TRANSCRIPT OF PRESS BRIEFING BY TRAVIS ON RADIO ADDRESS

WASHINGTON, July 11 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is the transcript of a
White House press briefing on Friday, July 10, by Jeremy Travis, director
of the National Institute of Justice, and Dr. Jack Riley, director of the
Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring Program, released today by the White House:

PRESS BRIEFING ON THE RADIO ADDRESS

BY JEREMY TRAVIS, DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF JUSTICE; DR. JACK
RILEY, DIRECTOR OF THE ARRESTEE DRUG ABUSE MONITORING PROGRAM

The Briefing Room

MR. TOIV: Our briefers are Jerry Travis, who is Director of the National
Institute of Justice -- that is the research arm of the Department of
Justice -- Dr. Jack Riley, who is the Director of the ADAM program in the
National Institution of Justice, and that is the Arrestee Drug Abuse
Monitoring program. And they will brief on the study that is going to be
released tomorrow, as well as on some grants that the President will be
announcing. And also available to answer questions on some elements of
that will be Harry Kramer, Director of Congressional and Public Affairs for
the Office of Justice Programs.

Jeremy Travis will begin.

MR. TRAVIS: Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm very pleased to be talking
this afternoon about three initiatives that the President will be speaking
about in his radio address tomorrow morning. First he'll be announcing two
grant awards that will be made by the Department of Justice, one having to
do with the very serious problem of methamphetamine abuse that is
particularly plaguing the western and southwestern parts of this country.
And second, an announcement that he'll be making regarding enhancements to
the Drug Court Initiative that have been one of the keystones of this
administration's overall program against drug abuse.

And then I'll be taking you through the ADAM research report that will also
be released tomorrow that's being put out by the National Institute of
Justice that shows the levels of drug use around the country and in
particular the connection between drugs and crime.

First, on the methamphetamine initiative, the Congress this year
appropriated $34 million in the budget of the Community Oriented Policing
Services office within the department to provide direct assistance to law
enforcement agencies that are dealing with the very serious problem of
methamphetamine influx in their communities. The COPS office will be
announcing tomorrow $5 million that will be set aside for direct assistance
to a number of jurisdictions that are responding to the problem of
methamphetamine. Those jurisdictions that will be invited to participate
in this grant program are Phoenix, Arizona; Salt Lake City, Utah; Oklahoma
City, Oklahoma; Dallas, Texas; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Minneapolis,
Minnesota.

The specific purposes of these grants will be to assist these agencies in
- -- particularly dealing with the public health and public safety hazards
that are posed by methamphetamine to allow for a better coordination
between law enforcement and fire departments and environmental protection
agencies and the like, because, as you know, the methamphetamine problem
requires a coordinated law enforcement and public safety response. The
amount of the grants will be up to $750,000 and other jurisdictions, in
addition to the six that I mentioned will be also invited to participate.

Secondly, the President will be announcing a significant expansion of the
Drug Court Initiative of the administration. The specifics of this
announcement are that the 150 jurisdictions will receive grants totaling
about $27 million to plan, implement and enhance and track the progress of
drug courts.

Drug courts, as I mentioned at the outset, one of the very important, very
significant, very effective innovations that's come about by virtue of the
1994 Crime Act. The first drug court was the brainchild of Attorney
General Janet Reno in Dade County in 1989, and since that time the number
of drug courts have grown exponentially to the point now where there are
well over 270 drug courts in operation around the country. The
announcement being made by the President tomorrow will bring that number up
to 400.

This is a significant use of the criminal justice power, the power of
judges to coerce behavior, to encourage individuals who abuse drugs and
plague our communities to seek treatment and to stay in treatment. So this
announcement will be a major milestone in the use of the federal funds
under the Crime Act to provide direct assistance to localities around the
country.

Third and finally, I'd like to talk a bit about the ADAM research report
that were releasing tomorrow from the National Institute of Justice, and
I'd like to put this in context a bit. In this briefing room, a number of
you have heard about different ways that we have as a country to monitor
trends in drug abuse, perhaps best known to the public are two national
surveys: the National Household Survey that is based on face-to-face
interviews with randomly selected households across the country; and
secondly, the Monitoring the Future Survey that is based on interviews with
students from a randomly selected sample of high schools. Every year,
these surveys give us a picture of increases or decreases in drug abuse at
the national level.

