Clinton Drug Plan Boosts Emphasis on Treatment : Narcotics: The $13.2-billion strategy would cut interdiction at the border and increase efforts abroad.

Calling it “a course that offers the promise of real results,” President Clinton on Wednesday formally presented a $13.2-billion drug-fighting strategy that partly shifts emphasis from law enforcement to drug treatment and prevention.

Clinton, appearing with inmates undergoing drug treatment at a Washington-area prison, outlined a plan that would increase overall anti-drug spending by $1 billion, or 8.6%, while boosting spending on treatment and prevention by $827 million, or 18.2%, to $5.4 billion.

The program pares efforts to halt the cross-border and seaborne flow of drugs, which the Administration considers “cost-ineffective,” by $94 million, or 7.3%, to $1.2 billion. But it will increase spending to counter the manufacture of drugs abroad.

Despite the shift in emphasis, the Administration would still spend 59% of its anti-drug budget for law enforcement, and 41% for treatment and prevention.

The total spending, which would mark a 9% increase from last year, assumes that Congress will accept the Senate’s version of the pending crime bill, an assumption that may not prove true.

Speaking at the Prince George’s County Correctional Facility, Clinton said he knows firsthand that treatment of drug abuse works.

“I have the questionable privilege of living in a family that has dealt with both alcoholism and drug treatment,” he said. Clinton’s half-brother, Roger, was jailed for drug use, and his mother was once married to an alcoholic.

The Clinton budget would allow the treatment of an additional 140,000 addicts. Federal authorities estimate the total addict population at 2.5 million, but only 1.1 million of those who potentially could benefit from treatment are receiving it.

Peter Reuter, a drug expert at the University of Maryland who has advised the federal government, said that even with more spending, U.S. anti-drug treatment programs probably cannot absorb more addicts.

“You can’t force-feed it,” he said. “The drug treatment infrastructure is very weak.”

Typically, only 20% of addicts who participate in drug treatment programs are still off drugs a year later, Reuter said. but the rate improves after users have been through such programs several times. “After four or five drug treatment (programs), you start to see some greater effects,” he said.

The proposed program would spend $191 million more to reduce drug use among students, including stepped-up education campaigns.

The largest single area of increased spending would be prevention and community anti-drug programs. Spending would increase by $448 million, or 28%.

Officials said they decided to cut drug-interdiction funding in part because traffickers have changed their tactics in response to policing.

Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) hailed that decision, saying it is “very smart” to conduct fewer surveillance flights and to focus instead on “overturning the drug-producing gangs and cartels in the countries that grow the drugs.”

But the Administration program was denounced by Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), who called it a “welcome mat for drug thugs.”

Treatment “does have a proper place in the mix of anti-drug programs but not at the expense of law enforcement,” Gramm said.

Clinton was accused last year of downplaying anti-drug efforts after he cut 140 jobs and 23 employees from the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Despite the downsizing of the White House drug office, and signs that drug use is again on the rise, political pressure for more federal action to fight drugs has subsided from the levels of the late 1980s, when the crack cocaine epidemic began.

Clinton’s remarks were made in the prison gymnasium in front of about 75 inmates who are undergoing treatment in a program called Awakening.

One of them, 43-year-old Joseph Mungo, said his attraction to drugs “was more powerful than I knew.”

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail,” he said as Clinton listened intently. “I have lost everything and I have to start over.”

Reactions from the crowd to Clinton’s presentation were positive.

“I see the changes in people who are coming through this program,” said Jeff Blackwell, 32, of Washington. “Any type of program for drug addiction is more positive than warehousing.”

“We’re addicts,” said 46-year-old Donzel Moorehead of Washington, who has been in the Awakenings program for nine weeks and has three weeks to go. “We go overboard in everything we do. Treatment is necessary because it helps us change our attitudes about the disease.”