The National Methamphetamine
Drug Conference
Strategy: The 1997 National Drug Control Strategy
James R. McDonough,
Senior Strategist, Office of National Control Drug Policy
If I have learned anything in life, it is that there is always hope, and there are always people with goodwill and faith and desire to solve problems. We need ideas from you, and we need execution of those ideas. Our hope is for an America with a will to solve the drug problem we have, not only with methamphetamine, but with the entire drug plight that faces this nation. We have a clear opportunity to proceed against this problem, and the Strategy is the roadmap to take us there.
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Five Goals of the
National Drug Control Stategy
- Educate and enable America's youth to reject illegal drugs as well as alcohol and tobacco.
- Increase the safety of America's citizens by reducing drug-related crime and violence.
- Reduce health and social costs to the public of illegal drug use.
- Shield America's land, air, and sea frontiers from the drug threat.
- Break foreign and domestic drug sources of supply.
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We plan to incorporate your ideas into the collective national strategy, which is a comprehensive approach to drug abuse in America. We have captured the essence of the 1997 National Drug Control Strategy on pages 30 and 31 of the document. Any strategy must have goals; we have selected a short list of goals that encompass the entire spectrum of what we must do.
James McDonough, senior strategist at ONDCP, presents an overview of the 1997 National Drug Control Strategy |
We put these goals in no particular rank order except the very first goal: Educate and enable America's youth to reject illegal drugs as well as alcohol and tobacco. In other goals, we visit crime, social consequences, health concerns, and what we can do about these problems. Finally, we discuss border control and the organizations that supply drugs to our children and our people. Simply put, five goals are supported by 32 objectives. Let me tell you how these goals play a role in our National Strategy.
First of all, any strategy must exist over time. We must have a long-term view of what we are able to do. Over the next ten years, our ideas will change as we learn, as we succeed in some areas and have a difficult time in others, but the strategy will adapt. As with strategy, we must have resources. We will face tremendous resource limitations, and we must adapt our strategy to fit our assets. Resources have to be planned over time. We will have a 5-year outlook at the resources we need to support this 10-year approach to our nation's drug problem.
Having done that, keep in mind that no strategy survives its moment of issue; it changes immediately upon its impact with the forum in play. Strategy has ideas that sometimes work, but sometimes do not. We plan to look at how the National Strategy works. To do this effectively, we place measures against that strategy. Where is success? Where should we reinforce? Where should we try something new? We are now devising a balanced approach to look at each one of the objectives to give us an indication where our strategy needs to change and which new ideas should be tried. What opportunities need to be exploited?
Let us look at the various components of the strategy. When we look at the massive problem of drugs in America, at first glance it seems overwhelming. We then do what we have done here: Break it down into component parts. As we do this, we begin to realize what we can accomplish with each of those parts. Experts across the country have told us the main effort has to be demand reduction, and this is where we plan to focus. It is, after all, this craving for drugs that drives the problem. If people did not want drugs, we would not have a drug problem.
We will focus on demand reduction, but we must ask: Where is the critical focus? Where can we have the greatest effect? Our answer is to look at America's youth. We have 68 million Americans under the age of 17. If we can grow them to adulthood free of substance abuse, we are successful. If we raise them to age 20, and they are not binging on alcohol, smoking, or taking drugs, they are probably not going to start later in life. So our idea is to focus on youth—educate them, protect them, and keep them free of drugs.
The average American youth watches about 18,000 hours of television before he or she graduates from high school; that is more hours than the child spends in school. Did you ever watch teenagers drive? They are listening to music. When they are walking down the street, they are listening to music. When they are walking, they are listening; they are hearing. Media impacts them. We have noted the ads that are intended to warn them about the dangers of drugs have decreased in recent years; we need to increase them.
If we take our target group, our youth, and if we expose 90% of them to the right messages four times a week—positive messages, educational messages that allow them to judge for themselves—we change attitudes. If we change attitudes, we change action. We change practice. We are looking at a $175 million a year ad campaign matched pro bono through the media. Over five years, we will spend about $1.75 billion. Is it worth it if 68 million American youth can grow up to be drug-free adults? Yes, it is worth a generation free of drugs.
We cannot forget about the 3.6 million chronic users who are citizens, too. We heard the eloquent, compassionate views of the terrible effects of methamphetamine and other drugs that are hurting our people. We have to bring them back; we have to try. We believe we can bring the numbers of chronic users down by helping them into treatment programs.
If we keep children from using drugs, watch them develop their entire lives drug-free, and we reduce the chronic population of users, we will make tremendous inroads in decreasing drug abuse in this country. These are your ideas, and they are great ideas.
We are a nation of law, and we enforce it. We also have a prison population of 1.6 million, with about 100,000 of those in federal prisons. Sixty percent are there because of drugs. They committed a crime because they had drugs or were distributing drugs or were under the influence of drugs. We have a quarter of a million Americans in the state prison systems because of drugs; most will not spend their entire lives in prison. If they leave prison with a drug addiction, they will have to subsidize it. The addiction they sustained in prison leads to further prison time. We need to stop the vicious cycle; you are telling us to stop it through the drug court system with incentives, disincentives, and abstinence for the nonviolent offender.
