Pubdate: Sun, 10 Sep 2000
Source: Insight Magazine (US)
Copyright: 2000 News World Communications, Inc. 
Contact:  3600 New York Ave., NE, Washington, DC 20002
Feedback: http://207.238.36.125/feedback/
Website: http://www.insightmag.com/
Author:  Mark Davis

IS THE DRUG CZAR SKIRTING THE LAW?

The head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy is under fire for manipulating data in a report to Congress to cover shortcomings in his federal antidrug program.

Bill Clinton's drug czar, Barry McCaffrey, has had no shortage of trouble recently. First, he provoked outrage by paying TV producers to let him edit scripts to promote the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy's, or ONDCP's, antidrug message. Then he got into even more trouble when Salon, a liberal Internet magazine, discovered that he was paying publishers to run antidrug editorials. And McCaffrey's problems only got worse when it was discovered that his office's Website was allowing advertisers to store "cookies" on visitors' computers, potentially allowing advertisers totrack what other Websites they visit.

Now McCaffrey's office is in more hot water. Insight has discovered that ONDCP manipulated data in a formal report to deceive Congress, a likely violation of federal law. The move concealed from congressional budget makers the shortcomings of ONDCP's $195 million per year media campaign to promote antidrug awareness. The campaign is the only program ONDCP directly manages. The doctored document, "Performance Measures of Effectiveness: 2000 Report," is supposed to fulfill ONDCP's obligations under Public Law No. 105-277, which seeks to reduce waste by requiring ONDCP to set "quantifiable and measurable" goals and then file annual reports with Congress detailing progress. If goals are not met, Congress can eliminate programs that don't work.

To this end, ONDCP includes in its report a section called "Progress at a Glance," two pages that color code each of its goals: green for goals that are "on target" and red for those "off target."

It's here that the deception began. In the section describing its media campaign, ONDCP listed its goal to "increase the percentage of youth who perceive drug use as harmful" in green. This meant that it was on target to increase the proportion of American youth who see drug use as harmful to 80 percent by 2002. But was ONDCP really on target?

In 1996 only 59.9 percent of 12th-graders -- the group that ONDCP used to measure youth perception -- saw regular marijuana use as harmful. By 1998, the proportion had fallen to 58.5 percent and, by 1999 it was at 57.4 percent.

For three consecutive years, risk perception among 12th-graders fell below the 1996 levels. Given these bleak numbers, ONDCP should have marked this goal in red, indicating that it was not on target. To get the numbers to come out right, officials made two changes (which they did not point out in the report) in the way they calculated risk perception. First, they changed a figure called the "base year," from which they judged progress. The original base year was 1996; the new one was 1998.

By making the change, they accomplished two things. First, they made the downward trend -- one that might have jeopardized funding for their program -- look less severe. Second, since the most recent data came from 1999, a 1998 base year left less room for long-term comparison. Using a 1996 base year would show a trend for three years: 1997, 1998 and 1999. But by starting in 1998, officials could now report that, although there had been a decline, it had been only for one year.

But even this more modest decline never made it into the report. That's because McCaffrey's officials made a second change: They started to use eighth-grade data instead of the 12th-grade data. Conveniently, eighth-graders typically see drug use as more risky than 12th-graders, hovering in the lower 70 percent range compared to the upper 50 percent range for 12th-graders. By changing the data source, officials found they could boast that they were less than 7 percent from their 2002 goal, compared to the 23 percent shortfall with the original 12th-grade data.

ONDCP officials cooking the report to Congress now waived their magic wand a third time by misreporting data which they obtained from a University of Michigan study called "Monitoring the Future." The numbers they reported from the study should have indicated 73.3 percent of eighth-graders saw regular marijuana use as harmful. Officials tripled their improvement by reporting a higher number.

Could these have been well-intentioned mistakes? When Insight confronted ONDCP officials about the changes, they refused to speak on the record. On background, however, officials sheepishly defended themselves. "There was no intention to hide anything," says one official who spoke only on condition of anonymity. "This does not say anything about ONDCP."

The source speculates: "The change in base year could be a misunderstanding. The graph should have started with 1996. I can't imagine why that happened. It's a very large enterprise to put together."

