounds: marijuana in the Appalachian states, methamphetamine in the Rocky Mountains, cocaine in South Florida. "There is no longer any one drug that consumes America as cocaine did in the 1980s," said Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Two senior U.S. officials say President Clinton will link the fight against drugs to helping develop tiny Caribbean economies dwarfed by the resources of drug traffickers. Clinton's drug czar, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, and his special counselor for the Americas, Thomas "Mack" McLarty, said the administration will work to increase trade opportunities for Caribbean countries. But they offered no new money to supplement slumped U.S.