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National Drug Control Strategy Update 2003
February 2003
- Stopping Use Before It Starts:
Education and Community Action
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ONDCPNational Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign: $170 million. The fiscal year 2004
Presidents Budget continues funding for ONDCPs Media Campaign, which uses paid advertising
and grassroots public outreach to educate the Nations families, parents, and youth about drug use and
its consequences. Targeted, high-impact media messagesat both the national and local levelsseek
to reduce drug use through changes in adolescents perceptions of the danger and social disapproval of
drugs. In a continuing effort to reach the Nations youth, the Media Campaign has recently undergone
a significant revision and instituted a new strategy. This new strategy requires testing of all television
advertising for effectiveness before airing; a shift of the youth target audience to focus on ages 1416,
the years during which youth appear to be at greater risk for initiating drug use; reduction in the
number of youth-strategic message platforms from three to two, for a more focused approach;
modification of the Media Campaign to focus primarily on the prevention of marijuana use by youth;
more oversight by ONDCP in the creative/ad development process; and a harder-hitting ad style.
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ONDCPDrug-Free Communities Program: $70 million. This program assists community
groups in forming and sustaining effective community and anti-drug coalitions that fight the use of
illegal drugs. These coalitions work toward reducing substance abuse among youth and strengthening
collaboration among organizations and agencies in both the private and public sectors, and serve as
catalysts for increased citizen participation in strategic planning to reduce drug use over time. In
addition, Drug-Free Community coalitions are expected to synthesize data from all available sources
to better document the nature and extent of local drug problems, including the underage use of alcohol
and tobacco and any use of illicit drugs and inhalants. To further the efforts of these important coalitions,
the Administration proposes an increase of $10 million over the fiscal year 2003 requested level.
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EducationSafe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities (SDFSC) Program:
$694 million ($584 million drug related). The fiscal year 2004 Presidents Budget determined that
this program is ineffective, and recommends the investigation of new strategies for measuring program
performance and distributing funds. The Budget makes a modest reduction in funding for this schoolbased drug prevention program, which reaches young people in most of the Nations school districts,
until the program can demonstrate results. SDFSC funds are appropriated directly for State Grants
and National Programs. State Grants provide funding to all 50 governors and state education agencies.
As part of the National Programs budget in fiscal year 2004, $8 million is requested for a competitive
grant program that will provide for drug testing, assessment, referral, and intervention. Drug testing
has been shown to be effective at reducing drug use in schools and businesses across the country. This
funding will expand drug testing efforts initiated by the Department of Education in fiscal year 2003.
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Corporation for National and Community ServiceParents Drug Corps Initiative:
$5 million. This initiative will establish a program to support and encourage parents to help children
stay drug free. This program will provide matching funds to national parents organizations to train
thousands of parents nationwide in how to reduce drug abuse and form parent drug prevention groups.
Prevention efforts are our first line of defense
against illegal drug use. Such efforts hold out
the promise of preventing drug use before it
starts and sparing families the anguish of
watching a loved one slip into the grasp of
addiction. Although we face a major challenge
in driving down drug usewith 16 million
past-month (current) users and six million in
need of drug treatmentour Nations strategy
for preventing the use of illegal drugs has much
to recommend it. The fact is that although 7 percent of Americans use an illegal drug on a current basis, 93 percent do not. Legal
substances such as alcohol are inherently more
difficult to control, and the numbers show it,
with 109 million current users, 13 million of
whom need help. Similarly, alcohol use among
young people is more prevalent than use of
illegal drugs.
Drug prevention programsparticularly those
programs that are research-based and involve
the communityare invaluable in educating
young people about the dangers of drug use
and reinforcing a climate of social disapproval
of drug use. The Federal Government supports
such programs both with funding and by
supplying the best available evidence, technology,
and tools.
But drug prevention makes for a difficult public
policy discussion because prevention activities are
not, for the most part, discrete, government-funded programs. In fact, they can best be
understood as the sum of the efforts parents and
communities make in bringing up young people.
Unfortunately, for too many years, the popular
culture has not supported parents seeking to
educate their children about the dangers of
drug use and to empower them to make good
decisions. In music, film, and television, drug use
has too often been portrayed as glamorous and exciting, drug users and even drug dealers as free-spirited nonconformists.
Worse, well-funded legalization groups have
spread misinformation about the effects of drugs.
They have even insinuated to young people that
drug use is an adolescent rite of passage and that
adults who tell them otherwise are seeking to
limit opportunities for personal growth that are
rightfully theirs.
Such misinformation has taken on the force of
law in states where legalization groups have
pushed through a series of state referenda to
legalize medical marijuana. Legalization
lobbyists have portrayed their agenda as a
representation of popular will, as though
parents and communities were seeking to bring
more drugs into their schools and homes.
