Results ‘Spotty’ in D.C. Drug War, Bennett Says : Narcotics: Official tells capital the fight will not be abandoned, citing signs the worst may be over.

One year after he pledged to make the District of Columbia a “test case” in the nation’s drug war, national drug policy director William J. Bennett said Friday that the results of federal efforts here have been “mixed, spotty, incomplete” but that he had no intention of abandoning the city.

Even though the city’s homicide rate remains at a near-record level, Bennett said, there are “encouraging” signs that the worst days of the drug epidemic here may be over.

The number of hospital emergency room patients reporting drug use dropped 13% in 1989, after more than doubling between 1986 and 1989, he said. In addition, in urinalysis drug testing at D.C. Superior Court, 60% of defendants showed positive for cocaine or other drugs--down from a peak of 73% in 1988.

Hospital emergency room admissions and drug testing of arrestees are considered key indicators of drug abuse. But Bennett aides acknowledged that they are not certain what caused the declines and that it is too early to say they represent a long-term trend.

“The city of Washington is still in trouble,” Bennett said at a news conference. “Work in some very serious areas . . . is not as far along as I’d like to see. But progress in some other serious areas has been made and shouldn’t be minimized.”

Bennett was joined at the news conference by Sterling Tucker, the District of Columbia’s director of drug control policy. Both officials avoided the type of acrimony that has marked relations between Bennett’s office and D.C. officials.

“On balance, I would have to say the federal government is meeting its commitment to the District of Columbia,” Tucker said. “Now we are hopeful there will be new commitments.”

Bennett refused to be drawn into a discussion of D.C. Mayor Marion Barry--an earlier target of his unflattering remarks--and of Barry’s upcoming trial on cocaine possession and perjury charges. However, Barry was absent from the list of city officials singled out by Bennett for praise.

Bennett had called the news conference to fulfill a promise to give semiannual reports on the D.C. anti-drug initiative that he announced last year. The plan, which at the time was estimated to cost $80 million, called for the creation of a multi-agency law enforcement task force, the construction of a new federal prison in the area and a 500-bed pretrial detention facility in the city, more federal prosecutors, the eviction of drug dealers from public housing development and new “model” drug treatment clinics.

Bennett acknowledged that some of the major elements of the plan never got off the ground. The federal prison, the costliest element, was scrapped within a week because of political opposition to a proposed site in Anne Arundel County, Md. “This project has now entered the American ‘not-in-my-back-yard syndrome’ lore, and enough said about it,” Bennett said.

There is still no agreed-on site for the pretrial detention facility. In addition, federal officials acknowledge that no new treatment beds for addicts have been added as a result of the Bennett initiative.