TAKING STOCK ON THE WAR ON DRUGS

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is what happens to your brain after starting
marijuana.

BARRY McCAFFREY, DRUG POLICY DIRECTOR: At the end of the day -- and really
this comes lock, stock, and barrel out of Partnership for Drug Free America.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is what your family goes through.

McCAFFREY: What we're trying to do is change youth attitudes.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And your friends.

REP. NEWT GINGRICH (R) HOUSE SPEAKER: When you have the courage to say, "No,
I'm not going to do drugs and you shouldn't do drugs either," when you have
the courage to turn in somebody who's a drug dealer, when you have the
courage to insist that you want to go to a drug-free school, live in a
drug-free neighborhood, when you turn to your younger brother and sister and
say, "Don't you do it," you may literally be saving their life.

WILLIAM J. CLINTON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: These ads are designed
to knock America up side the head and get America's attention and to empower
all of you who are trying to do the right thing. Please do it.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Any questions?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOBBIE BATTISTA, HOST: Will new government ads keep your kids off drugs? Ask
drug policy director Barry McCaffrey why he thinks they work. Also, a man
some call Dr. Vomit offers a more graphic deterrent. And this man suggests
the government is in denial. Are you? Get ready to talk back.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to TALKBACK LIVE, CNN's interactive talk show.
I'm Bobbie Battista, and we are taking stock of the war on drugs as the
government releases a new series of public service announcements today.

With us in our studios, General Barry McCaffrey, director of the Office of
National Drug Control Policy and a member of the National

Security Council. With us as well from Dallas, we are joined by Dr. Larry
Alexander, an emergency room physician who has earned the nickname, Dr.
Vomit. And we will get into that a little bit later in the show.

General McCaffrey, good to see you. Nice to have you on the show.

MCCAFFREY: Good to be here, Bobbie.

BATTISTA: The ad that we saw just a few moments ago is pretty much the sum
and substance of what you hope will be a $2 billion, five-year advertising
campaign aimed at keeping kids off drugs. Why do you think these ads will work?

MCCAFFREY: Well, we're going to begin what we launched today with President
Clinton. And we had Attorney General Janet Reno here and Secretary Donna
Shalala and the Speaker to try and indicate this is a bipartisan effort.

We're going to talk to children, particularly middle school youngsters,
about the dangers of drugs, but not just on television, that beautiful
Partnership for Drug-Free America work, we're also going to be on the
Internet, radio, print media, a very sophisticated five-year effort.

BATTISTA: So it's a saturation campaign for the most part?

MCCAFFREY: We're going to try and talk to every young person four times a
week in prime time access.

BATTISTA: OK, now how will you know that this kind of an ad is getting to
the people it needs to reach?

MCCAFFREY: We're going to have to evaluate it. We went out to 12 test cities
in the last four months and ran these ads, a $20 million effort, saw
dramatic feedback of 500 percent increase in telephone calls to these
community coalitions, which is really the heart and soul of what we're
doing. We think it will work, and we're going to have to evaluate it,
though, step by step.

BATTISTA: What do you think now of critics who say, "How about taking the $2
billion and spending it elsewhere?"

MCCAFFREY: Well, one of the nice things is we don't have to make an
either/or determination. We've increased the amount of money in drug
prevention activities by more than 15 percent just in the coming year. We're
going to do a lot of things. We're going to support boys and girls clubs,
Pride, DARE Program, a lot of efforts to try and engage young people after
school, between 3:00 P.M. and 7:00 P.M. and on weekends and in the summer.

BATTISTA: Let me ask you something. You've got a gold bracelet on your wrist.

MCCAFFREY: Yeah.

BATTISTA: And there is special significance to that. Could you tell us about
that?

MCCAFFREY: Well, this is a very special thing. It's Tish Elizabeth Smith's
(ph) memory bracelet. She died in her first year at college, this beautiful
young woman, a straight "A" student. Her mother is here today, Deborah
Padgett Barr, and we're going to talk to her of an overdose of heroin which
she took smoking, probably one of her first drug uses in her life. It's a
tremendous reminder to people like me of why we're doing this.

BATTISTA: Let me talk to Mrs. Barr. You're right, she's right behind you
here in our audience. And I see you have pictures of your daughter. Can you
share her story with us?

DEBORAH PADGETT BARR, MOTHERS WITHOUT CHILDREN: Tish was 18. She had been a
very good student in high school. She graduated an honor roll student, went
off to college. I encouraged her to take college classes outside of the
city, and she would say jokingly, "Mommy, I'm not big enough to leave you."
But just a few months later, she left me forever.

With the end of her high school days and the beginning of college, there
were new people in her life, new situations and challenges. And I think
Tish's need to fit in outweighed the logic she used to have. She was very
anti-drug as a child.

The new friends in her life gave her some drugs, and she started out smoking
marijuana in the fall. And I don't think she got the message that I got as a
child. That's why this campaign is very, very important. Just like we would
immunize our children against measles or diphtheria, this is an opportunity
to take information vaccine all across our country and save our children's
lives.

BATTISTA: Let me bring in Dr. Larry Alexander now, because unfortunately,
Dr. Alexander, you see quite a number of cases just like this, don't you?

DR. LARRY ALEXANDER, BAYLOR MEDICAL CENTER: Unfortunately, we do.

BATTISTA: Can you tell us about a few of those?

