Martinez, Bob

Bob Martinez (1934–) was the drug czar of the United States, serving as the second director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy from 1991 to 1993, having been appointed by President George H. W. Bush. Prior to this appointment, he had been both an educator and a politician, teaching in his hometown of Tampa, Florida, in the 1960s and 1970s before running for mayor of Tampa in 1979.

While mayor, he changed his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. He later served as governor of Florida from 1987 to 1991, during which time Jeb Bush (son of George H. W. Bush, and future governor) was his secretary of commerce. Florida, particularly South Florida, had experienced serious drug problems since at least the late 1970s, and increasing spending on state antinarcotics and drug education programs while decreasing wasteful spending elsewhere was one of Governor Martinez's principal concerns. (Nationally, Martinez was best known for ordering the arrest and prosecution of Miami rap group 2 Live Crew for violating obscenity laws with their lyrics.) Martinez was appointed shortly after losing his reelection campaign.

As drug czar, Martinez was tasked with the oversight, coordination, and evaluation of the [Page 494]executive branch's anti-drug efforts both domestically and abroad, as performed by the various agencies involved—and to advise the president on the particulars of the country's anti-drug efforts. Essentially, Martinez's job was to act as liaison between the president and the various federal entities concerned with narcotics.

Generally, political appointees like the drug czar do most of their work beyond the view of the public eye, and have little to say to the press except in response to some specific event. Martinez was a key exception to this pattern during the 1992 presidential election, when he was especially outspoken in his criticisms of Reform Party candidate Ross Perot. Martinez addressed the U.S. Conference of Mayors—having been chosen as a speaker in large part because he was a former mayor who had risen to such a position—and departed from his prepared speech to declare, “This nation didn't gain a hard-won victory in the Cold War only to surrender its constitutional liberties to a secretive computer salesman with a penchant for skullduggery.”

Perot, who had advised the governor of Texas on drug policy in the early 1980s, called for greatly expanding the “War on Drugs,” and making it a literal war by declaring martial law, expanding wiretap powers, rating judges according to the severity of their sentencing in drug crimes, and even suspending habeas corpus to cordon off neighborhoods for the purpose of house-to-house searches for drugs. Some officials may simply have defended their department from the implied criticism, but Martinez spared no words in condemning the candidate's plans, later saying that he thought Perot viewed the War on Drugs as “a civil war,” and that he showed no apparent sensitivity to civil liberties.

Though there had been a “drug czar” of one sort of another since the Nixon administration, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, where the drug czar has resided since 1988, was still new when Martinez came to it, and his tenure was marked by a continual staff shake-up and other effects of ongoing reorganization and settling in. This, and Martinez's low headline presence compared to predecessor William Bennett (a Washington veteran), gave rise to frequent, and possibly founded, rumors that Martinez was going to be promoted out of the office to a diplomatic post, and replaced with someone more effective.

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