CITING BUDGET, JUSTICE ENDS DRUG-TESTING PROGRAM AT JAILS

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department is scrapping for now a jailhouse
testing program for accused drug offenders that was credited with providing
data about heavy drug users and emerging illegal drug trends.

Officials at the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department's
research arm, cited budget cutbacks for the demise of the Arrestee Drug
Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) program that it has run since 1986.

The program tests people arrested for drug violations at jails in 35 cities
of varying sizes. Data is used to develop national patterns of drug use,
trends, markets and treatment needs. The program involves a urine test and
a confidential interview with the accused person.

Mark Kleiman, a UCLA public policy professor and drug policy expert, said
the program differs from most other government measures of drug abuse by
focusing on the heavy users -- those responsible for more crimes, addiction
and other problems -- rather than people who use drugs casually.

"All the people who are dropped by the rest of our social services network
get picked up by the jails," Kleiman said Wednesday. "If you're going to go
duck hunting, you go where the ducks are."

In one example, data enabled researchers to accurately predict that the
sharp rise in crack cocaine use in the 1980s would be a one-time spike
because younger drug offenders were using the drug in far smaller numbers.

"You could see it was not going to be a big, brand-new endemic drug,"
Kleiman said.

National Institute of Justice Director Sarah Hart called the program
wonderful but said budgetary constraints made it impossible to continue it
along with other programs that measure such things as domestic abuse,
corrections issues and management of heavy court caseloads.

"It was one program. We have an obligation to do criminal justice research
on all sorts of issues," Hart said.

The spending bill signed last week by President Bush for the fiscal year
that began Oct. 1 included just $6 million for discretionary Justice
Department research programs, down sharply from $20 million the year
before. The ADAM program alone cost $8.4 million a year.

Hart said the president's next budget request, which will be released next
week, will include some money to revive ADAM. She said the agency is
working on revisions that could reduce the cost to as low as $6 million a year.

The institute stopped the program two weeks ago but the decision received
little attention because the only notice was a four-paragraph announcement
on its Web site.