Narcotics research, rehabilitation, and treatment. Hearings, Ninety ...

598force within our State Police Department. This will have the ability andmobility to move across the face of our State after the criminals who profit bydealing in drugs.In the education phase of our program, in the summer of 1970, 200 teacherswere given an intensive 2-week course in drug use and abuse. These teachersthen returned to their communities with the mandate to give 10 hours of awarenesstraining to their fellow teachers. By awareness training is meant knowingwhat the drugs are, the symptoms the children will exhibit when taking themand some of the syndromes behind the taking of drugs.Virginia recognizes our t.eachers are the front line of defense in our schoolsand that education is the long range weapon to thwart the spread of the drugabuse. To date 47,000 of our teachers have been given this 10-hour awarenesstraining. By the end of July we hope to have some 55,000 teachers trained.We do not feel this is enough in education. The State is now completely revisitingthe health curriculum from kindergarten through the 10th grade to includedrug education—not drug information but drug education. This then meansthe State will have to certify its teachers to teach this program. This also meansthe State has to retraiji, between 1972 and 1974, its 1,500 health teachers and2,000 counselors.This gives a 2-year period for the universities and colleges of the Commonwealthto gear up to begin to produce certified teachers in this area. Besides thistraining, the State is also carefully looking at a program to utilize the Parent-Teacher Associations throughout our Commonwealth as a vehicle to give to thepeople of our State 10 hours of awareness training. Our hope would be for atleast 21/4 million people to be trained by 1975..This brings me to the efforts we are making in the area in which you are mostconcerned—treatment and rehabilitation. In 1969, Virginia had no rehabilitationprogram to speak of. Today we have the beginnings of such a program, but weshare the feeling of inadequacy which is so general in this area.We doubt that there is any single type of treatment and rehabilitation programwhich will be successful in all cases. We are not even confident about therelative merits of the more popular programs used today. Therefore, we havebegun with several different models of different therapeutic techniques so that wemay determine which will be the best method or methods for Virginia to use inthe future. V.^!,,;i,. ,,,,, i,.,, .; • -ir.., ,;,,..!.,.One of the most respectell medical schools'in the country, the ^ledieal Collegeof Virginia, has a methadone program. This program has been functioning for14 months without one incident of death or overdose. It is not simply a maintenanceprogram. The program u.ses other facilities like vocational rehabilitation,job training and counseling while the drug methadone is being used as a buffertool to give us time to reorient our patient back into a productive life. Over a longI>eriod of time the patient's methadone is cut back as he receives counseling andbecomes strong enough t.o reenter society.An example of local. State, and Federal cooperation is a therapeutic communityrecently opened in the Richmond metropolitan area. The Richmond communityaction program supported this program with permission of the City eople who are addicted and who are abusers of otherdrugs. In the Tidewater area, plans are on the way to take a good section of oneof our military bases. Camp Pendleton—in fact we will use the bachelor officer'squarters—and take personnel from each of the service agencies such as thehealth department, vocational rehabilitation department, and department ofeducation who will live on the Pendleton project. They will be answerable toonly one director and have that director answerable to the board of agenciesvi^hich submitted the personnel. In this way we give the personnel the freedomto interact over each patient's problem, and give the program the ability to grow