The ADAM program, the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring research program of
the National Institute of Justice, is different from these national surveys
in three important ways. First, we collect data at the local level, on a
quarterly basis. We do not, and indeed cannot, present a single national
picture of drug abuse trends. So the 1997 ADAM Report presents 23 distinct
portraits of drug abuse trends in 23 participating cities.

Second, although we measure drug abuse in the traditional ways; we ask
people -- what is your drug abusing behavior -- as do those other surveys,
we also take urine samples to determine the presence or absence of drugs in
a person's system at the time of his arrest. So unlike the other surveys,
the ADAM data are much less susceptible to both exaggeration and denial of
drug use.

Third, the people we interview are all arrested and charged with crimes.
So even at the local level, our sample is not representative of the overall
population, but of the arrestee population. But this third attribute of
the ADAM program is, in fact, its greatest strength, because it provides a
window on the world of crime.

In other words, we are able to track drug use within a specific
subpopulation, the criminal population, that is very important to this
country for public policy purposes. For example, there as the ADAM program
that has enabled researchers to document the decline in the crack cocaine
epidemic in our large cities, we have been able to show, for instance, that
in Manhattan, crack use among young adult arrestees dropped from 80 percent
in 1989 to 33 percent in 1997.

We have also been able to show the strong correlation between homicide
trends and cocaine positive trends in many ADAM cities. So without this
rich data source, the rise and fall of the crack epidemic that is one of
the good news stories in our country and its relationship to changing crime
trends would be mostly conjecture. So in releasing today's 1997 ADAM
report, we wish to reaffirm two central findings of this research program.

First, the ADAM data remind us powerfully that there is no single national
drug problem in this country. The drug problem of one community is very
different from the drug problem of another community, and consequently, the
strategies that work in one community may not be right for another
community. We need only compare San Diego, California with Washington,
D.C. In San Diego, we see that the levels of positive tests among the
arrestee population, both for males and females, are at about the 40
percent rates. So methamphetamine is a significant problem in San Diego
and in much of the Western to Southwestern part of this country, as shown
in the ADAM data.

Compare that to the city that we're in -- the Nation's Capital, Washington,
D.C. -- the methamphetamine rate is less than one percent, is barely a blip
on the screen. So if you are a law enforcement official or a treatment
provider or a public health officer or an education leader or a community
activist, your drug problem in San Diego is very different from the drug
problem that we face here in the Nation's Capital. This is the power of
the ADAM data is that we can make those distinctions.

The second central finding of the ADAM report is the strong nexus between
crime and drug abuse. In all 23 cities included in this study, between
one-half and three-quarters of the people charged with crimes had drugs in
their system at the time of their arrest. In most cities, 20 percent had
multiple drugs in their system. This finding -- when combined with a solid
research consensus, that treatment within the criminal justice system can
significantly reduce both drug abuse and criminal behavior -- this finding
provides the foundation for a number of the initiatives of the Clinton
administration.

The Drug Court program that I just spoke about, the prison-based treatment
program of the Justice Department, the breaking the cycle initiative
supported by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the criminal
justice treatment networks funded by the Center for Substance Abuse
Treatment of Health and Human Services Agency -- all of these are premised
on the idea that the coercive powers of the criminal justice system can be
used to keep drug users in treatment and thereby reduce drug abuse and
reduce crime.

General Barry McCaffrey sums up this policy rationale with a simple phrase:
"If you hate crime, you'll love treatment." Now, one final word about the
ADAM program. Ultimately, ADAM's greatest value is that it can serve as a
useful, practical tool for communities across this country to help them
develop effective anti-drug strategies at the local level.

Under the leadership of Attorney General Reno and with the very strong
support of General McCaffrey and Dr. Alan Leshner of NIDA and Tom
Constantine of the Drug Enforcement Administration, we at NIJ have
developed a five-year plan to expand the ADAM program, which now exists in
a total of 35 cities -- 23 original cities and 12 new cities -- to expand
that to every city throughout the country over 200,000 in population, for a
total of 75 to 80 cities. We will also ask each of those cities in the
year 2000 to conduct annual outreach surveys in the rural and suburban and
tribal communities that they neighbor so that we can finally develop an
understanding of the crime and drug connection in rural, suburban, and
tribal America.

This is particularly important because of the methamphetamine problem that
is being faced by a number of rural communities throughout the country.
Now, consistent with the belief that ADAM is ultimately a tool for local
policy development, we've also established in all 35 cities currently
participating a local coordinating council that represents criminal
justice, treatment, and public health agencies to use the ADAM data to
develop local drug strategies.

As a research agency, we believe that knowledge is power, and by giving
hundreds of communities throughout this country a clear picture of the drug
problems in their neighborhoods, we believe that the ADAM research program
will empower those communities to develop effective strategies to reduce
drug abuse and enhance public safety.

I would now like to ask Dr. Jack Riley to present some of the findings in
the 1997 ADAM report by focusing on four specific drugs. What have we
learned about changes in use patterns in methamphetamine use, cocaine use,
particularly crack cocaine use, marijuana, and opiates, particularly
heroin. And then we'll both be available for questions.

Dr. Riley.

DR. RILEY: Thank you, Director Travis. My name is Jack Riley and I'm the
Director of the ADAM program. The report which I'm going to attempt to
summarize is the green-covered document that should be part of your
package. I want to speak briefly about the results from our 1997 study.

If I can leave you with one thought, it is that we are dealing with
multiple drug epidemics among the arrested population, and that these
epidemics vary in their intensity, their direction, as well as by location,
drug, age group, gender, and race. You may not be able to see the detail
presented in the chart up here, but you can probably see how the height of
the bars differs by color, which represents the drug, as well as how the
height of the bars differ by community. These differences and patterns
suggest that community-specific interventions will be required to
effectively reduce drug use.

To illustrate that point, let's consider the complexity of the cocaine
problem, and to a lesser extent, the heroine and marijuana problems here in
the Unites States here in these 23 cities. Together, these drugs illustrate
some of the variation associated with age groups, as well as the variation
in the timing and intensity of drug epidemics that our communities are
experiencing.

If these 23 sites were ranked in order by percentage of adult males testing
positive for cocaine, marijuana -- excuse me, Manhattan would be at the top
of the list, with nearly 58 percent of the males testing positive; San Jose
at the bottom with about 14 percent, and Philadelphia in the middle with
about 34 percent. Within each of those sites, however, it is usually
evident that the oldest males, those 36 and older, are far more likely than
the youngest males in the adult population, age 15 to 20, to test positive
for cocaine.

In Detroit, for example, only five percent of the 15-20 year olds tested
positive; while nearly 50 percent of the oldest group among males in
Detroit tested positive. This age pattern is held in many sites for a
number of years. And since younger arrestees are coming into cocaine use
at low rates, at least among the arrested population, and older cocaine
users are aging out or dying out of cocaine use, we are seeing overall
declines in the cocaine positives in these communities among arrestees.

In other words, many of the communities to which we are referring today are
past the peak of the cocaine epidemic and are increasingly dealing with a
problem that is concentrated among older users who may be less criminally
active and may have starkly different treatment needs than their younger
counterparts.

As Director Travis mentioned earlier, and as other NIJ and ADAM
publications have demonstrated, the waning of the cocaine and particularly
crack epidemic has a clear relationship to violent crime in our
communities. Measuring cocaine use among arrestees at the local level is
thus one important mechanism for monitoring and predicting violent crime
movements.

It is important to note that cocaine use is not declining in all sites. A
number of communities, primarily in the southwestern United States, are
showing increases in cocaine positives. In some cases, young adult males
are more likely than the oldest males to test positive for cocaine.
Communities where cocaine use among arrestees may still not have reached
its peak include Houston, Miami, San Antonio, Dallas, New Orleans, Omaha,
Phoenix, and San Jose.

In some ways the opiate problem is distinct from the cocaine problem, while
in other ways it is similar. One way that the opiate problem, which
includes heroin, is different is that only eight communities show more than
10 percent of the arrestees testing positive for opiates, including 22
percent in Chicago and 19 percent in Manhattan.

However, the problem is similar to cocaine in that older arrestees are
usually far more likely to be involved with heroin use than younger
arrestees. Again similar to cocaine, however, there are a number of
communities where the younger age groups are starting to catch up, and
indeed in some cases exceed the older groups in terms of involvement with
opiates, including Philadelphia, New Orleans, and St. Louis. Trends in
these cities should be monitored carefully, as they may be indicative of
future heroin problems in these communities.

Marijuana, in contrast, exhibits the opposite pattern. That is, marijuana
is found extensively among younger arrestees but relatively infrequently
among the older offenders. Thus while the numbers have leveled off for
marijuana in many of our communities, even among the younger offenders, the
age structure pattern suggests that these communities, indeed most of the
communities in our 23-site system that we're reporting on, will be dealing
with substantial marijuana-using populations for many years to come.

[Continued in Part 2]

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski