[Part 1 of 2]

NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF JUSTICE OFFICIALS HOLD NEWS BRIEFING ON EXPANSION OF
ARRESTEE DRUG ABUSE MONITORING (ADAM) PROGRAM

TRAVIS: Good morning. My name is Jeremy Travis. I am the director of the
National Institute of Justice, and I am very pleased to welcome all of you
to this morning's announcement regarding the institute's new arrestee drug
abuse monitoring, or ADAM ADAM program.

And I am joined today by Sally Hillsman on my far left, who is the deputy
director of the National Institute of Justice and heads up our research and
evaluation office. And to my immediate left is Dr. Jack Riley, who is the
director of the institute's ADAM program.

In a moment, I will ask Dr. Riley to describe to ADAM program in some
detail. But I would like to first take a few minutes to set a broader
context for today's announcement.

At both the national level and at the local level there is a strong desire
to develop a greater understanding of the drug problems facing our
communities. As a nation, we have implemented a number of surveys that
document the changing nature of drug abuse. The Monitoring the Future
Survey recently released focuses on high school students. The Household
Survey, as its name implies, focuses on households. And the Drug Abuse
Warning Network, or the DAWN Survey, captures data on drug abuse from
emergency room admissions.

For the past 10 years, the National Institute of Justice has administered
another survey that helps to create a national composite. This has been
called the Drug Use Forecasting, or DUF program, under which we conduct
anonymous confidential interviews with randomly selected arrestees who are
in police facilities awaiting their first court appearance.

The standard interview consists of questions about drug abuse, about
criminal involvement, as well as social history information. We also take
urine samples to determine recent drug use so that the data reported from
the DUF program does not rely upon self reports.

Over the past decade, the DUF program has provided powerful corroboration
of the relationship between crime and drug use. Consistently, in city after
city, over the entire 10 year period, we have found that between half and
three quarters of all arrestees test positive for drugs at the time of
their interview.

The DUF program has also documented changes in drug use patterns,
including, for example, the upward and then downward trends in crack use;
the rise, fall and apparent rise again in methamphetamine use; and the rise
in marijuana use among juveniles.

Most importantly, from our point of view, the DUF program has provided a
powerful window into the world of criminal behavior that has allowed (ph)
researchers and policymakers to learn in a timely fashion about important,
streetlevel changes in that world of criminal behavior.

For example, using the DUF program, the National Institute of Justice has
conducted research on access to illegal handguns, research on variations in
drug markets, and we have constructed profiles of methamphetamine users.
All of these research studies, we believe, have contributed to
understanding of the world of criminal behavior and drug abuse.

For the same period of time, the DUF program has also, however, experienced
limitations. Most significantly, it has been limited to 23 cities for the
past 10 years. And as a result, the DUF program has not captured drug
abuse patterns in most American urban centers nor has it documented drug
abuse patterns in rural America or suburban jurisdictions at all.

These limitations have become particularly acute as the nation has
witnessed a sharp surge in methamphetamine use, which, as we know now, is a
particular Western and rural phenomenon.

About 18 months ago, Attorney General Reno asked the National Institute of
Justice to develop a plan to expand the DUF program to provide tools for a
much broader understanding of drug use patterns around the country.

With her very strong encouragement and with the active support of General
Barry McCaffrey, who is the director of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy, and Tom Contantine, who is the administrator of the Drug
Enforcement Administration, and Dr. Al Leshner, who is the director of the
National Institute of Drug Abuse, with their strong support, NIJ has now
developed ADAM, the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program.

As the successor of the DUF program, ADAM is projected to grow over the
next three years from the current 23 cities to 75 cities and have a
presence in every city in the United States over 200,000 in population.

TRAVIS: President Clinton's budget for fiscal year '98 contained a request
to the Congress to fund the first phase of that threeyear expansion, that
expansion to 35 cities. And Congress has now provided the funding in the
recently enacted budget.

So today, we are formally announcing the creation of the ADAM program and
the selection of the next 12 ADAM sites. This is an important towards
creation of a known national system for monitoring drug abuse within the
criminal population, which is a very important group in terms of our
broader interest in breaking the linkages between drug abuse and crime.

When fully operational, the national ADAM program will cover the 75 largest
cities in the country these cities account for almost half of our
homicides and will include annual surveys in rural, suburban and travel
jurisdictions.

