ORGANIZERS TRY TO REVIVE DRUG DATA PROGRAM

Federal effort helped gauge impact of illegal drug use in Charlotte

Local organizers of a national program that gauged drug use among those
arrested in 35 U.S. cities are searching for money to restart the program in
the Mecklenburg County jail.

The Justice Department abruptly scrapped the $6.8 million Arrestee Drug
Abuse Monitoring program in January, citing budget concerns.

On Tuesday, Paul Friday, a college professor who served as Charlotte's ADAM
site director, said he and others are applying for at least three federal
grants in hopes of reviving it.

He said the Charlotte portion of the program cost about $100,000 a year to
run and gave the community information vital to predicting drug trends,
helping addicts and making the city safer.

"Substance abuse data is hard to come by," said Susan Long-Marin,
epidemiology manager at the Mecklenburg County Health Department. "We are
always looking for ways to determine the impact substance abuse has on our
community. (Without ADAM) we lose local data."

Through ADAM, researchers went to the Mecklenburg jail quarterly to
interview and drug test people who were being processed and charged with
offenses ranging from traffic violations to murder. The data taken from
those who agreed to participate was then crunched to determine information
such as:

- - In 2003, about two-thirds of all male participants tested positive for
drugs.

- - About 70 percent of men charged with a felony tested positive for some
drug.

- - The most frequent place men bought drugs was a house or apartment, not the
street.

- - Nearly two-thirds of men at risk for alcohol or drug dependency, or drug
abuse have no insurance.

The local data, which also included information on women, was combined with
the other cities' information and used to map national patterns of drug use,
markets and treatment needs.

Since Charlotte joined ADAM in 2000, it has been used locally to determine
which treatment services inmates needed, to project the number of beds and
counselors needed in treatment centers and to determine if the centers
offered the right programs.

Deputy Chief Bob Schurmeier said Charlotte-Mecklenburg police used the data
in its drug-threat assessment and sent information to vice and patrol
officers about drug use in the areas where they work.

Jan Thompson, director of inmate programming at the Mecklenburg jail, said
ADAM made Charlotte-Mecklenburg a safer place.

"It provided accurate information that every substance abuse agency could
utilize," she said. "Our police can be more effective (having the ADAM
data). Our policies can be based on fact and not guesswork."