ALEXANDER: Well, even just this past weekend, we had two overdoses in the
hospital that I work in now. And I have changed hospitals since really
becoming involved in this. And it's just an example of how this is beginning
to spread throughout the entire metroplex areas. I don't think any suburban
area is safe anymore.

And I agree with Mrs. Barr. I think many of these kids who are trying this
are doing it to fit in because their friends are doing it, because they want
to belong. And unfortunately, many of them, when they're trying heroin this
time, aren't aware that the chieva (ph) that they're using is truly heroin.

BATTISTA: All right, let me take a couple of questions here from the
audience. Jennifer, go ahead.

JENNIFER: I just wondered why the money wouldn't have been split more
between community-based programs and programs that work from the ground up,
as well as the sort of top down media campaign. It seems like often,
children are affected by their peers and what's around them and their
environment as much as they're affected by what they see sort of far off in
the media. And I was wondering if there would be a way for the money to be
allocated both from the top down and bottom up.

BATTISTA: General?

MCCAFFREY: I think your point is right on target. This is an either/or
proposition. Tremendous increases in funding, three years in a row, have
been the biggest drug budgets in history. The amount of money that's
actually going to this piece of it, the youth media strategy campaign, is
under one percent of the total.

So we don't have to choose. We're going to support broad-based drug
prevention programs, including things like safe and drug-free schools money.
So I think you're quite right. We have to build community coalitions if we
expect to make any progress in this.

BATTISTA: Let me scoot over here real quick. We do have to take a quick
break, and when we come back, a man who says the drug war is a dirty,
rotten, miserable failure. We'll be back.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: My brother nearly died from a cocaine habit. And I've asked myself
a thousand times: What kind of fool was I that I did not know this was going on?

You know, I got myself elected president. I'm supposed to know what people
are thinking, what's going on in their minds. How did this happen that I
didn't see this coming and didn't stop it?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ANNOUNCER: In today's "New York Times," the first of many anti-drug ads
encouraging parents to talk to their kids about drugs appears. A mother
says, "My kid doesn't smoke pot. He's either at school, soccer practice,
piano lessons, or at a friend's house." The son says, "I usually get stoned
at school, after soccer practice, before piano lessons, or at my friend's
house."

BATTISTA: Welcome back, everybody. We are talking about the war on drugs
today. Let's take a phone call now from Joe in West Virginia. Joe, go ahead.

JOE: Yes. Over two million people admit to using cannabis in the United
States. Roughly 200,000, that's two percent, were caught last year.
Conversely, 98 percent were not caught. This to me shows a complete failure
of the government's drug policy. The fact is that people who want to use
drugs will continue to do so regardless of the laws in place.

BATTISTA: Well, General, we had an Internet message there a few minutes ago,
too, someone criticizing the effort because it's going after the users
rather than the suppliers.

MCCAFFREY: Of course, what we're talking about today is we're talking about
drug prevention, focusing on young people in middle school years, and
reducing the likelihood of using cigarettes, alcohol, the most dangerous
drug affecting our children, and marijuana. That's 90 percent of the drug
abuse problem. And it produces the four million chronic addicts in our
country today. So prevention is the heart and soul of this strategy.

At the same time, we've got to recognize that we want to support local law
enforcement. We want high rates of social rejection of drugs, and law
enforcement is part of that equation.

BATTISTA: I thought it was interesting a few moments ago when Deborah, whose
daughter overdosed on heroin trying it the first time, you said that she was
brought up who was very anti-drug as a child and obviously was getting that
message from those around her but then tried drugs anyway. So, I mean --
Crystal, go ahead.

BARR: I'm not sure that I adequately prepared my daughter for the drugs she
would be facing. The drugs of today are not the same drugs that I grew up
with, and I did not understand -- For example, I didn't know that kids were
smoking heroin. My image of a heroin user did not fit my daughter, so I
didn't prepare her for that. I think in her mind, smoking heroin must have
seemed much less serious

BATTISTA: The PSA we're looking at now as you talk is one, as a matter of
fact, that addresses parents and the fact that they should talk to their
children about drugs.

All right, joining us now is Mike Gray, a writer and filmmaker. He authored
the film, "China Syndrome," among others. His latest book is entitled, "Drug
Crazy, How We Got Into this Mess and How We Can Get Out."

Mike, welcome to the show. Let me ask you, first of all, how you even got
into this topic. I mean, how did this book even come about?

MIKE GRAY, DRUG WAR CRITIC: Well, I've been aware of the fact, as I think 75
percent of the American people are aware of the fact, that the drug war is a
failure. And so six years ago, I decided to start digging into this. And the
deeper I got, the more horrified I became. And this book was the result of that.

I tried to cover the entire drug war and then shrink it down to 200 pages.
So it's basically a two subway ride read, and you can get through the whole
thing and understand what went wrong and why.

BATTISTA: Well, tell us if you can in a capsule.

GRAY: Well, in capsule, we didn't have a drug problem in this country prior
to 1914. These wounds are totally self-inflicted. And the terrible tragedy
that happened to Mrs. Barr and her daughter and the stories that Larry is
talking about, the emergency room heroin overdoses, this all occurred during
the most stringent prohibition this planet has ever seen. We enacted it in
1914. At that time, we did not have a drug problem. There were a couple of
hundred thousand addicts in the country, and there was no teenage addiction.
The teenage addicts were absolutely unheard of.

Prior to 1914, for all practical purposes, children didn't have access to
drugs. Now, of course, they can get anything they want from the neighbor's kid.

Continues: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v98/n541/a11.html


Checked-by: Melodi Cornett