And there are other glaring mistakes. An undiagnosed heart ailment caused his death. But the teenager had taken Adderall, a drug prescribed by his doctor to treat an attention-deficit disorder. It contained amphetamine, a drug on the list. I worked for the government.
Statistics are something people manipulate.
These days, Florida's drug fight is an enormous effort. Bush created the Office of Drug Control in 1999 to coordinate prevention, treatment and enforcement efforts, announcing his goal of cutting drug abuse in Florida in half by 2004. It coincides with the national drug strategy to cut abuse countrywide by the same amount. To head the program, Bush brought in McDonough, a former U.S. Army colonel who served as head of strategy for the Office of National Drug Control Policy from 1996 to 1999. On Dec. 2, almost a year after McDonough's arrival, the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Washington, D.C., issued a nationwide alert about the increasing abuse of designer drugs.