Truth or DARE?

Bush is supposed to release the National Drug Control Strategy. I haven't seen it yet but he did preview its contents in his weekly radio address last week. He wants to spend millions more of your tax dollars to increase drug testing in schools, help more communities run prevention programs and pay for treatment through religious groups for more low-income addicts.

Those proposals include increasing funding to $23 million from the current $2 million for schools that want to use drug testing to expand early intervention programs, adding $10 million for local coalitions working on prevention efforts, and doubling to $200 million the funding for the government's "Access to Recovery" program that helps addicts afford professional care.

Completely ignoring our country's long standing separation of church and state he proposes doubling the already obscene amount of your tax dollars going to faith-based organizations. I assume that means your basic Southern Fundamentalist Christians.

Bush also argued on behalf of the addict assistance program, funded at $100 million for the current year, which he said would involve a large role for religious charities.

"Because I know a good way to change a person's behavior is to change their heart, faith-based treatment programs will always be an option," he said.

Wouldn't you think these charities, by definition would be donating their services for free to the needy instead of charging the government? And his reasoning on the increasing funding for drug testing in schools would be laughable if it were not so fiscally irresponsible. The schools need books and arts programs, not police agents assigned to watch your children pee.

He cited an annual Department of Health and Human Services survey of eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders, released last year, to show the progress made under his watch.

That survey found less use of many kinds of illicit drugs among high school students, especially for Ecstasy and LSD. Overall, the survey showed an 11 percent drop in illegal drug use in the previous two years, slightly surpassing Bush's goal of a 10 percent reduction.

This survey is so flawed that it wouldn't bear mentioning except that Bush is using to promote a false scenario of success under the current drug enforcement policies. Fortunately, Peter at Drug War Rant posted a comprehensive analysis debunking the survey results, so I don't need to duplicate his remarks. Pete sums it up well in his title.

Government agency spends our money, investigates self, says 'It's all good'.

He then goes on to explain how these 'positive' results were achieved.

This comes from their release of the Partnership Attitude Tracking Study (PATS), which has become the method by which the ONDCP has decided it should be evaluated, ever since it kept getting negative results from independent studies.

PATS is generated by the Partnership for a Drug Free America, which is essentially a private arm of the Drug Czar's office. The Drug Czar gets tons of taxpayer money to run advertising which gets special consideration and rates in the media, while the Partnership raises money to produce spots and run surveys that say the spots are working, which justifies bigger budgets for the Drug Czar.

...In other words, the results of the survey they are running determine whether their existence is justified. Can you say "conflict of interest?" I knew you could. In addition, since they depend on all the taxpayer supplied advertising dollars from the Drug Czar, they have additional incentive to insure good results.

Any other incentives? Well let's look at the corporate and foundation support to the Partnership. Let's see... in the $25,000 and above category, we have: Bayer Corporation, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation, Consumer Healthcare Products Association, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly-Clark Foundation Inc., Novartis Consumer Health, Inc., Perrigo Company, Pfizer Foundation, Inc., Pharmacia Corp., The Procter & Gamble Fund, Schering-Plough Corporation, Wyeth/ Wyeth Consumer Healthcare. Recognize a pattern?

Pete notes well that the methodology of the survey was completely unscientific and ends with a sobering reminder as to how far this administration is willing to go to suppress the truth.

They asked "How often do you go to websites that encourage illegal drug use?" and "How often do you go to websites that discourage illegal drug use?" Hmmmm... How would they classify Drug WarRant? They don't have a question for "How often do you go to websites that tell the truth about the drug war?"

We wonder where Last One Speaks would fall under their criteria as well.