Although this national coverage is important, the structure of ADAM
recognizes the drug abuse problems are highly localized in nature.

The ADAM protocols that we're announcing today call for the creation of
local coordinating committees to use the ADAM survey to ask research
questions of local policy relevance. So we think that this balance between
national coverage and local focus makes ADAM a powerful tool for
practitioners and researchers alike who are interested in developing more
effective responses to challenges in drug abuse.

So I now (ph) turn the presentation over to Dr. Jack Riley, and we'll both
be available, as will Dr. Sally Hillsman, for any questions.

RILEY: Thank you, Jeremy.

I'd like to start with a brief description of the ADAM system and what the
program means in terms research and policy relevance both at the local and
national level with respect to substance abuse issues.

As Jeremy mentioned, the program is relatively simple in concept. It's a
base interview, approximately 15 to 20 minutes in length, combined with a
drug test that confirms or validates reports of recent drug use. In that
sense, the program is designed to provide basic prevalence information on
drug use among arrestees. And that's the context in which the predecessor
program, the drug use forecasting program, has primarily been used.

The key new feature of the ADAM system is to transform this program into a
system that not only facilitates research, but facilitates local policy
adjustments and local policy approaches to substance abuse, criminal
justice and other social issues.

To that extent, the ADAM program makes frequent and extensive use of
special topic studies. These are supplemental questionnaires that are
added to our base interview and are used to address issues that are of
either local, regional or national importance. At the publications table,
over to my right, there are examples of a number of different special topic
studies that we have done and administered through special questionnaires
over the course of the past two years including a study on
methamphetamine use; arrestee attitudes and use of firearms as well as
access to firearms; crack's decline and changes in crack consumption; a
preview of a study of drug market participation in six ADAM sites.

In addition, we're in the process of developing national addenda, as we
call these supplemental questionnaires, on gang activity, substance abuse,
alcohol use and domestic violence, and a variety of other topics relating
to policing practices. All of these subjects are designed to provide local
policymakers and local researchers, as well as national policymakers and
national researchers, direct policy relevant information on subjects that
are of interest to them in their communities.

It's also important to note that this system can be used to conduct
longitudinal studies. We provide direct access to the arrestee population,
a population that is involved in a variety of different socially harmful
and socially costly activities. We are currently using a site in
Birmingham, Alabama, to conduct a longitudinal evaluation of a community
intervention called "Breaking the Cycle."

This is a program of universal needs assessment for substance abuse
services at the time of arrest, followed by the development of a tailored
program addressing substance abuse needs. The ADAM system serves as the
platform by which that program will be evaluated over the course of the
next two years.

RILEY: In addition to the special studies feature of the program, ADAM
represents important new distinctions from the drug use forecasting
program. Perhaps the most important is the geographic expansion of the
program. The addition of 12 new sites which are listed to my right,
your left provides important eyes and ears on subjects as substance
abuse, in this case in the western United States, which is where we started
the expansion of the program.

An equally important component of the program however is the outreach
component of the program. This is the rotating supplemental data
collection that Director Travis mentioned through which each of the
communities where we routinely and consistently collect data will have the
opportunity in conjunction with NIJ and in conjunction with their own
coordinating council at the local level to select a supplemental population
it may be rural; it may be tribal lands; it may be juveniles; it may be
the general arrestee population from surrounding counties to study with
respect to substance abuse issues.

These are populations that, until this component of the program was
developed, we were not routinely able to develop information on and provide
information to national, state and local policymakers.

A second important distinction between the ADAM and the DUF program is the
Department of Local Coordinating Councils. These are local bodies
constituted by NIJ and charged with three primary responsibilities.

The first is scanning for those outreach ideas that I just mentioned. We
believe very strongly that state and local policy makers should develop
the ideas for the outreach data collection. They are the people who know or
have a sense for where the problems with respect to substance abuse, in
their communities and their states, are developing. And we will be reliant
on these coordinating councils to scan for those outreach opportunities.

Second, the local coordinating councils will be charged with developing
ideas for special topic studies. Again, as we've seen with substance abuse
issues over the course of the last decade and the drug use forecasting
program, there is no one single drug problem when you get down to the
community level. Community needs vary tremendously depending on local
circumstances. We expect that local circumstances will help dictate the
types of special studies that are undertaken in these communities.

