[Part 2 of 2]

QUESTION: Do you follow examples of how these surveys have been used
practically, you know, in the past?

TRAVIS: Well, it's a real important question. One of the powers of the
ADAM program is that it is a collection of data at the local level where a
lot of policy is made on responses to the drug use problem, and where we
are working to increase the timeliness of the data coming back to the local
community. So we view the institute the local policy level relevance
of the ADAM program is one of the primary strengths of this particular
approach.

So what are the types of questions that some of the local policy
coordinating councils might be looking at?

Jack Riley mentioned some. The profile of methamphetamine users that we
published has particular interest to people who are interested in public
health issues on who is coming into the criminal justice system that has a
methamphetamine problem.

How do you think about treatment availability for this particular group of
individuals?

Another one that would be more on the enforcement side, the publication
that we have a preview of here that we are about to release next month
looks at the variations in local drug markets. We've asked arrestees, how
do you access your drug supply?

TRAVIS: How often do you have to go into drug markets to be able to buy
drugs? Do you buy from the same user from the same seller all the time?
To what extent do police and their enforcement activities tend to impinge
upon the availability of drugs?

So these questions have particular relevance at the local level to those
who are interested in enforcement questions. So the variation of the
variety of drug policy questions from treatment to enforcement all have
sort of purchase in terms of how the ADAM program can help inform the local
policy discussions.

QUESTION: (OFFMIKE) in studying the link between drug abuse and violent
crime, do you find that one are they coequal partners or does one drive
the other? Your 10 years of DUF data what comes first, or can you say
that it's something like that?

RILEY: I think it's important to recognize that...

(UNKNOWN): I'll stand so I can see you.

(LAUGHTER)

RILEY: There are high levels of substance abuse across all crime
categories. A median across sites of probably 60 percent or more of the
arrestees test positive for at least one drug at the time of arrest, almost
regardless of crime categories.

Now there are certain certain charge categories where you're even more
likely to find an individual who tests positive for drugs. Prostitution and
possession cases are instances.

With respect to the link between violent crime, I urge you to pick up a
copy of the large report on the table to my right on homicide in eight U.S.
cities. Six of those cities were drug use forecasting cities, and there's a
very clear link between homicide trends in those communities and the level
of drug use cocaine use measured among the arrestee population.

I think a lot of what is driving that relationship is differences in terms
of the risk of participating in cocaine markets, particularly in crack
markets, in those communities.

QUESTION: But which comes first? Did most people start at one violent crime
versus drug abuse?

RILEY: That isn't information that at this point we routinely gather,
although I will say in part of developing our revised interview instrument
we're looking at what amount that is that is information we should be
asking about the development of criminal careers and how drug use
affected the development of criminal careers.

QUESTION: Did the incident (ph) study differentiate in that division you
were talking about, about cocaine use and the link with homicide. Did it
differentiate between crack and power cocaine?

RILEY: We, in terms of drug testing, cannot distinguish between crack and
powdered cocaine. The testing process only tells you whether or not the
person recently used cocaine. But we can then corroborate the cocaine test
with selfreport, so that we know what the majority in those communities
the vast majority in some cases of what we're talking about with respect
to recent measured cocaine use is in fact crack cocaine and not powdered
cocaine.

QUESTION: How much was the funding that you got to spend on this?

TRAVIS: Congress appropriated $4.4 million additional dollars this year
to the NIJ budget to fund the expansion to the 12 sites that we're
announcing today.

QUESTION: I think you said you do these interviews and drug tests
quarterly. What is the sample size? You mean you just do everybody in the
jail at that point or a certain number of people? Or...

RILEY: Well, it in part depends on the size of the community. But as a
general rule, we end up interviewing about 225 to 250 adult males. For
practical considerations because of the lower arrest rates for females, we
almost always end up interviewing all the females that come through the
facility during our two to threeweek window of data collection.

And then, in the juvenile situation, it again depends largely on the arrest
rate as to whether or not we interview everyone or a fraction that comes
through.

QUESTION: And are these drug tests mandatory or voluntary?

RILEY: No, the data collection is all voluntary, and we make clear at the
time of the interviewing that their participation in the program has
nothing to do with their current arrest charges.

