Now is not the time to cut back on anti-drug spending, the U.S. drug czar told members of the National Association of Counties on Monday.
"Just when we are beginning to see the drug situation improve is not the time to surrender," said Robert Martinez, director of the Office of the National Drug Control Policy.Although federal spending for drug control recently rose 64 percent, and anti-drug spending in the nation's counties rose 112 percent since 1989, funding from the federal level is tapering off and some members of the House Appropriations Committee have threatened to cut anti-drug spending, Martinez said.
To combat the funding situation, Martinez's office prepared a booklet listing every program that receives federal funds for anti-drug purposes. The goal is to make existing funds more available.
Drug use declined significantly in other areas since 1985, when the United States was reported to have 23 million drug users. That number fell to 12.9 million in 1990.
Martinez also reported a 50 percent drop in young children using drugs for the first time.
"But we still have 12.9 million people who use drugs, and we still have 5.9 million addicts that we have to deal with," Martinez said.
The solution that Martinez favors is education, prevention and drug-treatment programs.
"This is based on partnerships at all levels," Martinez said. "I urge you to create programs that get the community to work as a team. Whenever they do we have seen great progress."
New anti-drug legislation should also be engineered to match anti-smoking legislation that recognizes the effect of smoking on non-smokers, Martinez said.
"The system is overburdened, and we know that drugs do damage to bystanders," he said.
One side effect Martinez mentioned is contamination of groundwater by clandestine labs manufacturing designer drugs that dump their toxic chemicals in unsafe areas.
"We will be working with the EPA to clean those areas up," Martinez said.
But the most important area Martinez wants a community partnership with is education. Throughout his own formal education, Martinez said he was never taught about the dangers of illegal drugs.
"It's no wonder that we had such a difficult time accepting that we had a problem," Martinez said. "We need to create the education so that we don't have a generation or two down the road who forgets what drugs do and has to experiment again."