1 - National Criminal Justice Reference Service

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treatment entry. People who have been traditionally excluded from decision making are somewhat reluctant to
participate in the formal system, so the informal system is another element that must be considered in the Master
Plan.
Another model is the community empowerment model. At Evaluation, Management and Training, Inc. (EMT),
we are evaluating a number of the OSAP Community Partnerships and, in this case, there is a transfer of
technology and an effort to transfer our capacity to interrupt behaviors that are associated with the adverse effects
of drug and alcohol abuse. The technology of detoxification, rehabilitation, and habilitation is really the principal
means of recovery for many of the people, and the formal system cannot provide that. Since many of those people
probably would not enter the system even if they could do so, there is an effort to train community-based people to
do the kinds of things that professionals usually do. Non-professional but e~'tremely intelligent, informed, and
skilled people can accomplish remarkable things out in the community. Even law enforcement activities are being
assumed by the community; in Sacramento County, the police have not been able to interrupt the drug trafficking,
so citizens groups and neighborhood groups are taking the owners of the property to small claims court, using the
justice system to try to do what the police will not do. They find out who owns the property where crack is being
distributed, they inform them that the property is being used illegally and is a disturbance, and then take the land
owner to small claims court. seeking a $5.000 claim against the landlord. They do not need lawyers, and they do
not have to wait six years to get a court date. Win or lose, they are going to get the landlord. to evict those people
or ultimately the property can be seized. The community is becoming empowered.
A fourth model similar to this is based on community autonomy. Many people refuse to accept funding from the
county. They will not participate in the Master Plan process, and they want t~ operate independently from formal
efforts by the system to interrupt their local drug and alcohol abuse problems. Each of the aforementioned models
has significant impacts on the Master Plan, and it is important as a master planner to recognize competing
systems. In some respects, we are working on two Master Plans, one of which describes the formal system. which
uses data to identify and make rational decisions. But there is also a Master Plan that must recognize the invisible
system. Maybe these community-level "providers" are never going to communicate with the formal system, but
they can communicate among themselves a little better. Perhaps we can help them adapt technology out of the
formal system in order to accomplish much of what the system can no longer provide. People in different parts of
the community have very different priorities, and it is important from a master planning point of view to
understand that, to remember that the formal system is only a piece of the puzzle. We may never get the
information that we want from the informal system, but we still have to make decisions and these people still have
to be included in the process.
IMPROVING DATA SYSTEMS FOR MONITORING
DRUG USE
Patricia Ebener
The Rand Corporation
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A new RAND research project is now underway and may be useful to feed into the master planning efforts
throughout California. The study is about improving data systems and has just been funded by the Office of
National Drug Control Policy. (Appendix M) RAND's Drug Policy Research Center has investigated the
availability of various data systems for policy analysis, and we have done some exploratory analysis with the major
federal data systems, DAWN, and the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse. The results from 17 different
federal agencies that collect data about drug abuse and its consequences show a fragmented collection of indicators:
we have a vast army of data out there. Some are collected by the different fields: by enforcement, by the treatment
community, by the health community, by the labor department, and by the transportation department. There is
little coordination of data collection at the federal level. In addition to fragmentation is lack of timeliness.
Indicators of drug use and of the consequences that arise from use of drugs often lag behind the phenomena
because of the slowed processing of data.
The result, when you put all these things together, is that you may have apparently inconsistent findings, with an
inexlJlicable downward trend in one indicator system and an upward trend in another one. A more integrated,
systematic approach would more consistently describe the situation, an approach that has not been done in the past
for the existing systems. ONCDP has begun to add~Cjs these problem by looking at these multiple indicator
systems produced by different agencies and trying to make more sense of them. ONCDP has asked RAND to
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