"I am probably the only NIH institute director who goes to a cocktail party and the first 12 people who come up to me tell me how to fix the drug problem," Leshner said recently. "The director of the National Cancer Institute doesn't have that problem."

But Leshner, a key player in the Clinton administration's controversial war on drugs who works closely with drug czar Barry McCaffrey, is not complaining. He has managed to survive, and even thrive, in his high-profile job since 1994 -- not an unusually long tenure for an NIH director, but a lifetime for most politically sensitive public policy positions in Washington. Under his stewardship, NIDA's budget, which is largely spent on research into substance abuse, has nearly doubled. And Leshner dismisses the notion that he is a shill for the administration's anti-drug policies.

"We're the science guys," Leshner says. "Our job is to provide accurate scientific information. And since we understand that drug use basically is bad for you -- from a public health perspective, not an ideology perspective -- we think people shouldn't engage in the behavior."

But some critics have a less benign view of his role. They say he has supported research that bolsters the administration's point of view, failed to fund projects that could undermine it, opposed research into medical marijuana and used images drawn from advanced medical technology to create misleading anti-drug campaigns.

"He's the propaganda minister in the war on drugs," says one sharp critic, Mark Kleiman, a University of California at Los Angeles public policy professor. He slips into a mock-German accent to deride Leshner's claims of objectivity: "Of course, Dr. Leshner would say that all he cares about is the 'zzzience.' He's convinced that if you can use 'zzzience' to show that drug abuse is a disease, you'll get people to stop hating drug addicts. But that approach doesn't work. All he does is reinforce that these drugs are bad and therefore we should be more repressive."

Because of the emotional nature of the issue, Leshner is used to being a lightning rod for criticism from those, like Kleiman, who challenge both his priorities and his methods. A psychologist who previously served as acting director of the National Institute on Mental Health, Leshner, 56, makes no apologies for his tough-guy swagger, which he says he honed while spending summers at his grandparents' borscht-belt hotel. He gleefully describes himself as "obnoxious," acknowledges that he is "hated" and spells out his mission with no apparent doubts about the purity of his motives.

"I'm not the NIH director responsible for bungee jumping," he says. "I'm in charge of speaking with people about the risks associated with drug abuse. It's your business if you want to smoke marijuana. I just present you with the data."

In helping to sell public health messages to young people, Leshner himself acknowledges, he's swimming against a backwash of skepticism about government anti-drug messages that's only been heightened by the vapid "just say no" campaigns of the past. "This is a constant uphill battle," Leshner says. "A lot of people are going to assume that everything we put out is hyperbolic."

NIDA spends most of its $780 million budget on research about drug abuse, with programs focusing on treatment, prevention, epidemiology and the biology of addiction. Few critics complain about that peer-reviewed process, although some believe Leshner should be pushing NIDA to fund investigations of alternative drug policies, such as decriminalization in other countries.