ANTIDRUG REPORT SHOWS LITTLE PROGRESS IN CLINTON YEARS

Youth drug use in the United States increased sharply during the eight
years of the Clinton administration, and the number of drug-related
episodes in emergency rooms are now at historic highs, according to
figures in a national report on drug policy to be released today.

The sobering news comes during a time when the federal government
committed huge amounts of new money recently to fight the problem,
increasing funding to $19.2 billion this year from $13.4 billion in
1996, an average increase of more than $1 billion a year.

But Barry McCaffrey, director of the Office of the National Drug
Control Policy, will argue in a White House news conference that the
drug problem among youths is getting better.

To support his position, he will cite a 21 percent decrease in use
from 1997 to 1999, perhaps the first signs from a widely praised
anti-drug media campaign. Still, drug use among those ages 12 to 17
was exactly the same in 1999 as it was in 1996, when McCaffrey became
drug czar: in both years, 9 percent of those youths surveyed
acknowledged using illegal drugs during the previous month, according
to the national survey. And in 1993, when Clinton first took office,
only 5.7 percent of teens said they used illegal drugs.

"We've got a long ways to go," said Joseph Califano Jr., chairman and
president of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at
Columbia University and a former secretary of Health, Education and
Welfare.

The report for the first time during McCaffrey's nearly five years in
office includes delivering adequate treatment as one of five national
drug strategy goals. In 1998 -- the last year for which figures are
available -- 57 percent of America's addicts who needed treatment did
not get it.

Winning political support for treatment of hardcore drug users has
always been a difficult fight in Washington and in most state
capitals. McCaffrey's predecessor, Lee Brown, attempted to
dramatically increase funding to treat long-term drug abusers but was
resoundingly defeated, receiving no new funds for chronic users in
1994.

The report is being issued amid questions over how President-elect
George W. Bush will address drug policy. In recent weeks and months,
the issue has all but disappeared from the national agenda.
McCaffrey's job remains unfilled -- the lone Cabinet-level seat from
the Clinton administration still vacant.

During the campaign, Bush said little about drug policy, but he did
support the Clinton administration's $1.6 billion Colombia
drug-fighting package. As governor, he favored tougher laws for drug
offenders.

But Bush will soon hear more about the debate over Colombia -- and
more broadly on whether it is wiser to focus on cutting supply of
drugs or the demand from users.

The numbers in the 2001 national drug strategy report suggest that
even with a 34 percent increase in treatment funding during the last
five years, the programs fall far short of helping those who are
toughest to rehabilitate and most costly to society.

In 1993, the report estimated 3.3 million hardcore cocaine users and
694,000 heroin addicts. The 1998 figures: 3.3 million cocaine addicts,
980,000 heroin addicts.

In Clinton's first year, the drug-abuse warning network recorded
460,910 drug-related conditions in emergency rooms. In 1999, the
number increased to 554,932, the highest ever recorded.

Michael Massing, author of "The Fix," a history of America's drug war,
said: "The percentage of those untreated remains to me one of the most
telling figures in the wealth of statistics the drug control office
puts out."

Abstinence: Teens Follow Through On Pledges, Sort Of

Teenagers who make sexual abstinence pledges apparently mean what they
say, at least for a while. A study says teens who promised to refrain
until marriage delayed having sex about 18 months longer than others.

Among those who formally promised to avoid unmarried sex, about 50
percent remained virgins until about age 20.

Among nonpledgers, said Peter Bearman, a Columbia University
sociologist and the study's co-author, 50 percent were no longer
virgins by age 17.

"The average delay among pledgers is 18 months," he said. "That is
significant. And that is a pure pledge effect."

Bearman and his co-author, Hannah Brueckner, a sociologist at Yale
University, analyzed the effect of virginity pledges on teenagers
enrolled in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a
federally funded survey of children in the seventh through 12th grades.

Data from the study suggested that by 1995 a church-led, voluntary
effort had prompted about 2.5 million teenage boys and girls to make
spoken or written pledges to remain virgins until marriage.

In their study, Bearman and Brueckner analyzed data from interviews of
20,000 teenage virgins in 1994 and 1995. A follow-up survey in 1997
included 14,000 of those in the original study.