OFFICIAL ENLISTS PARISH TO HELP WAR ON DRUGS

A community that does not tolerate drug use can be an effective method for
fighting drug abuse among young people in Jefferson Parish, the U.S. deputy
drug czar said Wednesday in Gretna.

Mary Ann Solberg, deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy, was in Jefferson Parish to address a workshop on building community
coalitions to fight drug abuse held at the Jefferson Parish district
attorney's office.

Speaking to prosecutors, law enforcement officials, educators, and members
of volunteer agencies and the business community, Solberg said the
community can set standards of behavior that send a message to young people
that drug use will not be tolerated.

That attitude, combined with drug testing in Jefferson's public schools and
the parish's intensive drug court probation program, can form the base of
an effective way to deal with drug abuse, she said.

A change in attitude can be as simple as parents refusing to allow alcohol
to be served at home graduation parties, Solberg said. "And a lot of
parents today are of the age that they smoked marijuana in the 1970s and
thought of it as just a rite of passage, as no big deal," she said.

But it is a big deal today, partly because the marijuana smoked now can
contain 10 to 15 times more THC, the chemical that gives marijuana its
narcotic effect, than marijuana smoked 30 years ago.

Today's marijuana is so potent, she said, that while marijuana use has
fallen in recent years, the number of young people addicted to it has risen.

Employers who give jobs to young people, such as fast-food restaurants,
also could insist on drug testing. That testing, plus the testing in
schools required for participation in extracurricular activities, gives
teenagers incentives "to say no," Solberg said.

Fighting drug abuse also is important because its use is linked to many
societal ills, including crime. "Nationally, 80 percent of people arrested
for crimes say they were high on alcohol or drugs when they committed the
crime," she said.