The Justice Department has ended a program that measured criminals' use of drugs and forecasted drug epidemics.
The Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program was started in 1986.
Sarah V. Hart, director of the National Institute of Justice, said in an article in The New York Times, the program was ended because of a lack of money. The budget grants the institute $6 million a year in discretionary money for social science research, down from $20 million the previous year. The program to test for drug use alone costs $8.4 million a year.
The ADAM program was useful in the battle against drugs and was widely credited for tracking the crack epidemic and detecting the start of the methamphetamine epidemic.
This is a real loss in the fight against drug abuse.
The government is paying $50 million a year through the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration for a household survey asking people to report drug abuse voluntarily.