Steering America's youth away from drugs is the top priority of the 1997 National Drug Control Strategy, said General Barry R. McCaffrey in a speech before approximately 200 people yesterday at the Kennedy School of Government's ARCO Forum.

His new $16 billion budget proposal to Congress represents a nine percent increase over last year and includes a 22 percent increase in funding for programs directed at young people.

Children are the number one priority in the battle against drugs in the United States, said McCaffrey, who directs the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP).

According to McCaffrey, serious exposure to drugs, now begins in the 6th grade. About one in five high school seniors regularly use drugs.

McCaffrey also fielded questions from the audience on a wide range of topics including the hotly debated Proposition 215 in California and Proposition 200 in Arizona.

Both will permit doctors to recommend marijuana to patients who are suffering from serious illnesses.

The growing public support for this initiative forced the Clinton administration to address the issue of legalizing marijuana use for medicinal purposes.

However, the ONDCP still maintains that the health effects of marijuana remain unproven. Since 1937, federal law has prohibited the purchase and sale of marijuana.

McCaffrey said, however, that medicinal marijuana "ought to be looked at and will be looked at."

In December, the ONDCP committed nearly $1 million to fund a comprehensive review of the possible benefits of marijuana by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine.

Responding to a question about the issue of intravenous needle exchange, McCaffrey said that he would rather focus on funding for treatment programs.

"[The needle exchange] issue is on the periphery," McCaffrey said. "We only have 50 percent of the funding we need for treatment programs; that's what we need the most."

Concluding remarks to McCaffrey's speech were given by the Kennedy School of Government's Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and Management Mark H. Moore and Deborah Prothrow-Stith, assistant dean of Government and Community Programs at the School of Public Health.