Note: Walters is director of the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy. This commentary was adapted from his remarks to a recent
conference in Tijuana on drug trafficking and journalists at risk.

BUSH ADMINISTRATION POLICY TARGETS USE OF ILLEGAL DRUGS BY U.S. TEEN-AGERS

Cross-Border Drug Threat

TIJUANA - The drug trade begins with experimentation in youth. Many want to
deny this and suggest that it is adults who decided to make choices that
are a part of their freedom. It's not. If young people do not experiment
with drugs in their teen-age years, they're unlikely to try later on. The
United States has decades of pain and suffering to prove this.

The younger children experiment, the more likely they are to become
addicted in their teen-age years or later on. We have decades of experience
and research to prove this. We know that young brains are still developing
in their teen-age years. They do not form in childhood and their chemical
composition and maturity are particularly susceptible to the changes that
we now know are associated with the disease of addictions.

The drug trade is about initiating children and about addiction because
addicts consume the largest share of the drugs. It is about taking people's
humanity away at a very young age in many cases. Today, 23 percent of the
estimated 4.5 million Americans in the United States who have a dependency
problem and can benefit from treatment are teen-agers. We believe,
President Bush believes, most Americans believe that is unacceptable.

In addition, we believe we have to make the people who have a dependency
well. We are committing unprecedented resources to treatment. President
Bush made the commitment of adding $1.6 billion dollars over the next five
years. Next year, we will get $3.8 billion from the federal government for
drug treatment.

And we believe there is hope. There are many people who are in recovery.
Many families have dealt with this problem and have first-hand experience.

I say all that by way of making clear that we understand that American
demand for drugs has been a principle driver of this problem in this
hemisphere, and that is not acceptable.

President Bush has made clear to me, privately as well as what he has said
publicly, that in regard to the drug problem that we are not asking other
nations, our allies, our friends, to bear burdens that we should bear
ourselves. He has made this single measure of the effectiveness of our
efforts as an administration - the reduction of drug use in the United States.

Through a balanced strategy of supply-and-demand control, we increased our
demand reduction efforts. Shortly after I took office in December, I
authorized change in our policy and in the direction of our advertising
campaign used to prevent drug use by young people. We began with a series
of ads that told the story that many in the southern part of our hemisphere
have been asking why Americans don't understand and take seriously: that
the American drug consumer is the single largest funder of anti-democratic
forces and terror in the hemisphere.

We intend to drive home not only the health threat that drugs pose for
young people but that they are a threat to their ideals.

You cannot expect other people, our own people and others in other nations
to risk their lives, to give their lives for your freedoms, for your
security, if you do not understand the responsibility to give back to them.
To live in a way that supports the values that those people give their
lives to support and are giving them today.

On the drug issue, we also believe that in addition to prevention and
treatment, we must reduce the supply. We know that this is a market. That
it lives on supply and demand. And if we are successful in reducing demand,
that success will be undermined by the very market forces that will exist
if we don't also reduce supply.

I just came from a meeting where we had 14 nations of this hemisphere
focused on the issue of interdiction of drugs in the eastern Pacific. I was
both encouraged by the seriousness of the people there to focus together,
but also by the general view that this is a unique and historic time.
What's going on in the United States, what's going on in Mexico, what's
going on in Colombia, and other nations of this region shows a kind of
seriousness about this problem as never before.

I think the seriousness is generated also by another fundamental fact.
Every nation that has been involved in production and transit of drugs
throughout history has developed its own domestic consumption problem.
Every nation at this meeting was aware that, especially today, drug
businesses operate on the currency of the drug product itself. When the
operators in individual countries are assisting in the movement of drugs
through the country, they are paid in drugs to sell in their own neighborhood.

Demand and consumption in the hemisphere is growing dramatically and we in
the United States are not going to be satisfied simply by reducing our own
problems and having it spread to other countries. We cannot. The economic
future, the democratic future, the security future of the hemisphere cannot
be what it needs to be if the drug problem diminishes in the United States
but then as a result grows in the hemisphere.

The economic opportunity, the democratic opportunity, the opportunity for
security that we all want will be put in jeopardy.

The drug problem is about lies and intimidation and terror, both on the
supply and the demand side. Its enemy is truth. And if those who speak the
truth are silenced, drugs will be dominant and won't be controlled and
cannot be controlled.

On the demand side, the great lie is "It's fun, it's harmless, you can
handle it." Most people start using drugs as young individuals and they get
the drugs from a peer. Not from an adult that seduces them, but from
another person, their own friends in many cases who say "It's fun, you can
handle it. It's not really dangerous like they say."

And for all too many of these young people, their lives are ruined, lost.
Opportunities are compromised. Families and communities are hurt because
it's a lie. Drugs are about addiction and dependency and irresponsibility
and detaching people from their responsibility and their family and their
future.

Drugs impinge learning. They impinge the ability to control one's self
responsibly. They cause paranoia and violence and misbehavior and they
associate you with a criminal element because the criminal element is
what's necessary on the supply side.

This is a market that cannot say the business it's in, because it's in the
business of seducing children and promoting the slavery of free individuals
through the substance they sell. It's in the market because the market is
dominated by addiction. It's in the market of taking people's dignity. It's
in the market of taking their futures and of those around them. And because
it's in that market, it must use violence, terror and intimidation.

So, when you report the reality of drug traffickers, the reality of the
drug trade, the trade must try to silence that. Because the drug trade
cannot stand to have this reality known by people, young people, older
people, by people who make decisions about politics.

In a democratic society, we should have a debate about drug legalization.
But no democratic society can sanction the enslavement or degradation of
it's own citizens. No democratic society can let its youth's future be
taken away from them and still call itself a decent and just society. So
the drug trade has to rely on making people look the other way. If you say
it, call it what it is, you will be silenced.

We have to remind people sometimes of unpleasant facts. The trade must
silence those who would point out the guilty parties because that leads
countries to reduce this problem. That's why they have to kill. That's why
they have to intimidate. That's why they have to silence.

Societies controlled by drug traffickers become barbaric. They are
controlled by the gun. They become controlled not by morality and
responsibility but by using human beings for the traffickers' purposes.

Democracy is in the way of drugs and drugs is an acid that seeks to corrode
and dissolve democratic institutions. It cannot be any other way. And the
only inhibitor to that acid is a free press and a free people.

I know many brave people in this room, and of others that you represent not
in this room, who stand against enormous threat by themselves or almost by
themselves. And the steps that you've made to support those people and to
make sure that when they are harmed, justice replaces repression is
absolutely critical to the future of our peoples and this hemisphere.