Those inside-the-Beltway connections could pay off if eGetgoing becomes a provider of treatment programs that substitute for prison sentences. Last year in California, for example, voters passed Proposition 36, which diverts nonviolent drug offenders into court-supervised treatment instead of prison. Whether states will accept drug treatment over a modem is still unclear, but knowing the policymakers will be key for eGetgoing.

Karlin is also CEO of C.R.C. Health Corp., which owns 29 residential and outpatient drug and alcohol treatment centers around the country. He plans to merge the two companies and then take the new entity public next year. Has the Internet meltdown dimmed his optimism? Not at all. "There was a shakedown of Internet companies that shouldn't have been public in the first place," he says. "The companies that have a compelling solution are going to make a lot of money, and we of course hope to be one of them." The company raised $4 million last year, and is currently trying to close a $5 million round of financing. Karlin boasts that the company will have 70 percent gross profit margins.

McCaffrey's move to corporate America isn't so unusual; there's a tradition of former federal drug officials cashing in when they leave office. But the usual path from the public to private sector leads straight to the urinal: Drug-testing consulting businesses that work with corporations to keep employees clean have been the greener pastures of choice.

"It's amazing how these people who work in the drug war field end up profiting from it later," says Zeese. "Carleton Turner, Reagan's top drug advisor, he went on to become a drug-testing consultant. And Bob DuPont, the former head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, one of the lead drug warriors in the Ford and Carter years, he went on to become a drug-testing and security consultant for private companies on drug use in the workplace. He teamed up with Peter Bensinger, former head of the DEA."

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Compared with advising companies on how to get their office workers to pee in a cup, working for a for-profit dot-com drug treatment company seems downright progressive. And Zeese admits that the choice isn't entirely out of character for McCaffrey, based on his work in office: "He actually had a lot of rhetoric that was pretty good from a treatment perspective. 'We've got to treat it like a health problem. We can't arrest our way out of the problem.' But he couldn't make it happen in Congress without increasing the law enforcement budgets. And as a result, the treatment was primarily coerced treatment."

Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, who helped write the statute that created the office of drug czar, says: "It's in character with his rhetoric. I don't think it was in character with the actual budgets. He spoke fairly consistently about the need for an increase in treatment, but the other parts of the federal drug budget grew faster than the treatment portion."

The irony is that even in a best-case scenario, whatever online treatment services eGetgoing can offer drug addicts can't compare with what McCaffrey could have done had he had the political will and clout while in office.

For example, Sterling points out that in 1997 McCaffrey publicly challenged the Department of Defense over what he considered its inadequate commitment to the war on drugs, but he never made a similar challenge to the Department of Health and Human Services. "During the time that he was the drug czar, on the order of two-thirds of the hardcore drug addicts that needed treatment, according to the data in his annual reports to the nation, couldn't get it. We're talking about 3 million people per year unable to get treatment. The fraction of the gigantic HHS budget that could have been increased to adequately fund drug treatment was infinitesimal."

From a treatment perspective, the picture does not seem likely to get much brighter under the new administration. On Thursday, President Bush announced the nomination of John Walters as the new director of the Office of Drug Control Policy.

Of Walters, McCaffrey's likely successor, Sterling has this to say: "He thinks that not enough people are being prosecuted. He thinks that drug sentences are not long enough. He thinks that expanding the role of the military overseas is a good thing. He thinks that it makes sense to try to control the supply overseas."

Zeese sums it up: "The current drug czar that's being nominated today actually makes McCaffrey look like a softie. Everyone Bush is appointing is about as hawkish as you can imagine."

Which points to what may be the even greater irony: Perhaps we should all be rooting for McCaffrey's Internet treatment scheme, given the way the current administration's drug policy is shaping up.

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