QUESTION: What is the rate of consent? Just curious.

RILEY: We get about 90 percent, 85 percent, depending on the location of
the people approached who agree to be interviewed. And of those, 85 to 90
percent will agree to give a urine sample.

RILEY: We don't consider an interview complete unless we have both the
completed interview and a drug test.

QUESTION: Have you failed to monitor or assess the extent to which the
local policy councils have implemented or made action conclusions based on
the data that they've got so far?

RILEY: The local policy councils are being created now with the creation of
ADAM. So what we have asked to the sites that do both new sites and all
sites, both the DUF sites and the new ADAM sites, is to constitute a local
policy coordinating council.

We asked the new sites in submitting their application or their concept
paper to identify policy questions that they want answers to. So once, you
know, they're up and running, we expect that they'll start adding the
addendum, the added questions to the survey of interest to them.

So in a year, we'll come back and talk again. But I think one of the
important, very important objectives here is to provide local communities
with a better empirically based understanding of their drug problem and
answer questions that are of interest to them so that they can then take
policy action.

QUESTION: Was there no systematic way that the communities looked at the
(OFFMIKE) and then...?

RILEY: Sally, did you want to say something to it?

HILLSMAN: There is no systematic way, although obviously, both the law
enforcement and the research community that were involved in the DUF
program at the local level had a variety of mechanisms that they used in
order to bring the information to the attention of local policymakers, and
to also initiate some of the research addenda that we added to the DUF
program.

But what we're trying to do here is to regularize that process and also to
ensure that, to the extent possible, it's inclusive of all of the various
parties at the local community who might have important ways to use this
information.

One of the things I also wanted to add was that in the urinalysis test,
it's a panel of 10 different drugs that are tested. So one of the
important things in the ADAM samples will be the capacity to look at
different not just the level of drug use but the different kinds of
drugs that are being used at the local level.

And in the ADAM program, we are going to have some flexibility with respect
to what's in that panel of drugs so that we'll have a core panel that we
will test across all of the sites. But then sites may have some concern
about a different drug or a new drug and we'll have the capacity to adjust
the panel in order to see if we can pick up either leading edge new drugs
that may be coming on the market.

TRAVIS: If I just might add one thing I neglected to mention is that we
are examining the technology to add new drugs to the panel. There are some
drugs that until recently, the ability to detect them in the urine specimen
was relatively limited. So we expect that that panel of 10, that menu that
we can choose from, the test for will grow in addition to the addition
of several sexually transmitted diseases, through collaboration with CDC to
the panel.

QUESTION: This drug testing as well is contracting through some local
public or private agency or...

TRAVIS: Yes.

QUESTION: And is it typically a public or private agency that does this?

TRAVIS: The drug testing just to answer your question. The drug testing
portion is handled through a national contractor so the current setup is
that the site administrator, the local person responsible for managing the
interview team and providing quarterly access to the facility, at the end
of the data collection run will ship the specimens to a national laboratory
contractor. So the testing is not done onsite. And that's to ensure that
we have uniform testing methodology, comparable testing procedures across
all the participating sites.

QUESTION: (OFFMIKE)

TRAVIS: Well, there are certain classes of inhalants, (OFFMIKE) to organic
compounds that we expect to be able to add to the panel, not the universe
of inhalants. LSD is difficult to test for, but that's clearly a drug that
would be of importance to the juvenile population. Some of the more
exotics, we've had the ability to test for, but the relatively expensive.
So we need to determine a methodology for sort of best determining how to
feel that expensive testing technology. This would be things like ecstasy,
GHB, and other drugs that are probably relatively low prevalence, but there
may be isolated pockets where testing for them might be important.

TRAVIS: Signal communities for example.

QUESTION: How well do you test for methamphetamines right now?

TRAVIS: I'm sorry.

QUESTION: How well do you test for methamphetamines now?

TRAVIS: Well, methamphetamine is tested that's one of the core 10 drugs,
so we test for that in all 23 existing sites.

QUESTION: With all 10 12 new sites west of the Mississippi, it seems to
be a powerful statement about the growing problem of methamphetamines.
Right?

TRAVIS: That is correct. Almost every one of the applications that was
submitted from the western United States indicated, either through their
own local initiatives on collecting data and drug testing, that they were
experiencing problems with methamphetamine.

QUESTION: Including California?

TRAVIS: Exactly. That they wanted routine collection of the data and
I'm not aware of a single community that applied that did not think that it
had a problem that was relatively severe with methamphetamine.

QUESTION: Is the primary objective of this program to give a helping hand
to local communities? Or to gather data that allows you to look at national
trends and patterns?

TRAVIS: Do you want to chose between those two?

We're trying to do both, and I think one of the some underlying some
principles of the ADAM program is that the national drug program has a
significant local dimension to it.

Just to give a quick example of that, speaking of methamphetamine, the test
the positive rate for methamphetamine tests in San Diego either exceeds
or comes very close to cocaine levels. If you test for methamphetamine,
which we do on the eastern seaboard, you can barely find it. If you look
at heroine use in Baltimore, that is the drug problem in Baltimore, whereas
in Washington, D.C. it's a crack cocaine problem.

So there is significant local variation toward the drug problem. So the
ADAM program has the benefit because it is locally rooted, of being able to
provide a picture, which is composite of pictures, of the drug problem by
looking at it's local variation.

At the same time, the because this is a research platform, the access to
this population, the criminal (ph) of our population, allows us to look at
a number of national issues of national importance the gang research
that Dr. Riley mentioned. Obviously there's a lot of concern about gang
prevalence in cities.

There's also a lot of concern about gang migration. Where do gangs come
from, go to? How do they sprout up in places that are unexpected?

So having a national research platform that allows us on a quarterly basis
to talk to people in police custody about their criminal involvement, drug
involvement, and gang involvement and weapon involvement, gives us the
capability at the national level to be able to understand some very
important phenomenon, particularly in their regional variation and as some
of these activities move across the nation.

So it is both a national research program that is distinguished by its
access at the local level.

QUESTION: Are gangs yet in and methamphetamine much yet?

RILEY: I don't think we've developed any information on that. We are in the
process of completing a study in six western sites that is analogous to the
market study the market participation study that you'll find a preview
of here. There are some important differences, at least from preliminary
data, in terms of differences of participation in those markets. But
beyond that, it's a little early to speculate.

QUESTION: Is there one particular drug that you see as a kind of an
upandcoming problem?

TRAVIS: Well, we've discussed methamphetamine a lot this morning. That is...

QUESTION: Something that maybe is not as well known, that you're finding
the more use of and could be something of the future to worry about?

TRAVIS: I'll ask Jack to talk about trends that we've observed recently.
But let me just comment upon the methamphetamine question again.

There's a little concern about the rise of methamphetamine use, and concern
that we don't know enough about it's movement across the country. And the
decision by the institute to focus our expansion activity on the western
part of the United States reflects a very serious concern about
methamphetamine use, and a desire to know much more about the users, the
markets, the access to markets, the movement from jurisdiction to
jurisdiction.

So if you were to ask what is the drug that's on the scene right that we
are most concerned about, both for its law enforcement purposes and for its
public health purposes, I think methamphetamine would be the number one
concern at the moment. And the ADAM will help us development much better
understanding.

If you want to talk, Jack, about some trends that we're seeing at all?

RILEY: I think two significant trends, one of which is available in report
form over on the publication tables, are worthy of note.

RILEY: The one that is reported on is the plateauing or the gradual decline
in powder cocaine and crack use in most of the existing 23 sites in the
system. Andy Gaul (ph) and Bruce Johnson (ph) have very carefully analyzed
those trends and reported that there is stabilization of crack and powder
cocaine use, ultimately leading toward a longterm decline if those trends
hold up in many communities across the United States.

The other major trend that we have observed over the course of the past
couple of years is the sharp increase in marijuana use. That's no surprise
to those of you that have been paying attention to drug use statistics, but
the rapid expansion of the use of that drug among the arrestee population
was very stark over the course of the past two years.

TRAVIS: Anything else?

Thank you.

END

Copyright 1997 Federal Document Clearing House, Inc.