ReconsiDer Tidbits

US is said to overstate spending on drug care

Report cites $1b in discrepancies

By John Donnelly, Globe Staff, 1/24/2001

WASHINGTON - Promising to further stoke the debate over America's
controversial war against drugs, a Rand Corporation study has found that
three federal agencies overstated their spending on drug treatment by $1
billion, and that the reported costs of some law enforcement efforts are no
more than "educated guesses."

"I tracked down one budget guy for the Border Patrol and asked how they
figured out the drug budget and he told me, `We made it up,"' said Patrick
J. Murphy, one of the study's authors and an assistant professor of
politics at the University of San Francisco. "He said 10 percent of their
budget seemed too low, 20 percent too high, so they settled on 15 percent."

The report, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe, was requested by
Barry R. McCaffrey, who stepped down last month as director of the Office
of National Drug Control Policy. It examined 10 agencies that report their
drug budgets to the drug policy office.

There were no allegations of misspending in the report, but the survey said
"flawed" reporting techniques made it impossible to know how much money was
actually spent on the battle against illicit drug use. Critics of US drug
policy have long argued that it gives short shrift to treatment programs
designed to help addicts overcome their cravings.

McCaffrey, who did not return telephone calls seeking comment, insisted on
completing the potentially embarrassing report because he wanted a better
accounting of the drug war, the authors said. They noted that he had long
been bothered by seemingly soft figures in agencies' budgets, even though
he continued to cite the inflated treatment numbers in his defense of
drug-control policy.

The drug policy office said in a statement that it "asked for the Rand
reports because we want the most reliable data" and that it has "used the
Rand findings, and will continue to do so, to improve the way drug budgets
are presented to the Congress and the public." Rand is a consulting and
research firm known for its work on complex subjects.

The statement said that the FBI drug methodology has been corrected and
that the Veterans Affairs and Education departments changed their data
collection so as to "substantially address Rand's findings." It gave no
specifics.

The most politically sensitive aspect of the Rand study, which for more
than a year examined the 1998 federal drug budget of $16 billion, may be
the amount spent on drug treatment.

In 1998, McCaffrey's office said US agencies spent $2.8 billion on drug
treatment. Rand said the actual number was closer to $1.8 billion, or 36
percent less than reported. That finding upset several members of Congress.

"If a guy wants to surrender himself for drug treatment in this country,
there are not enough places to go," said Representative J. Joseph Moakley,
a Democrat from Boston. "I think it's terrible if they are inflating
figures that show there's more drug treatment than there actually is."

Added Representative John F. Tierney, a Democrat from Salem: "Before we ask
for more drug-control money, we ought to be sure where it's going."

The largest discrepancy originated from Veterans Affairs, which reported
spending $363 million on specialized care for drug addicts and $710 million
on related treatment for those with substance abuse problems, according to
Rand.

Veterans Affairs spokesman Jo Schuda said the department could not comment
on the report because it had not seen a copy. She said the department
reported spending $407 million on specialized care for drug addicts in
1998, and $1.1 billion overall for medical care of addicts, slightly higher
numbers than Rand's.

Murphy, one of the study's authors, said the department included in its
accounting, for example, "heroin addicts who were seeking treatment for a
broken arm, not drug treatment."

"If people are serious about spending money on drug treatment, they are
going to have to look at the level of services they have been providing,
and it's much less than they had thought," Murphy said.

The report praised the Coast Guard, Bureau of Prisons, and Defense
Department for the accuracy of their accounting. But it said the
methodologies used for the Immigration and Naturalization Service and
Customs "are based largely on educated guesses."

The collection of data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, which administers about $2 billion in block grants to
states for drug prevention, "is a collection of arbitrary assumptions and
rules," the report said.

And the 1998 figures from the Health Care Financing Administration are
based on patient diagnoses and costs, "but the patient data are taken from
a 1983 study," the report said.

The Rand report recommends that the drug control office "define explicitly
what constitutes an antidrug activity" and that budgets should be based on
"empirical data, something more than guesses or expert judgments."

Lynn E. Davis, a senior fellow at Rand and another of the report's five
authors, said that without better figures, the drug office is unable to
"measure performance against its goals."

She also said the lessons in the report could be applied to other federal
offices that compile figures from several agencies "to give Congress and
the American people a sense whether the right priorities of money are being
allocated, or whether there are gaps."

Herbert Kleber, medical director of the National Center on Addiction and
Substance Abuse in New York and deputy head of demand reduction in the drug
policy office from 1989 to 1991, said the Veterans Affairs Department has
"gotten a free ride" for some time on categorizing non-drug-related medical
care as drug treatment.

He called the level of funding for treatment a "bipartisan failure. ... It
doesn't seem to matter whether you have Democrats or Republicans, drug
treatment doesn't get a lot of play. No one ever lost an election being
soft on drug treatment."

Many Democrats are expected to ask for a major jump in drug treatment
funding. One of them is Representative Nancy Pelosi of California.

"We are going to have much stronger oversight to make sure that money is
being spent in a cost-effective way to face the demand," Pelosi said.

John Donnelly can be reached by email at jdonnelly@globe.com

This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 1/24/2001. © Copyright
2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

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