And what of the improvement that ONDCP tripled when it reported data to Congress? "That was a typo,"the source insists.

But officials were less eager to admit error when it came to changing 12th-grade data to eighth-grade data. Those changes, they claimed, were appropriate because they said the media campaign targets middle-school children. One official, who was in charge of data for the report, says: "We weren't trying to pull anything sneaky here."

The evidence seems to contradict these claims. Federal law requires ONDCP to point out any changes it makes to the reporting system, and the 2000 annual report did note other legitimate changes. If officials weren't trying to hide their failure, why didn't they note these changes?

An official who spoke on the condition that his name not be used responded that the report's authors simply forgot. "We missed that," he says. "It's a 200- or 300-page report. We missed that one, so shoot me."

Besides, he continues, "This to me was a very minor change to make because I'm also aware of what goes on in the media campaign."

This official's supervisor, the first source we quoted, tried to back him up. "It was an oversight," the supervisor first told Insight. But later she indicated that officials might have chosen not to document a "minor" change such as this. "Changes are indicated only if it's a major change," the supervisor says. "This was only a minor change."

But that's not what the law requires. Public Law No. 105-277, which appropriates money for ONDCP's media campaign, requires "a description of any modifications to the performance-measurement system." That certainly seems clear enough.

And the opinion that this is a "very minor change" doesn't seem to be universal. Insight contacted the office of Republican Rep. Jim Kolbe of Arizona, a member of the Task Force for a Drug Free America and chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that allocates funding for ONDCP. According to Kolbe spokeswoman Fran McNaught, switching data samples in a report that attempts to measure progress is deceiving: "We're looking at tracking true performance, so if you give us apples (one set of data) one year and oranges (another set) the next, that's not an effective tool!"

And what of ONDCP's claim that the changes were appropriate? If these changes were legitimate, there should be someone willing to take responsibility for the changes and explain why they approved them. So Insight asked ONDCP who made the decisions. Several officials blamed an "interagency working group." One said directly, "That was a decision that the interagency working group made and that we went along with." When Insight pressed for names of the members of this working group, the source referred us to his supervisor.

But, according to the supervisor, the decision was "not officially brought up at the working group."

When Insight confronted the original official about the discrepancy, he changed his story, saying, "I don't recall that I took this to [the working group] at all. This to me was a very minor change to make because I'm also aware of what goes on in the media campaign. I'm aware that their target is the `tweens' (middle-school children). I said, 'You know we're not getting an accurate measure.' I said, 'eighth-graders are a better measure.'"

Each time Insight talked with this official, the story changed. But always there were discrepancies.

While it is true that many ONDCP commercials target middle-school children, the media campaign, according to ONDCP's Website and brochures, targets "youth ages 9 to 18." Given this, why would eighth-grade data be better? Is it a better indicator of whether children grow up to become addicted to drugs? Did it better reflect the cost of drug use to society?"I couldn't give you any definite correlation," he says.

Insight asked some other experts about the differences, just to be sure. A second ONDCP official, who had not been involved in the decision to change data, says, "Eighth-grade data simply does not reliably portend future 12th-grade drug-use patterns. And 12th-grade drug-use patterns are the best, if imperfect, indicator of the future burden drug abusers will impose upon society."

Lloyd Johnston, a professor at the University of Michigan who conducts the "Monitoring the Future" study, agrees that it would be inaccurate to call one set of these data "more accurate" than another. "I think they're probably both important," he says, although he also indicates that he might expect eighth-grade data to change first. "The eighth-graders, it appears, are in a sense the first to respond to new influence in the environment," he explains.

Insight also asked him whether the eighth-grade data were a reliable predictor of the future cost to society -- whether eighth-grade attitudes strongly correlate to drug addiction later in life -- since this is what ONDCP is tasked to reduce in the long run. "I don't know if I can make that connection," Johnston says. But, he responds, "We've done a lot of our analyses on the perceived risk on 12th-graders and can show pretty conclusively that that's one of the determinants of whether they use or continue using."

Either way, the most important question remains unanswered. If ONDCP's changes were legitimate, why did officials not report them to Congress, and why did they refuse to talk about them on the record? Congress may be getting ready to ask those questions.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager