OBAMA TAPS ADDICTION SPECIALIST FOR NO. 2 DRUG CZAR

PHILADELPHIA -- In another clear break from past policy, President
Obama announced Friday that he intended to nominate as the nation's
No. 2 drug czar a scientist often considered the No. 1 researcher on
addiction and treatment.

A. Thomas McLellan, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, will
be charged with reducing demand for drugs, a part of the
foreign-supply-and-domestic-demand equation that many policy experts
say has been underemphasized for years.

"We're blown away. He understands," said Stephen J. Pasierb,
president and chief executive of the Partnership for a Drug-Free
America, that addiction "is a parent, a family, a child issue."

If confirmed by the Senate, McLellan will be deputy director of the
Office of National Drug Control Policy, which advises the president
and coordinates anti-drug efforts. Obama last month nominated Seattle
Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske to head the office.

Kerlikowske's reputation for innovative approaches to law enforcement
and McLellan's stature as a treatment scientist make them "a perfect
match," Pasierb said.

Although hardly known outside his field, McLellan is regarded as a
leading researcher on a range of addiction-related issues.

As a scientist at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in
Philadelphia in the 1980s, he led development of two measures, known
as the addiction severity index and treatment services review, that
characterized multiple dimensions of substance abuse. The tools, used
worldwide, help determine the type and duration of treatment.

In 2000, he was lead author of a groundbreaking paper that compared
drug addiction with chronic medical conditions.

When diabetes or asthma patients relapsed after treatment ends, he
argued, doctors concluded that intervention worked and that treatment
needed to be continual.

"In contrast, relapse to drug or alcohol use following discharge from
addiction treatment has been considered evidence of treatment
failure," the authors wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

McLellan, 59, grew up outside Harrisburg, Pa., and did his graduate
work at Bryn Mawr College, earning a doctorate in 1976. In 1992 he
cofounded the nonprofit Treatment Research Institute to study and
adapt promising scientific findings into clinical practice and public policy.

He worked with the State of Delaware, for example, to implement a
system that tied part of the payments to state-funded treatment
centers to predetermined measures for success.

"I think his long and rigorous examination of how drug-abuse
treatment is delivered is pretty unique," said David Friedman,
director of addiction studies at the Wake Forest University medical school.

People in the field have long been frustrated by drug policies under
both Democrats and Republicans that they say were driven not by
science but by ideology -- essentially, arrest the drug suppliers and
get the users out of sight.

Friedman was buoyed several weeks ago when Secretary of State Hillary
Rodham Clinton made an unusual acknowledgment of the role played by
domestic consumers of illicit substances.

"Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade," she
said in Mexico.

Friedman said that "if that's the way the administration feels about
this, then all of a sudden the deputy for demand reduction" --
McLellan's job, in addition to being the second in command --
"becomes a very important position."