And then finally, the coordinating councils will have responsibility for
local dissemination and integration of this data in a policy context. We
will collect the data. We will assist them in the dissemination. But
ultimately, the process of making use of these data in the local community
context will fall upon the local coordinating councils.

It's also important to note that the ADAM system provides each community
with the opportunity to collect data among both adult and juvenile
detainees. The former drug use forecasting system collects the data from
adults in 23 sites, and from juveniles in 12 sites. We're very pleased to
have the opportunity to extend the data collection in all 35 sites to
include both adult and juvenile detainees where it's possible.

I'd like to say a few words on the significant cooperation that this
program has experienced with other local, state and federal organizations
as a part of developing the platform.

Director Travis mentioned the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which
has played an important role in supporting us as we moved from the drug use
forecasting system to the arrestee drug abuse monitoring system.

In addition, we have developed important collaborations with other federal
organizations, such as the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, on the
issue of developing statelevel estimates of the need for treatment among
arrestees; the Centers for Disease Control on testing a subpopulation of
the arrestees for the prevalence of certain sexually transmitted diseases;
and international audiences on the possibility of developing an
international platform, taking ADAM to foreign sites in some context in the
coming years.

This program is a staged rampup. Today, marks the move from 23 to 35
sites. We hope next year to be able to take the program to an additional 15
locations, an additional 25, bringing us up to 75 in FY 2000, and have a
fully functioning system in place with 75 routinely collected sites plus
outreach operating at peak capacity in FY 2001.

As I mentioned earlier, we started the process of expansion in the western
United States in large part because of the concern about our lack of
information on methamphetamines use, but also because generally that was an
area of the United States where the DUF program lacked geographic coverage.

To my right, the four sites that are listed in blue Minneapolis,
Sacramento, Albuquerque and Tucson are the first sites that we expect to
begin collecting data some time in January or February.

RILEY: In other words, in the first quarter of the new calendar year.

The remaining sites that are listed Anchorage, Seattle, Spokane, Salt
Lake City, Las Vegas, Des Moines, Oklahoma City and Laredo we will roll
out in terms of data collection over the course of the next several months
in the new calendar year.

It is important to understand what the communities put into the process of
becoming an ADAM site, and we asked when we sent out a request for
proposals and concept papers to these communities that they address several
interests or several issues in their application.

We want to see the demonstration of what the community interest in the
program was what context they did use the data; what were their local
needs with respect to substance abuse issues, particularly among arrestees;
and how would this program fit in that context.

We asked about their capacity to collect the data. Would they be able to
guarantee our access to their facilities and to collect the data according
to a prescribed national protocol?

We asked for their ideas about special studies. What are the community's
needs with respect to special topical issues? We got a wide variety of
responses from these communities. Perhaps the most important and the most
consistent across all these sites was the interest in gang activity, and
that's why we have undertaken the development of a national addendum on
gang activity that we expect to start fielding sometime in 1998.

And then finally, we asked these communities to give us some of their ideas
about outreach for all the parts in their states or in their surrounding
communities where they lacked data on substance abuse trends and substance
abuse issues and where implementation of data collection would provide
highvalue added or high leverage toward understanding substance abuse
issues in their community and in their state.

So the result of the process is the 12 communities, as I indicated at my
right. And if you take a look to my left, you will see a chart that shows
what the national system looks like. In this case, the newest sites are
listed in red, and the existing sites carryovers from the drug use
forecasting program are noted in blue.

We are very pleased to be here today announcing the expansion of the
program and look forward to your questions.

Thank you.

QUESTION: Does this now mean that there will be a continuing physical
presence of some additional people at these various locations to collect
the to do the interviews, to do the drug tests, to analyze the data?

TRAVIS: We conduct these surveys on a quarterly basis. So every quarter
there will be a random selection of arrestees who will then be administered
the survey questionnaire and from whom we will take urine samples.

So it's not continuous, but it's pretty frequent. So it's on a quarterly
basis.

QUESTION: Now these will be people who go from Washington or from where?

TRAVIS: We have established relationships at the local level with typically
universities or some of the research entities, sometimes governmentally
based, and they are the ones who actually conduct the interviews.

So the relationship between NIJ and the local site is a an ongoing
relationship that helps support the actual interview activity. So they
collect the data, and then that gets aggregated up to a national level.

But we are particularly interested in local variation, because the drug
problems are really quite different from community to community.

[continued in Part 2]