U.S. Funds Drug Treatment Experiment

The Clinton administration Wednesday awarded the University of Alabama a $1-million grant for a novel experiment in which every person arrested in Birmingham will be tested for illicit drug use. Those who test positive will be required to attend treatment programs.

Jeremy Travis, director of the National Institute of Justice, which will administer the grant, called the Birmingham program a “quantum leap” in national drug policy.

The grant reflects the administration’s emphasis on drug treatment over interdiction, and it is sure to fuel debate over whether drug treatment is effective for those who do not enter into it voluntarily.

“It’s not just volunteers [in the Birmingham program]. It’s not just nonviolent offenders. It isn’t just prior to a court appearance and a conviction,” said Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the president’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. “Every offender that comes in gets tested and, if he’s positive, he’s in the program. . . . It’s not a maybe. He will receive treatment.”

Some experts are skeptical. They cite problems associated with coercing individuals into treatment and argue that the grant money, like so many past grants aimed at curbing the nation’s drug problem, will be spent fruitlessly.

“It will fail miserably,” according to Mark Greer, author of “The Drug Solution.”

“I am adamantly opposed to mandatory drug programs,” he added. “They just don’t work.”

But according to M. Douglas Anglin, director of the UCLA Drug Abuse Research Center, people who are coerced into treatment programs “stay as long and do as well” as people who have entered treatment voluntarily.

Recent studies, however, seem to favor the belief that the justice system, if administered flexibly and responsibly in conjunction with independent drug treatment centers, can effectively treat drug abusers who initially do not want to be treated.

“There isn’t a whole lot of research, but people who come into treatment unwillingly do seem to benefit from it,” said Susan Turner, a senior researcher at the Rand Corp. think tank’s behavioral science department.

Between half and three-fourths of the country’s criminal population tests positive for illicit drugs upon arrest. In Birmingham, 68% of those arrested test positive.

Travis hopes that by intervening immediately upon arrest, assessing each individual’s experience with drugs and providing appropriate treatments the link between drug use and criminal behavior can be broken.

Birmingham’s judges will decide whether to hold defendants who test positive in jail, where treatment can be administered, or to release them until trial, in which case they will be monitored periodically and treated for drug use.

Defendants eventually may be placed into in-jail treatment programs, halfway houses or a number of other kinds of drug addiction centers.

This will be the first systemwide intervention program that also will provide continuous treatment and supervision to defendants moving through the criminal justice system, according to L. Foster Cook, director of the substance abuse program at the University of Alabama, which obtained the grant in competition with eight other proposals and received a check for $1 million Wednesday.