‘Just Say No’ Not Enough, State Panel on Alcohol, Drugs Is Told

“Education must go beyond ‘Just Say No,’ ” Dr. Xylina D. Bean told the Governor’s Policy Council on Drug and Alcohol Abuse on Monday, referring to anti-drug campaigns such as those espoused by First Lady Nancy Reagan. “We must give children something else to say yes to.”

Over and over again, speakers at the first meeting of the council formed by Gov. George Deukmejian to develop a statewide plan against alcohol and drug abuse told panel members that the key to combatting the problem is preventing it.

The nine council members, who head state agencies involved with abuse problems, met at Parker Center, the Los Angeles Police Department’s downtown headquarters. They heard from two recovering teen-age drug addicts, a youth gang worker, a police officer who teaches the LAPD’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, and one of his 12-year-old pupils, as well as a teen-age victim of a drug-related crime, paralyzed in an accident caused by a drunk driver.

‘Nothing to Do’

An 18-year-old former addict, identified only as Robert, said many children get involved with drugs because “there’s nothing to do. There should be programs where kids could play baseball . . . a lot of sports activities where kids could stay away from the negative.”

Bean, an expert in prenatal care at Martin Luther King Jr. General Hospital, said that more emphasis should be placed on outreach for prenatal care because the majority of drug-abusing mothers don’t seek it before giving birth to addicted newborns.

Panel chairman Chauncey Veatch III, who directs the Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, said the council will hold four meetings in other areas of the state before making its recommendations by Oct. 1, the deadline set by the governor. The group will seek information from other state agencies, he said, to identify just what is being done, how much is being spent, and how best to coordinate those efforts.

“Our goal is not to re-create and duplicate, but to assess,” he said.

Meanwhile, statistics recently compiled by the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that Los Angeles led the list of 25 metropolitan areas surveyed for the number of drug-related deaths between 1983 and 1987.

2 Cities Left Out

The survey did not include drug-related deaths in New York City or Newark, N.J., however, and a spokeswoman for the institute could not say why they had been left out and whether Los Angeles might have remained the leader had they been included.

The survey, which is being compiled into a formal written report later this year, found Los Angeles had 1,488 drug-related deaths in 1987. That number was down, however, from 1,693 in 1983 and 2,878 in 1986.

Los Angeles will also be included in a $375,000 U.S. Department of Justice study of how illegal drug trafficking can corrupt police, according to wire reports. Officers in Miami and Washington as well as Los Angeles will be the subjects of the study, which was requested by Miami Police Chief Clarence Dickson after 14 Miami officers were sent to jail in a major corruption case involving drugs.

Cmdr. William Booth, LAPD spokesman, said he was unaware that Los Angeles would be part of such a study. “We haven’t had any (officer) convictions of narcotics-related charges. Our problem is at the use or abuser level,” he said.