Posted on: Wednesday, September 10, 2003

EDITORIAL
Drug data can't be used to cut treatment

A state Health Department official cited a couple of statistics this week that might tempt well-meaning but desperate-for-cash lawmakers to save some money on drug treatment programs for teenagers.

What a mistake that would be.

Elaine Wilson, chief of the department's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Division, said the number of adolescents admitted into publicly financed treatment for crystal methamphetamine abuse has dropped since 1998, from 189 in that year to 158 last year.

She also cited a 2002 survey of 28,000 public and private school students indicating that less than 2 percent of high school seniors who took part in it said they used ice within the past 30 days. A similar survey taken in 1989 put that number at 5.5 percent.

Such numbers suggest a lot of things, but cutting back on drug treatment for adolescents, as Wilson would agree, is not one of them.

That's not to say these data aren't encouraging. It may be that education of youth on the extreme danger of ice is working. The survey did suggest that many students consider ice to be dangerous. If that's the case, you'd wonder why the state doesn't supplement the limited federal grants that now pay entirely for prevention programs, thus putting more money behind proven approaches.

Of course, there's the question of how much credence to place in a survey taken by 15 percent of the state's student body. What are the odds, one wonders, of an ice-using student participating honestly, or at all, in such a survey?

Possibly the most questionable numbers of all those provided from the survey are those extrapolating how many students in grades six through 12 in the state need drug or alcohol treatment. Those numbers also fell — by about one-third — from an estimated 16,800 students in 1998 to 11,000 last year.

You might find this drop, if it's indeed a reliable indicator, encouraging — at least until you consider that there's only enough money available to provide about 1,500 students a year with drug treatment. That's between 9 percent and 14 percent of those the survey suggests need it.

We must do better.