Pubdate: Thu, 11 Jan 2001
Source: Fresno Bee, The (CA)
Copyright: 2001 The Fresno Bee
Contact:  http://www.fresnobee.com/man/opinion/letters.html
Website: http://www.fresnobee.com/
Forum: http://www.fresnobee.com/man/projects/webforums/opinion.html
Author: Russell Clemings, Fresno Bee
Bookmarks: http://www.mapinc.org/meth.htm (Methamphetamine)
http://www.mapinc.org/find?158 (A Madness Called Meth)

LEGISLATORS PLEDGING ACTION ON METH ISSUES

FRESNO -- It will take a few weeks for details to become clear, but
lawmakers who took part in the Central Valley Methamphetamine Summit
this week are pledging to introduce legislation to address some of the
concerns raised by summit participants.

Law enforcement officials and others at Tuesday's summit in Fresno
asked for more federal agents, more equipment, and tighter laws and
regulations to help address the region's meth problem, especially the
hundreds of industrial-sized meth manufacturing labs scattered
throughout rural California.

The summit was organized by the state's two Democratic U.S. senators,
Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and Reps. Cal Dooley, D-Hanford,
and Gary Condit, D-Ceres, partly in response to an 18-page
investigative report that ran Oct. 8 in the McClatchy Co.'s California
newspapers, including The Bee.

With the 107th Congress still getting itself organized and a new
president awaiting inauguration, legislators' staff members said it
probably will be several weeks before specific plans can be made to
deal with issues raised at the summit.

"It's going to take a few days to analyze the written testimony and
the verbal comments and to attempt to synthesize it into an agenda,"
Dooley spokeswoman Gina Mahony said Wednesday.

One piece of legislation already being prepared would address an issue
that got little attention at the summit -- the difficulty that many
meth users have in getting treatment if they don't have health insurance.

At the summit, Boxer's staff distributed prepared remarks in which she
pledged to introduce a bill that would help ensure treatment on demand
for chronic users of meth and other drugs.

Saying that the number of substance abusers not in treatment exceeds
the number who are, Boxer proposed to boost federal funding for state,
local and nonprofit drug-treatment programs by an unspecified amount.
She said the bill for unmet treatment needs in California alone is
$330 million.

A Boxer staff member said the bill probably will be introduced later
this month.

In addition, both Boxer and Dooley said at the summit that they plan
to convene a second summit dealing with treatment and other issues,
such as prevention and education, related to reducing the demand for
drugs.

Another of the summit's attendees, Rep. Doug Ose, R-Sacramento, will
propose adding several counties to the existing federally designated
High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) in the Central Valley, a
spokesman said.

The HIDTA task force combines federal, state and local enforcement
personnel in a coordinated attack on the meth trade.

Ose spokesman Yier Shi said the congressman wants to extend HIDTA,
which covers Sacramento to Bakersfield, to encompass the northern
Sacramento Valley as well.
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake