06 March 2002

White House Official Hails Hemispheric Solidarity Against Illegal Drugs

Washington -- The nations of the Western Hemisphere have devised a good plan to work together on fighting illegal drugs, but "what we need to see now" from that plan is a significant drop in the production of illegal drugs and the number of drug users, says White House official Bradley Hittle.

In March 6 remarks, Hittle said that drug-policy coordination through the Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism (MEM), a tool launched by the Organization of American States (OAS) to measure anti-drug efforts throughout the hemisphere, is the "most hopeful progress" the region has made in many years of combating drugs. The MEM, he said at an OAS forum on counterdrug strategy, represents "a unique switch from a policy of mistrust to one of confidence" and indicates that the drug problem is now being recognized as a hemisphere-wide problem, rather than as one confined to certain nations in the region.

Under the new approach, no single country should be blamed as the source of all illicit drugs, nor any other country singled out as the sole consumer of those substances, Hittle said. For instance, he said the United States, generally thought of as a place where illegal drugs are consumed rather than generated, is now dealing with the reality of increased production of marijuana and methamphetamine within its borders.

Hittle, drug-source country support branch chief at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the Bush Administration has pledged itself to reduce by 10 percent over the next three years the number of drug users in the United States and to achieve a 25-percent reduction rate among users over the next five years.

"That's accountability, and that's the sort of requirement that's going to be needed if the MEM is going to achieve" its objectives for the 34 member states of the OAS, Hittle said.

He said that measuring the MEM's success is admittedly a difficult proposition, since the nature of the drug problem differs in each country, and therefore "logically the solution varies in each country."

MEM's challenge, said Hittle, is defining the drug problem in terms that are acceptable to the various countries in the region and finding solutions that can actually be implemented in each country. Under the MEM, each OAS member state appoints a drug-policy expert to help assess the nature of the drug threat in the other 33 countries of the hemispheric organization. To ensure objectivity, national experts do not participate in their own country's evaluation. Countries are evaluated in five main areas: national anti-drug plans and strategies; prevention and treatment programs; reduction in drug production; improved law enforcement; and overall commitment. The MEM stems from a mandate issued by the hemisphere's heads of state at the 1998 Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile.

"Most people in this room" would support MEM's recommendations for fighting drugs, Hittle said. But the challenge, he indicated, is tying country-specific recommendations to the resources available in each country in order to make progress in the drug war. Hittle said the U.S. national drug control strategy is tied to the resources made available to each federal agency involved in the anti-drug fight, and each of those agencies is held accountable for its performance.

Hittle said U.S. initiatives to fight the domestic drug epidemic in the 1980s achieved good results, such as cutting the number of cocaine users in half. Continued success in the following years, he said, helped persuade U.S. leaders to sign on to a unified hemisphere-wide anti-drug plan such as the MEM.

The MEM provides reason for optimism in the hemisphere's efforts against illicit drugs, and the United States strongly supports the plan, Hittle said. "We have, to this stage, done a good deal of the work necessary" to implement the hemispheric anti-drug strategy, he declared. "The question will be whether that strategy, as implemented, will be able to produce the results that all of us are looking for."