DRUG CZAR'S VISIT SPARKS SHOT AT $500,000 GRANT

OPA-LOCKA

After the nation's drug czar visited Opa-locka's Triangle on Tuesday, city
officials got busy applying for a $500,000 grant for drug treatment and
mental health counseling -- to begin to attack one component of Opa-locka's
crime problem at its roots.

"We can keep arresting people all day long, but until we have some viable
alternatives for this problem, we're never going to overcome this issue,"
City Manager Anthony Robinson said Wednesday.

Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the director of the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy, told a standing-room-only crowd at the Triangle's
Young, Bowers and Brown Cultural Arts Center that the drug problem is really
a community problem. He said residents must come together to identify the
addicts in their neighborhoods and get them help. He also suggested that
residents organize programs for youth that would provide alternatives to
drug experimentation.

McCaffrey alluded to White House financial support for the city when he said
that Robinson, as grant writer for the city, was one of the most important
men in Opa-locka.

Robinson said Wednesday that two of McCaffrey's assistants remain in town to
help city personnel apply for grants from the Drug-Free Communities Program,
a national initiative for building local coalitions to prevent drug use
among young people.

The grants are awarded over a five-year period with a maximum of $100,000 a
year to help reduce substance abuse among youth and to encourage private
groups and public agencies to work together to solve a community's drug
problems.

David Choates, executive director of the Broward County Commission on
Substance Abuse in Fort Lauderdale, said the grants and McCaffrey's
leadership have made an absolute difference.

"Both Miami and Broward County are under the national average in drug use,"
he said. "Things have been changing, and it happened after he came in. This
has been the No. 1 market in the whole country for a long time. He's done a
tremendous job."

Choates attributed the decline to putting drug use back on the national
agenda, public service announcements and advertisements, and the coming
together of groups like his community anti-drug coalition.

"If you delay the use of drugs by youth by just a few years, you have solved
the drug problem," Choates said. "If you keep a kid from getting involved in
drugs before age 18, you won't have a problem."

The Miami Coalition For a Safe and Drug-Free Community recently released a
report showing that marijuana and alcohol use and tolerance for such use by
young people has declined over the past five years.

The study was based on a 1999 survey of Miami-Dade public and parochial
students in grades 7 to 12 by other students with no adults present. It
showed that marijuana use declined from 13.4 percent in 1995 to 10.4 percent
in 1999. It also showed disapproval of a friend's use of marijuana rose from
48 precent to 60 percent over the same four-year period.

In Opa-locka, police estimate 40 percent of the drug problem is due to local
residents and 60 percent to people from places as close as Carol City and as
far away as Florida City, West Palm Beach and even New York.

"We get them from all over," said Charles Brunson, supervisor of the
Opa-locka Police Department's vice, intelligence and narcotics unit. "That's
the word on the street: The best stuff is in Opa-locka, in the Triangle."

Police have recently been stepping up arrests, trying to change the city's
reputation.

Brunson said that from Jan. 26 to April 21, 126 people were arrested for
drug offenses all over the city.

At least one Triangle resident agrees that money is needed to help young
people and addicts.

"The addicts are just people that lost hope," said Kathy Hightower, 41, who
grew up in the Triangle.