Pubdate: Wed, 28 Jan 2004
Source: New York Times ( NY )
Copyright: 2004 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Fox Butterfield
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Testing)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?225 (Students - United States)

JUSTICE DEPT. ENDS TESTING OF CRIMINALS FOR DRUG USE

The Justice Department has quietly ended a program to measure criminals' 
use of drugs and forecast new drug epidemics, citing budget cuts by Congress.

The program, the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program, or ADAM, tests 
newly arrested criminals entering jail for narcotics violations in 35 
cities.  Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d, in the Reagan administration, 
started it in 1986.

Law enforcement officials and criminal justice experts criticized ending 
the program, saying it was a useful tool in the battle against crime and 
drugs and was widely credited for tracking the rise and fall of the crack 
epidemic and detecting the beginning of the methamphetamine epidemic on the 
West Coast.

"This is a real loss," said Mark A.  R.  Kleiman, a professor of public 
policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is editor of The 
Drug Policy Analysis Bulletin.  "Closing down ADAM indicates a complete 
lack of seriousness about getting a handle on the drug abuse problem in 
this country."

Sarah V.  Hart, director of the National Institute of Justice, a research 
arm of the Justice Department, said she had decided to stop the program 
because of a lack of money.  The budget that Congress passed last week 
grants the institute $6 million a year in discretionary money for social 
science research, Ms.  Hart said, down from $20 million for the 2003 fiscal 
year.  The tests for drugs in jail alone costs $8.4 million a year.

"We can't put every dime into one methodology for drug testing," Ms.  Hart 
said.  "We have obligations to do research in many other areas of the 
criminal justice system," including the court system, helping prosecutors 
manage caseloads and reducing domestic violence.

A number of law enforcement officials and drug experts questioned the 
institute's support for the program and said the Justice Department and the 
White House Office of National Drug Control Policy should have lobbied 
Congress harder for money to continue the testing.

"Nobody I know, including me, has been able to get Sarah Hart to answer a 
phone call or e-mail about ADAM in months," said Bruce Johnson, an official 
with the National Development and Research Institutes Inc. in New York who 
manages the jail tests in Manhattan.

Ms. Hart said she had approached officials of the Bureau of Justice 
Statistics, outside the ADAM program, and asked them to come up with a 
smaller, less-expensive version.  One of those officials, Allen J.  Beck, 
said that he had been working for months to develop such a program but that 
the lack of financing now made it impossible to start even that smaller 
program.

Professor Kleiman said ending ADAM reflected what he and other drug experts 
said was a misallocation of resources in the fight against drugs.  The 
government, he said, is paying $50 million a year through the Substance 
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for a household survey on 
drug use.  The survey asks people to report drug abuse voluntarily and does 
not require urine tests, as the jail program does.

In addition, the survey is conducted among people who may use drugs only 
recreationally, Professor Kleiman said.

As a result, the household survey detects about 30 tons of cocaine use a 
year, he said, when the real total consumption is close to 300 tons.

"The household survey is missing about 90 percent of the cocaine that is 
used," Professor Kleiman said.

A reason the survey misses so much drug use, he said, is that "the great 
bulk of cocaine is consumed by heavy users, three-quarters of whom are 
criminally active." Those are the people counted in the jail program.

Professor Kleiman noted that ending the jail program occurred as President 
Bush, in his State of the Union address last week, called for spending an 
additional $23 million to test students for drugs.  Professor Kleiman said 
that students consumed relatively small quantities of hard drugs and that 
no studies showed that school-based testing deterred drug use.

"With that $23 million, we could run ADAM for three years," he said.

But a spokeswoman for the White House, Claire Buchan, said Mr. Bush 
believed that "drug testing has been shown to be effective in stopping 
students from taking drugs."

An official of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said 
that he had "enormous respect" for the jail testing but that budget 
realities had forced the administration to rethink it. The administration 
is working on a leaner, less expensive version that will provide a national 
estimate of drug use among criminals, something that the current program 
did not do, because its figures are local. 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake