Get Youths Out of Drug Areas, Bennett Urges

Federal anti-drug chief William J. Bennett said Friday that some neighborhoods are so infested with drugs that children should be removed from them and placed in orphanages.

“No one is a stronger proponent of the family than I am, but when we reach the level of child abuse that we see in some parts of America, we’ve got to do something,” Bennett said.

“We may just have to . . . find some way to get children out of the environment which they’re in, to go to orphanages, to go to Boys Town, to expand institutions like that, where they will be raised and nurtured,” he said.

Bennett spoke to about 1,000 members of PRIDE, the nation’s oldest and largest drug education organization.

Florida Gov. Bob Martinez, who spoke after Bennett, said some children are being removed from drug-infested neighborhoods but “in a more indirect way.”

“Often that parent, the drug user, is a child abuser, therefore the child is already taken because . . . of the abandonment of the child,” Martinez said.

Bennett said Americans can no longer afford to be casual about drug use.

“I think that among some there is a kind of ‘let them eat crack’ attitude. ‘If they want to die, let them die, and if they want to destroy their children in the process, it’s none of my business’ . . . That is just offensive, un-American and (an) unacceptable notion. We are all in this together,” he said.

Bennett, who is director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said that in the 1970s and early 1980s “the whole society winked at drugs,” but that Americans now identify drug abuse as the nation’s No. 1 problem.