HEARTBREAK SPURS FLORIDA ANTI-DRUG FIGHT

Bush appoints policy coordinator

TALLAHASSEE -- An 18-year-old college freshman stood before a group of state
and national drug policy leaders Friday and gave them a quick, terrifying
course in the role that drugs play in the lives of young Floridians.

Colleen Cook, who attends Florida State University, ticked off a list of
appalling real-life experiences to the hushed crowd: The death last summer
of a friend from a heroin overdose. The joke-like atmosphere that surrounds
the shallow anti-drug campaigns in the schools.

And a party, recently attended by a high-school age friend, where a line of
heroin -- for snorting -- stretched all the way across the bar, an
unremarkable part of the refreshments.

"We're tired of watching our friends die," Cook said. "Have you ever heard
the sound of a heart breaking? Well I have."

She said she wants to use her experiences to help other young people but has
been unable to find any program that would harness her energies.

"I want to do something," she said. "I want to speak in high schools. Will
someone please help?"

The group she addressed -- including Gen. Barry McCaffrey, director of the
Office of National Drug Control Policy, and Gov. Jeb Bush -- met in
Tallahassee in the first Florida Statewide Drug Control Summit, a Bush
initiative.

As part of that effort, Bush appointed James McDonough, 52, as the state's
drug policy coordinator to oversee and coordinate the anti-drug push. Bush
has recommended the state spend $40.4 million to fight drugs in the coming
year.

Ex-colonel to enact strategy

McDonough, a retired Army colonel, joined the Bush administration from the
Office of National Drug Control Policy, where he served as director of
strategy. He will be charged with putting into action Bush's "four fronts"
drug control strategy: awareness, enforcement, prevention and treatment.

The numbers discussed Friday support a new emphasis on reducing drug use in
the state. Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Tim Moore said
up to 70 percent of all crimes committed in Florida are "drug related or
drug driven."

Yet drug treatment is available to just 20 percent of those in need of it,
said John Daigle, executive director of the Florida Alcohol and Drug Abuse
Association.

The drug summit was an attempt to gather information and set goals for
attacking the problem on the specified four fronts. Marked by calls for
"zero tolerance, zero drug use," the summit highlighted South Florida's
designation by the federal government as a "high-intensity drug trafficking
area."

Seeks higher penalties

Among the key aims of the Bush administration are increasing criminal
penalties for drug traffickers and a consistent clear message for youth:
Drugs destroy lives. Officials hope that will end the kind of jokes that
Cook said she saw among her friends when they were handed stickers that
said, "Just don't use drugs."

"They'd tear off the `no' part, so it said `Just use drugs,' " she said.

In Orlando, where heroin use has exploded among young people, one mother who
lost a son to the drug made a video. It shows overdose victims in such
graphic detail that the video comes with a warning about its content.

Legislators and drug policy makers watched it Friday, after an introduction
by the woman who made the film, Tinker Cooper.

"This is what death by overdose looks like -- and it's not pretty," she
said. "Do you want your mother to have this as the last picture of you?"

The video, called Overdose: End of the Party, showed pictures of her son,
blond and smiling, and then, abruptly, the same face in death, contorted and
purple, lying in a pool of smeared blood. It also showed other young people,
their bodies frozen in agonizing death.

Cooper, who has become an anti-drug crusader, wants the video to be shown to
students in schools. "Maybe this'll get through to them," she said.