Incarceration is necessary as a deterrent, and law enforcement knows how to do that. The deterrent must make sense; it must be rational. The question is: How much deterrence do we need? What is the most cost-effective? Many want to throw away the key. The National Strategy lays out markers for what must be done. Above all, the laws must be seen as legitimate and equitable. We cannot allow unreasonable sentencing disparities.
We also need to remember that 71 percent of our drug users in America are working. We need to keep them free of drugs, keep them working, and keep them out of prison. We need to help these people into treatment before they progress to more serious drug abuse problems. Treatment is a highly cost-effective alternative; it is about one-tenth of the cost to treat a person rather than putting him or her in jail. We will bring the population of adult drug users down while we stop our children from becoming drug users.
If demand reduction is our main effort, we must go to the other side of the street and reduce the supply of drugs. There is a direct cause and effect; if there are more drugs available, more people use them. It is critical to cut the supply of drugs. At the source country, we find methods to displace the production of drug-producing crops and create incentives so that other legitimate enterprises are pursued. We use our intelligence systems and share our information to cut traffickers off at the source, in the transit zone, and at the borders before they arrive into the United States.
At the border, law enforcement moves in a timely manner, organized and sharing information, and stops the supply of drugs. We integrate these enforcement actions with an aggressive search to catch the laundered money. Drugs are sold because they produce money, and we will pursue the money. This need for money is a major vulnerability of the drug traffickers, and we will follow the money trail and stop their organizations.
We focus our efforts in the most consequential and cost-effective manner. Are the most drugs coming across the Southwest border? This is a tough, tough border 2,000 miles long. Some of it is urban, and some of it is wide-open desert. Sixty percent of the drugs enter America across that border through 38 ports of entry. Two hundred thirty-two million people crossed the Southwest border last year, along with 84 million cars and 2.8 million trucks, and drugs are coming over the border with them.
If we make entry more difficult at the Southwest border, what does a trafficker do? He looks for an easier route. About 30 percent of drugs come in from Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and we need to interdict drugs there. We want to close the back door and close all ports of entry to drugs. Only 2 percent of the world's production of heroin comes into the United States. It comes in small packages, and sometimes it is ingested by the human carrier. We need to develop a good system to break the supply of drugs and ensure we achieve integrated efforts driven by intelligence, then executed by professionals who are committed to the effort.
We cannot do it alone. We are a democracy that exists in a world of nations bound by international law. Because drugs affect other nations and come from other nations, we need to work together to stop drugs. We are working with Mexico; we plan to work in Southeast Asia to create incentives to build multilateral and bilateral protocols. We will develop a joint effort, a combined effort, to halt the flow of drugs. We will go to where the coca leaf is grown and work with those countries to create incentives to displace those crops, to create a better livelihood for those people, and to decrease the supply of drugs entering this country.
We are a great country. When our organizational ability, our leadership, and our people's wills are activated, nothing will stop us. We can put people on the moon and fight great wars, and we can fight drugs and win. We must be smart and use our resources. Our operations should be intelligence-driven and research-based. We are rational people who believe in science; we need to look at the facts, and we need to analyze the facts. We need to organize, and we need to share our capabilities. We need more research, more applications of technology and refined information sharing.
We want to streamline coordination, and we do not want turf battles in the fight to stop the supply of drugs. The objective is to decrease drug use by taking advantage of all ideas, develop new strategies, and incorporate those strategies so each one reinforces the other. What we learned here about solving the methamphetamine problem will work its way into the Strategy.
Ours is a team effort. The federal government cannot attain these goals without state cooperation. We need to turn to concerned communities, listen to them, ask them to help us reach our population and turn off the supply of drugs. We share efforts, as with the High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) program, which brings state and local police forces together with federal agencies. We need to enlist associations such as the National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors (NASADAD), the Boy Scouts of America, Boy's Clubs, the Elks, and all groups concerned about this problem. The Strategy details this effort over a 10-year period.
What are the essential elements of the National Strategy summed up? We are a nation of principles; the rights of individuals are highly important, as is the social good. We also recognize we are a democratic nation in an international system that abides by the rules of law and sovereignty. We are outcome-oriented; we know no silver bullet will solve this problem. We must weigh everything and take advantage of every long-term opportunity. The National Strategy is wide-ranging; it is concerned about what is happening in Omaha as it is looking at what is coming out of Burma. It is a comprehensive program with international and domestic approaches, intelligence assistance, integration of air, land, sea efforts, reinforcement of the borders, support for law enforcement, and whatever else we can add to break the supply of drugs.
The Strategy is realistic. Do not think we can leave this conference and have methamphetamine vanquished, once and for all. The National Strategy takes into account that we can make more and more progress without introspection. The Strategy has no arrogance to it. It does not say, "This is it; we have the answer." We turn to you to draw up a strategy, and we turn to you to improve it. We take a hard look at what we are doing to make it work and make it better. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the National Drug Control Strategy.
