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"Reauthorization of the Office of National
Drug Control Policy"
June 15, 2005 National Drug Control Strategy
In 2002, President Bush set ambitious goals to reduce teen drug use by 10 percent in two years, and by 25 percent in five years. The Administration has exceeded the two-year goal, with an 11 percent reduction, and over the past three years there has been an historic 17 percent decrease in teenage drug use. Pursuing a strategy focusing on prevention and treatment, as well as law enforcement and international programs, there are now 600,000 fewer teens using drugs than there were in 2001. This is real progress, and the 2005 Strategy builds on this dramatic success.
We have achieved the important goal of getting drug use by our young people moving downward. We now must secure the equally important objective of sustaining, accelerating, and broadening that downward movement. Maintaining our momentum will require a sustained focus on all aspects of drug control, as well as a balanced strategy for approaching the problem. With its three priorities and clarity of purpose, the Strategy offers both.
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Stopping Use Before It Starts: Education and Community Action
Progress in the fight against drugs is to be found in our schools, our neighborhoods, and our workplaces. Attitudes against drug use continue to harden. The number of children using drugs continues to fall. Citizens all across the country are uniting in community coalitions to battle vigorously against drug use and drug dealing in their neighborhoods. Though youth drug use is continuing to decline, the number of drug users overall is still far too high, and young people remain susceptible to the lure of drugs. This is our continuing challenge that the Strategy addresses through a combination of innovative programs aimed at our youth and their parents, who consistently are the most influential force in the lives of their children.
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Healing America's Drug Users: Getting Treatment Resources Where They Are Needed
As risky behavior goes, drug use ranks among the worst. While it is difficult to draw precise inferences from the data available, the likelihood that an adult who uses drugs at least on a monthly basis (a so-called "current" user) will go on to need drug treatment is approximately one in four—high enough to constitute a substantial risk, which draws millions of people to self-destruction, but low enough that many individuals are able to deny the obvious risks or convince themselves that they can "manage" their drug using behavior.
To assist those who would benefit from drug treatment, the Strategy focuses on innovative Department of Health and Human Services grants such as Access to Recovery, as well as interventions through the criminal justice system. In addition to these avenues, the Strategy supports approaches in a variety of settings to encourage drug users to seek the treatment they need. These include hospital emergency rooms, where doctors are now screening individuals for evidence of drug dependence and referring them to treatment as needed. They also include nonprofit organizations serving the needs of formerly addicted prisoners reentering society. These groups support their clients' first tentative steps in freedom, steering them away from established patterns of crime and drug use and into recovery after what for too many has been a life of addiction.
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Disrupting the Market: Attacking the Economic Basis of the Drug Trade
The strategy of the U.S. Government is to disrupt the market for illegal drugs—to do so in a way that both reduces the profitability of the drug trade and increases the costs of drugs to consumers. In other words, we seek to inflict on this business what every licit business fears—escalating costs, diminishing profits, and unreliable suppliers.
To effectively disrupt major drug markets, it is important that U.S. law enforcement and our allies approach this problem strategically, as a market. Many drug trafficking organizations are complex, far-flung international businesses, often compared to multinational corporations. Still other successful international trafficking organizations function as networks, with business functions accomplished by loosely aligned associations of independent producers, shippers, distributors, processors, marketers, financiers, and wholesalers. Such networked organizations pose special challenges to law enforcement and interdiction forces, since by the very nature of a network, the system is resistant to the disruption or dismantling of individual elements. As the Strategy demonstrates, networked organizations are not immune from severe disruption and dismantlement. The way to severely damage a networked organization is repeatedly to damage or destroy most of the elements in one horizontal layer of the network—especially a layer requiring critical contacts or skills—at a rate higher than the organization's ability to replace them.
The Strategy describes how the United States Government, in concert with international allies, is seeking to target networks by attacking entire business sectors, such as the transporter sector. The Strategy lays out several examples, including destroying the economic basis of the cocaine production business in South America by fumigating the coca crop; seizing enormous and unsustainable amounts of cocaine from transporters; and selectively targeting major organization heads for law enforcement action and, ultimately, extradition and prosecution in the United States.
Last Updated: June 16, 2005
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