DRUG WAR WITHOUT A PLAN

NEEDED: A FLORIDA DRUG CZAR

Coordinated strategy may be more effective in curbing
abuse.

A city commissioner wants the chief to prove the police department's
prevention programs work. A child-abuse investigator needs help
justifying to a court her decision to put the child of an alcoholic
mother in foster care.

In today's show-me-the-results society, such questions arise every
day. Life-altering decisions are based on such statistics. But what if
they aren't there? What if nobody knows which programs work and which
don't?

That's how it is in Florida, where 14 state agencies, thousands of
private nonprofit social-service organizations and hundreds of police
departments try to cope with the drug problem. Yet there's no clearing
house for information, no comprehensive effort to gather useful
statistics to guide policy making, no guidelines for evaluating the
effectiveness of programs and no state strategy for winning its "drug
war."

Last year Senate President Toni Jennings determined to find out what
the state is missing. She directed a Senate investigation that found
such useful things as drug arrests in Florida have increased 40
percent over the last five years (juvenile arrests 61 percent), that
30 percent of AIDS cases are tied to drug abuse, that some 447,000
adults and 247,000 children need state-funded substance-abuse
treatment. And in the last full budget year, 1997-'98, Florida spent
$139 million to provide treatment for 93,500 adults and 42,000 children.

But that information isn't meaningfully shared. There is no state
strategy to coordinate drug-abuse treatment, enforcement and
prevention programs. Now she's behind a measure that creates a
gubernatorial Office of Drug Control, requiring coordination among
state agencies and program evaluations. The bill, which passed the
Senate and awaits House action, fixes a serious oversight in giving
anti-drug warriors an important new weapon: information.