A LOT OF TASKS AWAIT A NEW DRUG TASK FORCE

What lingered most strongly after Thursday's summit meeting of Centre
County leaders on heroin use was Ferguson County police Chief Ed Connor's
call for a more coordinated community effort to fight the addiction -- not
at Thursday's meeting, but in December 1999, when the CDT interviewed him
in the wake of a wave of drug arrests and overdoses.

"Law enforcement has to work closer with health-care providers and with
schools," he said then, so the sense of deja vu that many people may have
felt on Thursday when people spoke of the need for more cooperation and
education should be forgiven.

In fact, that is what is exasperating about the whole war on drugs in
central Pennsylvania. It's been almost three years since the creation of
the Centre County Drug Task Force, which promised, in Attorney General Mike
Fisher's words, "a newly coordinated effort to stamp out drug dealing in
this county." While the task force can point to some successes,
particularly in arresting dealers, it still feels as if we're simply
treading water.

The evidence is in the admissions by local leaders that education efforts
put forth so far haven't been enough, or in concerns expressed in some
quarters that the intervention and treatment services available in the
county aren't sufficient.

It's also in the fact, which many residents might find surprising, that the
county doesn't have a systematic way to accurately gauge the magnitude of
the heroin problem. While drug task force officials said at a news
conference on Feb. 28 that there had been five heroin overdoses in Centre
County since Feb. 1, there may have been others that were unreported.
Incidents such as the death of 17-year-old John F. Gingerich II in late
February, which police believe was due to a heroin overdose, are left as
our best indicators of the scope of the problem.

So, here we are again, with a call for a community drug task force that
would work in conjunction with the already existing drug enforcement task
force.

Centre County Commissioners Keith Bierly and Connie Lucas have offered
their office as the hub of such a task force, and that seems to be the best
place to begin. It should include all of the sectors that were present at
the summit meeting -- law enforcement, treatment providers, public school
and Penn State representatives, health care officials and county social
service officials -- and citizens committed to making an impact in the drug
war at the community level.

Such a task force will have a busy agenda. It should:

Develop more visible and more effective education programs targeted at
potential youth users and their parents. Young potential users need to be
shown that drugs such as heroin have devastating consequences. Parents and
other adults in contact with youths need to be aware of the signs of
potential abuse and shown ways to respond.

Work with institutions such as Centre Community Hospital to implement a
drug-overdose reporting system so that the community has better information
on the scope of the problem.

Better publicize the county's existing prevention and treatment resources.
Dave King, supervisor at Clear Concepts Counseling Inc., a firm that
provides outpatient drug-abuse treatment under contract with Centre County,
guesses that more than 90 percent of county residents don't know who to
call if they or someone they know has a drug problem.

Raise questions about whether new treatment options are needed within the
county. For example, with the increase in heroin use in Centre County,
should the closest option for methadone treatment be more than 90 minutes
away in Harrisburg?

Assess how the county's police resources can be more effectively mobilized
to fight drug trafficking. That process has already begun with a meeting of
police chiefs this past Friday.

Most importantly, the task force should continuing lifting the veil of
denial and apathy that keeps falling over the drug-abuse issue in the
county. It shouldn't take a disaster on the scale of what's currently
happening in Allegheny County -- a drug overdose death every other day, the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported March 14 -- to galvanize our community to
action.

Yet, there is a real fear that we'll set ourselves up for just such an
eventuality -- followed by yet another session of hand-wringing at yet
another summit.