Your Facts Are Correct, But

Buried in the New York Times the day after Thanksgiving was an amazing interview with Thomas Constantine, head of the Clinton administration's Drug Enforcement Administration from March 1994 until his retirement last summer. Despite being the nation's top drug-enforcement official for five years, Constantine told reporter Tim Golden, he never once was called on to brief the president, or even chat with him about drug policy.

Constantine was especially disturbed by what he saw as a concerted effort in the administration to ignore the drug trade in Mexico. "I watched that situation for five and a half years, and every year it became worse," he told Golden. "We were not adequately protecting the citizens of the United States from these organized-crime figures."

But the DEA's annual evaluation of Mexico's efforts to combat drugs was regularly whitewashed by Constantine's superiors in the administration: "The policy makers from the National Security Council and the State Department started with the premise that they were going to certify Mexico," Constantine said. "Their question was, 'How do we get around the facts presented by Tom Constantine?'"

According to the Times, "other Clinton administration officials were resolute: American concerns about Mexico's corruption and drug-trafficking problems were secondary to trade and other economic interests. 'The idea was, if you said those things publicly, if you release documents, you will just aggravate the situation,' [Constantine] said. 'My concern was that we had kids in this country dropping like flies. Maybe that was parochial, but I felt like I was the only person there who felt like that. . . . Everyone would say, 'Your facts are correct, but there are bigger policy issues involved.'"