How about joining a dot-com that plans to charge drug addicts and alcoholics $1,200 for a 12-week group treatment program over the Web?

That's the premise of a San Jose Internet company with the unfortunate name eGetgoing, which Gen. Barry McCaffrey is lending his name and contacts to as a consultant. Now that McCaffrey has left the public-sector side of the war on drugs, he has taken up with a company that views heavy drinkers and drug addicts as a tantalizing target market of millions.

With the profit motive now on his side, treating addicts as an audience to capture instead of criminals to prosecute seems to suit McCaffrey: "EGetgoing will be a historic contribution to reducing drug and alcohol abuse in America," he crowed in a press statement. "EGetgoing's new Internet-based delivery mechanism will dramatically increase the likelihood that multiple millions of compulsive drug and alcohol users will find help." And so on.

As an advisor to the company, McCaffrey has been making TV appearances to promote it on local news affiliates, like the Bay Area Fox channel. He has introduced eGetgoing's corporate officers around Washington. He has even circulated a funding solicitation on his new consulting firm's letterhead to potential investors. "When you have the highest federal officer in the nation committing to a company like eGetgoing in its infancy," marvels CEO Barry Karlin, "it has given us a credibility which would have taken several years to try to build up. It gives us access to all kinds of people. That was obviously a real coup for us."

Some drug policy reformers don't quite see it that way. They're having a good laugh e-mailing the funding documents to each other. Mark Greer, a longtime critic of McCaffrey's policies who is executive director of DrugSense.org, wrote in an e-mail with the subject line "McCzar Hits Bottom :)," "If McCzar is actually affiliated with this loser of an idea, they must either have more money than sense and have paid him dearly for his involvement or perhaps they have convinced him that it could be a real dot-com winner and to partner with them on promises of future riches."

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Kevin Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy, says he has heard two reactions to McCaffrey's new gig among his fellow drug policy wonks: "It's a rip-off, and it's an Internet company that's likely to fail. You can look on the Web and find free Narcotics Anonymous in any city in the country. Come on, anyone who invests in this is making a mistake."

EGetgoing's Karlin says that the service isn't out to replace the free support that Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous provide. Instead the company will provide licensed counselors to lead group treatment sessions akin to the therapy you'd pay for at an outpatient drug treatment center. Of course, you'll never actually meet your therapist or see any of the other patients, because the whole thing will take place over videoconferencing software and voice-over IP.

The bumper sticker possibilities are endless: "Don't shoot up, dial up." "Need to light up? Log on!" Could the mighty Internet do what the federal government with all its tens of billions of dollars can't -- provide drug users with access to treatment instead of just locking them up, or has someone been smoking too much free-market rhetoric laced with Net euphoria circa 1998?

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