Operating with the benefit of slick ad campaigns,
with virtually no opposition, and making
outlandish claims that deceive well-meaning
citizens, campaign proponents have tallied up an
impressive string of victories.
That is, until now: in 2002, the movement
lost key referenda and similar efforts in four
states (Nevada, Arizona, Ohio, and South
Dakota), and otherwise failed to proceed with
efforts in Florida and Michigan.
The sheer comprehensiveness of the failure is
impressive: losses ranged from a Nevada effort
to legalize possession and use of marijuana, to an Ohio proposal that would have gutted
that states ability to incarcerate drug dealers
and provide drug treatment to prisoners, to a greatly expanded medical marijuana initiative
in Arizona.
A small band of wealthy backers spent millions
of dollars on various campaigns last year; their
across-the-board defeat suggests something of
what citizens in targeted states actually think
of the deceptions they were offered. The record
of 2002 also suggests that the mood of
national seriousness following the September 11
attacks is less open to self-indulgent social
engineering than some had hoped.
The ultimate direction of that mood is
significant, and probably critical, to the success
of our Nations drug control efforts, which,
like efforts to regulate smoking and alcohol use,
owe much to public awareness and an engaged
citizenry. As examples, the charts on these
pages illustrate the major reductions in smoking
that followed the 1964 Surgeon Generals
report linking cigarettes with health problems,
and the imposition of federal restrictions on
tobacco sales to minors in 1992.
Similarly, the data on the prevalence of
drug use shows the steep reductions in use that
followed the national mobilization started in 1985 by Nancy Reagans Just Say No
campaign. Like smoking and other social
pathologies, drug use is a problem that
responds to societal pressure; when we push
against this problem, it gets smaller.
Figure 4: Trends in Cigarette Use, 19002000. Annual per Capita Consumption of Cigarettes
for Those 18 Years and Over |
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Note: Data for 2000 are preliminary.
Sources: For 1900�1974: Tobacco Yearbook, 1981. Col. Clem Cockrel.
Bowling Green, KY, p. 53. For 1975�1981: U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Tobacco Situation and Outlook Report. Rockville, MD: Commodity Economics
Division, Economic Research Service, 1985.Table 2, p. 6. For 1982�1989: U.S.
Department of Agriculture. Tobacco Situation and Outlook Report. Rockville,
MD: Commodity Economics Division, Economic Research Service, 1992.
Table 2, p. 4. For 1990�2000: U.S. Department of Agriculture. Tobacco Situation
and Outlook Report.Washington, DC: Market and Trade Economics Division,
Economic Research Service, 2000. Table 2. |
Figure 5: Trends in Illicit Drug Use, 19741998
Percent Past Month Marijuana and Cocaine
Users among Those Ages 18�25 |
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Sources: For 1974�1978: U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, Office of Applied Studies. National Household Survey on
Drug Abuse: Highlights 1991. Rockville,MD, 1993. Table A.10, p. 78.
For 1979�1998 data: U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, Office of Applied Studies. Summary of Findings from the
1998 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. Rockville,MD, 1999.
Table 12, p. 74; Table 13, p. 75.
Adapted from charts originally published in �Substance Abuse: The Nation�s
Number One Health Problem.� Reprinted with permission from Robert
Woods Johnson Foundation. |
Figure 7: Trends in Alcohol Use, 18501997
Annual per Capita Consumption in Gallons
of Ethanol |
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Notes: Alcohol consumption is measured by converting the gallons of sold or
shipped wine, beer and spirits into gallons of ethanol (pure alcohol), using
estimates of average ethanol content for each beverage type. Per capita
estimates are then calculated per person age 15 and older prior to 1970 and per
person age 14 and older thereafter.
Source: National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Division of
Biometry and Epidemiology. Apparent Per Capita Alcohol Consumption:
National, State, and Regional Trends, 1977�1997. Surveillance Report No. 51.
December 1999. Table 1, p. 16. |
A Boost for Student
Drug Testing Programs
For young people in middle and high school,
drug testing programs are an effective means of
identifying those in need of drug treatment or
counselingand discouraging others from ever
starting. But until recently, the legal future of
school drug testing programs was unclear.
In a landmark decision last summer, the U.S.
Supreme Court gave a boost to schools struggling
to combat illegal drugs. By upholding an
Oklahoma school districts drug testing policy, the
Court cleared the way for schools everywhere to
perform random drug tests on a broad segment of
the student population. The decision marks the
beginning of a hopeful new phase in the effort to
keep our children drug free.
Previous Court rulings were restricted to the testing
of student athletes. The new ruling expands the
scope of drug testing to include not only boys and
girls who play sports, but those who participate in
any competitive extracurricular activity, from
cheerleading to the debate team. Now, public
middle and high schools everywhere can more
effectively gauge their drug problem and direct
students in trouble to the treatment they need.
