JUSTICE DEPT. ENDS TESTING OF CRIMINALS FOR DRUG USE

The Justice Department has quietly ended a program to measure criminals'
use of drugs and forecast new drug epidemics, citing budget cuts by Congress.

The program, the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program, or ADAM, tests
newly arrested criminals entering jail for narcotics violations in 35
cities. Attorney General Edwin Meese 3d, in the Reagan administration,
started it in 1986.

Law enforcement officials and criminal justice experts criticized ending
the program, saying it was a useful tool in the battle against crime and
drugs and was widely credited for tracking the rise and fall of the crack
epidemic and detecting the beginning of the methamphetamine epidemic on the
West Coast.

"This is a real loss," said Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor of public
policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is editor of The
Drug Policy Analysis Bulletin. "Closing down ADAM indicates a complete
lack of seriousness about getting a handle on the drug abuse problem in
this country."

Sarah V. Hart, director of the National Institute of Justice, a research
arm of the Justice Department, said she had decided to stop the program
because of a lack of money. The budget that Congress passed last week
grants the institute $6 million a year in discretionary money for social
science research, Ms. Hart said, down from $20 million for the 2003 fiscal
year. The tests for drugs in jail alone costs $8.4 million a year.

"We can't put every dime into one methodology for drug testing," Ms. Hart
said. "We have obligations to do research in many other areas of the
criminal justice system," including the court system, helping prosecutors
manage caseloads and reducing domestic violence.

A number of law enforcement officials and drug experts questioned the
institute's support for the program and said the Justice Department and the
White House Office of National Drug Control Policy should have lobbied
Congress harder for money to continue the testing.

"Nobody I know, including me, has been able to get Sarah Hart to answer a
phone call or e-mail about ADAM in months," said Bruce Johnson, an official
with the National Development and Research Institutes Inc. in New York who
manages the jail tests in Manhattan.

Ms. Hart said she had approached officials of the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, outside the ADAM program, and asked them to come up with a
smaller, less-expensive version. One of those officials, Allen J. Beck,
said that he had been working for months to develop such a program but that
the lack of financing now made it impossible to start even that smaller
program.

Professor Kleiman said ending ADAM reflected what he and other drug experts
said was a misallocation of resources in the fight against drugs. The
government, he said, is paying $50 million a year through the Substance
Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for a household survey on
drug use. The survey asks people to report drug abuse voluntarily and does
not require urine tests, as the jail program does.

In addition, the survey is conducted among people who may use drugs only
recreationally, Professor Kleiman said.

As a result, the household survey detects about 30 tons of cocaine use a
year, he said, when the real total consumption is close to 300 tons.

"The household survey is missing about 90 percent of the cocaine that is
used," Professor Kleiman said.

A reason the survey misses so much drug use, he said, is that "the great
bulk of cocaine is consumed by heavy users, three-quarters of whom are
criminally active." Those are the people counted in the jail program.

Professor Kleiman noted that ending the jail program occurred as President
Bush, in his State of the Union address last week, called for spending an
additional $23 million to test students for drugs. Professor Kleiman said
that students consumed relatively small quantities of hard drugs and that
no studies showed that school-based testing deterred drug use.

"With that $23 million, we could run ADAM for three years," he said.

But a spokeswoman for the White House, Claire Buchan, said Mr. Bush
believed that "drug testing has been shown to be effective in stopping
students from taking drugs."

An official of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said
that he had "enormous respect" for the jail testing but that budget
realities had forced the administration to rethink it. The administration
is working on a leaner, less expensive version that will provide a national
estimate of drug use among criminals, something that the current program
did not do, because its figures are local.