The United States should employ some of the techniques it is using to fight international terrorism in its war on drugs, U.S. drug czar John Walters said on Tuesday.

Interviewed a day before President Bush was due to release his national drug control strategy for 2005, Walters said international drug traffickers shared many characteristics with terrorist networks, although there were also some important differences.

“Maybe the brutal experience we’ve had with terror helps to make this more concrete and understandable,” he said.

Like terrorist networks, most drug organizations were no longer centrally controlled, with one command running the trade all the way from production to distribution, or as Walters put it, “from the farm to the arm.”

That made the drugs trade harder to disrupt since individual cells that were put out of commission by law enforcement agencies could easily be replaced.

On the other hand, Walters said it ought to be easier to go after drugs traffickers than terrorists because the drugs trade involved many thousands of people, making it potentially more vulnerable to attack and disruption.

“We now have tools and ways of sharing intelligence and looking at these organizations more as businesses. We begin to ask questions ... Where is it most particularly vulnerable? What does it take to cause a disruption in those markets?”

Success would be measured not so much by calculating the amount of illegal drugs seized, as in the past, as by measuring the flow of drugs to U.S. markets.

In his annual drug strategy document, Bush proposed spending a total of $12.4 billion this year, an increase of 2.2 percent over fiscal 2005.

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The administration has singled out two domestic programs for major increases while targeting others for deep cuts or elimination. It wants to raise funding for random drugs testing in schools from $10 million to $25.4 million, arguing that such testing is “powerful, safe and effective.”

It also wants to spend over $30 million more on setting up drugs courts, which aim to place users into treatment rather than sending them to prison. In the past year alone, some 400 of these courts have begun operating, bringing the total nationwide to 1,621.

Walters said this approach flowed from Bush’s understanding that drug addiction was a disease and had to be attacked as such. Previous administrations had treated it more as a law-and-order problem.

“There are tools we can use given the current understanding that this is a disease,” he said. “This is a disease that is begun by our children and adolescents.”

Among the administration’s suggested program cuts were a 60 percent reduction in a program called “methamphetamine hot spots” which funds law enforcement, prosecution and environmental clean-up. The use of methamphetamine is soaring in rural America.

It would also eliminate the Safe and Drug-Free Schools program, leaving state and local governments to fund school-based drug prevention programs.