The purpose of school-based drug testing is not
to punish students who use drugs. If drug-using
students are suspended or expelled without any
attempt to intervene in their drug use, the
community will be faced with a surge in the
number of drug-using dropoutsa more serious
problem in the long run. Of course, any effective
testing program should include clear-cut
consequences for students who use illegal drugs
suspension from an athletic activity, for example.
But above all else, the goal is to keep students
from using drugs and to guide users into
counseling or drug treatment.
Student drug testing programs also function as a
prevention tool, ideally as part of a comprehensive
prevention strategy. Testing programs work because
they reflect an understanding of teen motivations,
giving students an easy way to say no at an age
when peer pressure is at its peak. For many young
people, simply knowing they may suddenly be
called in to take a drug test provides a convenient out, which is often enough to make a student
stop taking drugs or never start in the first place.
Reducing Drug Use Through
Student Drug Testing
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According to the Journal of
Adolescent Health, a school in
Oregon that drug tested student
athletes had a rate of drug use that
was one-quarter that of a
comparable school with no drug
testing policy.
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After two years of a drug testing
program, Hunterdon Central
Regional High School in New Jersey
saw significant reductions in 20 of 28 key drug use categories.
For instance, use of cocaine by seniors
dropped from 13 to 4 percent.
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This Administration is committed to providing
families and schools with the tools they need
to keep children focused on learning, undistracted
by drug use. To that end, it will devote a portion of the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities programs national activities
funds to provide grants to schools that choose to implement effective drug testing programs
that include provision of treatment services for
students who test positive. In fiscal year 2004, $8 million is requested for student drug testing,
which will expand efforts initiated by the
Department of Education in 2003.
Seeing through the Haze:
Marijuana Use and the
Debate over Dependency
No analysis of drug prevention would be
complete without a discussion of marijuana,
the drug so widespread in todays schools that
nearly half of all high school seniors report
having tried it by graduation. After years of
giggling at quaintly outdated marijuana scare
stories like the 1936 movie Reefer Madness,
many Americans have been conditioned to
think that any warnings about the true dangers
of marijuana are overblown. But marijuana
produces withdrawal symptoms and is associated
with learning and memory disturbances. Among
youth, frequent users of marijuana are four times
more likely than non-users to have physically
attacked someone during the past six months.
Daily marijuana smoking was recently implicated
in a five-fold increase of risk for depression and
anxiety among females, according to an article in
the British Medical Journal.
Figure 7: Among Youth and Young Adults, a Steep Increase in Emergency Department
Mentions for Marijuana
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Source: Drug Abuse Warning Network (2001)
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And the harm is not just to the user. Marijuana is
the illicit drug most used by pregnant women and
women of reproductive age; yet recent research
has shown motor, behavioral, and cognitive
disturbances in offspring who were exposed to
cannabis in the womb. Such disturbances include
findings indicative of reduced activity in portions
of the brain that regulate emotion and
attentiveness. In some communities, as many as
20 percent of infants are prenatally exposed to a
mothers marijuana intake.
Moreover, research has now conclusively
established that marijuana is addictive. Of the 5.6 million Americans who meet the diagnostic
criteria for needing drug treatment (criteria
developed by the American Psychiatric
Association, not police departments or
prosecutors), 62 percent were found to abuse or be dependent on marijuana, according to
data compiled by the Department of Health
and Human Services. These are not occasional
pot smokers. These are people with real
problems directly traceable to their use of
marijuana, including significant health
problems, emotional problems, and difficulty in cutting down on use.
Figure 8: Treatment Admissions by Primary Substance of Abuse (Ages 1217)
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Source: Treatment Episode Data Set (2000)
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Parents are often unaware that todays marijuana,
with its blend of sophisticated cultivation and
plant breeding techniques, is different from that of a generation ago. In 1974, according to data compiled by the Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA), the average THC
content of marijuana was less than 1 percent.
Twenty-five years later, potency was averaging
around 7 percent, with some samples in the 30
percent range. Recent research published in the
British Journal of Psychiatry suggests a 15-fold
increase in THC content and concludes that the modern cannabis smoker may be exposed to doses of THC many times greater than his or her counterpart in the 1960s and 1970s.
The Journal concludes that this single fact has
made obsolete much of what we once knew about
the risks and consequences of marijuana use.
The topic of drug treatment is handled in
greater detail in the following chapter, but the
implications are obvious. More than 60 percent
of young people in drug treatment are there for problems associated with marijuana, and
there has been a nearly four-fold increase in the
number of adolescent marijuana admissions
between 1992 and 2000.
Last Updated: July 22, 2003
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