be here today.1 I thought, rather than hold this hearing up for an hour, hour and a half while we waited for his arrival, that we would just opt for that and perhaps have the opportunity to have him be a witness for the committee at a later time.

He was delayed because of weather. They are really in the middle of a great blizzard. I talked to my wife over the noon hour. We also have staff members who are scheduled to go back into Washington, and I don't want to louse up their reservations by being too long. So I am sorry to disappoint those, including me, who thought the Governor was coming back. We will get the Governor's testimony later.

And thank you gentlemen for being here today. You have been a big help. This has been a good hearing and that gives us real perspective that we sometimes don't get inside Washington.

[Whereupon, at 3:10 p.m., the Committee adjourned, subject to the call of the Chair.]

OHIO'S DRUG WAR

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 1990

U.S. SENATE,

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS,

Cleveland, OH.

The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:35 a.m., in the City Council Chamber, City Hall, Cleveland, OH, Hon. John Glenn, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.

Present: Senator Glenn.

OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN GLENN

Chairman GLENN. The hearing will be in order.

This is an official meeting of the Governmental Affairs Committee of the United States Senate. It is what we call a field hearing in which we come out and try to get information on a particular subject that will be particularly enlightening and helpful to us in our deliberations in Washington.

Today we are here to talk about two subjects that, it is sad to say, are more and more frequently mentioned in the same breath: youth and drugs. This hearing will examine how to separate the two through education, prevention, intervention and treatmentwith the cooperation of the Federal, State, and local levels of government.

I have been thinking that in Washington when we vote on programs, we talk in tens and hundreds of millions of dollars for various purposes with regard to drug and alcohol abuse and too often we don't really look to see what is working and what is not. When we have had hearings in Washington, I have asked Mr. Bennett and other people running the drug program how they follow up on their programs, what works, what doesn't? What is working with the kids are who being enticed into drug or alcohol abuse?

Too often the programs look a bit flimsy, and so I thought about having young people come in to Washington and the people running the programs at the local level to talk about this and tell us what is working, and what isn't. Is "just say no" the answer, or has that become passe and more of a joke than anything else? What other slogans are there? What programs are working, what programs are not working?

We decided to make the emphasis of this program those who are working directly with the young people in our schools and also talk to the young people themselves. What is working in peer pressure and what is not working.

Drugs have become part of too many of our children's daily existence, and they dominate too many of their lives. Teen-agers name

(63)

"drug use" as the biggest problem facing young people today. That is from teen-agers themselves. And drugs, all too often, cause their deaths. Alcohol-related accidents are the primary cause of death in 15-to-24-year-olds, and I start off by mentioning alcohol, because too many people still do not realize that alcohol is a drug. It just happens to be legal; it is not illicit. But it is a drug every bit as much as any of the harder drugs.

Crack cocaine kills our young people with addiction, and with the violence that accompanies its trafficking. As they say in some drug-plagued New York neighborhoods, "There are no old crackheads."

In cities across America, youthful offenders and users are figuratively going from kindergarten to jail, and in the shadows of our capitol, 8- and 9-year-olds serve as "lookouts" for drug dealers. In our urban centers, traditional parent-child relationships are turned upside down as young traffickers become the primary breadwinners in poor families. In our neighborhoods, drug trafficking robs families of the serenity that parents need to raise their children properly. Drugs do not honor boundaries of race, social status, or age. Drugs are an equal opportunity destroyer.

These reasons alone justify making drug education and intervention programs for young people a priority. But I should also point out, such programs make economic sense. In our State of Ohio, it costs $14,138 per year to jail an adult drug offender. In the United States, legal and illegal drug abuse by adults cost the economy up to $176 billion a year. That includes the cost of alcohol. It costs about 24,000 deaths out on the highway every year that are alcohol-related. In supporting antidrug programs for youth, we take the most effective action against this tremendous burden on public and private resources.

Today's hearing focuses on programs which are aimed to break the costly and deadly link between kids and drugs. Looking at our witness list, I see that the most important information I will get today will be from local and expert witnesses.

Let me explain. Local antidrug programs are most effective because their authors best understand the drug problem in their communities. In Washington, I am afraid that too often the issue of drugs is becoming no more than a PR gimmick. The President has dubbed our effort a "war." And on the Senate floor we rail at the growing body count: we talk in terms of war.

But the people of America's cities have to live with those bodies: with kids murdering kids, with drug-addicted mothers delivering drug-addicted babies, treatment centers too crowded to treat, with underfunded education programs that cannot always educate those kids most "at risk."

I feel strongly that we cannot fight the war on drugs with slogans coined by political speech writers. We need to get our ammunition, learn our strategy, from the citizens who, by necessity, are in daily, hand-to-hand combat with drugs.

For that reason, our hearing has a local focus. I think we are lucky to have with us some real experts on kids and drugs: these are the kids themselves, who we will hear from later today. We adults can debate all day long the efficacy of education programs, but these kids know what works. As far as I know, this will be the

first hearing of this type that has been held where we have actually had the young people themselves testifying before an official Senate committee. I am eager to hear from the young people of the pressures that push kids towards drugs and what they think adults should be doing to alleviate such pressures.

We owe it to them and we owe it to ourselves to listen carefully to what these young people have to say. The twenty-first century belongs to our children. They will determine whether it is another century of economic, social, cultural and scientific advancement for the United States, or if, as some have actually predicted, it will be the century of our decline. Everything we have done our children can augment-or they can undo. Everything we have accomplished they can build on or they can destroy.

If drugs win over our children now, they may never have the chance that we did to mold America. We owe it to the children and to this country to do all we can to help them choose the future over drugs. If they choose drugs, there is no future.

With those remarks I would like to embark upon our hearing this morning, and our first panel this morning is Mr. John H. Luke, Manager of the Detroit Regional Office of the General Accounting Office, accompanied by Mr. Bob Coughenour of the Detroit Regional Office, Ms. Deborah R. Eisenberg of the Human Resources Division in Washington, Mr. Gil Gillespie of the Detroit Regional Office. We have been doing some studies, and we look forward to their testimony this morning to start our hearing.

I believe they are doing a more complete report on drugs on what works and what doesn't that will be presented to this committee in Washington this summer. What we have today is an interim report which, as I understand it, will be part of the bigger report which compares programs here in Cleveland and in Hamilton County diagonally across to the other tip of our state, down just north of Cincinnati. These are two very different areas of our State, and we look forward to the testimony this morning. Mr. Luke, if you will lead off, we will appreciate it.

TESTIMONY OF JOHN H. LUKE, MANAGER, DETROIT REGIONAL OFFICE, GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE, DETROIT, MI 1

Mr. LUKE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and again let me recognize my fellow cohorts. I would like to identify Mr. Coughenour. He is our evaluator in charge of our field efforts in this study we have going today, and he is assisted by Deborah Eisenberg and also Mr. Gil Gillespie, among others on our staff.

Again, Mr. Chairman, we are pleased to be here today to discuss preliminary results of our work on the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act of 1986, whose major provisions seek to help schools and communities educate children about the danger of drug and alcohol abuse.

Mr. Chairman, you asked sometime ago that we embark upon this initiative which was a multistate review. Specifically, you asked us to identify how funds provided under the Act are used

1 See p. 152 for Mr. Luke's prepared statement.

and examine the extent to which educational programs include alcohol abuse.

Chairman GLENN. If I could interrupt for 1 minute just so I can explain this to everybody in the room before we go on, the General Accounting Office sounds like an accounting firm. It is a misnomer in that the General Accounting Office, for everybody's information, is really the investigative arm for the Congress and the Comptroller General and they do a lot of investigating for us. We make requests, and they assign people to do this and go out and do their investigation. So it is not just a matter of books and accounting books and ledgers and things like that; they really are the investigative arm of Congress. I thought I had better explain that.

Mr. LUKE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

As I was saying, in addition to the previous two questions you asked us to look at, you also asked that we determine how program effectiveness is assessed and also obtain the views of students and teachers on the drug education that is being provided today.

My remarks today focus on our preliminary results with respect to the State of Ohio, which is one of a number of states included in our overall review. We obtained information from the U.S. Department of Education, the Ohio Governor's office and the State Education Agency and the Cleveland and Hamilton School Districts. We also discussed the Drug-Free Schools program with principals, teachers and students at several schools within the districts.

The drug problem in the United States, as you know, Mr. Chairman, is a profound problem with no easy solutions. The Federal Drug-Free Schools program is one of a number of efforts directed at this problem. The two Ohio school districts we visited used most of the Drug-Free Schools funds to train school personnel in various aspects of drug and alcohol-abuse education, thereby enhancing their knowledge of the problem and the ability to counsel and educate students.

This is a relatively new program; accordingly, the effectiveness and payoff of such activities are, to date, unknown. On the basis of our discussions with a limited number of students and teachers, however, the message of drug and alcohol dangers is reaching the children; both students and teachers believe that drug and alcohol abuse would be worse without the Drug-Free Schools program.

As you know, the Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act provides federal financial assistance to establish programs for drugabuse education and prevention. Programs funded are to clearly convey the message that the use of illegal drugs and the abuse of other drugs and alcohol is wrong and harmful.

Ohio received about $8.4 million in Drug-Free School funds for the school year 1988-89. These funds were divided between the Governor and the State education agency. The Governor, who received $2.5 million, spent about 85 percent on programs targeting high-risk youth. The Act requires that governors spend at least 50 percent of their Drug-Free Schools funds on high-risk youth.

For example, one of the Governor's programs is the Urban Minority Alcoholism and Drug Abuse Outreach Program. This program targets high-risk African-American youth and uses a multidisciplinary team approach, including community education, prevention, consultation, media development and professional training