The role of the federal government in preventing adolescent drug use was a central issue of the 1996 presidential campaign. Bob Dole criticized the Clinton administration for reducing the staff of the Office of National Drug Control Policy while Clinton criticized attempts by the Republican majority in Congress to cut federal support of drug-prevention programs. It seemed as though everyone wanted to be seen as favoring federal spending on drug prevention, and in particular, drug education.
Indeed, 65 percent of congressional candidates polled in 1996 by the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America ranked prevention programs as the number one priority in reducing the country’s drug problem, compared to just 9 percent for both prohibition and treatment. By the close of 1996, Republicans had abandoned their attempts to reduce the federal prevention budget and Clinton had secured extra funds for drug-education programs within the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education.
There is no mystery in the bi-partisan popularity of such education programs. Recently completed large-scale surveys have shown that illegal drug use among young people increased in the past three years, following more than a decade of steady decline.
Advocates of drug education argue that federally funded initiatives of the past 10 years contributed, at least in part, to the decline in adolescent drug taking, and that cuts in federal spending led to the recent increased use. However, unlike other aspects of drug control policy, prevention or education has been hardly analyzed. Law enforcement and prohibition efforts have been the subject of debate in both the popular press and academic circles. In contrast, prevention is simply assumed to be a praiseworthy enterprise, and the claims of its advocates are uncritically accepted by the press and policy makers.
Despite claims to the contrary, available data do not support the view that the decline in adolescent drug use that occurred between the early1980s and early 1990s was influenced by the level of federal spending on drug-education activities. Indeed, if one takes into account the fact that the effects of spending do not manifest themselves in actual behavior for at least three years, then increased spending coincided with increased drug use. The massive increase in federal spending that occurred in the mid-1980s drew a lot of people and programs into the drug-prevention arena in an indiscriminate manner. A good deal of this money went to people with limited experience and expertise in drug prevention. It is thus hardly surprising that we often get more, not less, drug use as a result of these activities.
What happened in 1996 as described in paragraph 2