Bush to Praise Anti-Drug Organization During Visit

It’s everywhere.

On high school gym shorts and water polo caps, grocery store bags, bumper stickers, hamburger wrappers and trucks’ mud flaps.

The logo with the message “Drug Use Is Life Abuse” by the organization with the same name has saturated Orange County in the year and a half since the group was founded by Sheriff Brad Gates.

And because the group is funded completely by private donations, it is exactly the kind of volunteer effort that President Bush asked for in his 1989 State of the Union address.

As a result of the program’s success and the White House’s campaign against drugs, President Bush is traveling today to Orange County for the second time in a year to put his stamp on Gates’ anti-drug effort.

Last April, the president visited Orange County’s Rancho del Rio, a remote, 213-acre drug-smuggling hide-out that was seized by narcotics agents. The president noted the county’s effective anti-drug operation when he presented the sheriff with a check for almost $4.4 million in money confiscated during the raid at the ranch.

This time, Bush is expected to focus attention on Orange County’s grass-roots campaign to coordinate corporations and classrooms in a high-profile battle against drugs.

“We want to highlight what we could accomplish without any federal government money,” said Spencer Geissinger, executive director of the Drug Use Is Life Abuse Foundation. “We are the thousand points of light that the president has been talking about.”

Sheriff’s Lt. Orville King added, “This is a partnership between law enforcement and private enterprise.”

More than 50 of Orange County’s largest businesses are now members of the Drug Use Is Life Abuse Foundation, officials say. The purpose of the group is to maintain public awareness about the issue and to educate schoolchildren--starting in kindergarten--about the dangers of drug use.

“It’s trying to change an attitude,” said Ted Wedlake, a founder of the organization and a vice president at Western National Properties in Orange. “How did we get (people) to change their attitude about smoking, about buckling up, about drinking and driving? Those things were all cool 10 years ago. We’ve just got to make this not cool anymore.”

The methods employed to bring about this change in attitude have been creative.

Sponsors have asked local clergy to give one sermon every quarter about the perils of drugs. They have made film presentations that some movie theaters are playing before their features.

And they have put their stamp--the Drug Use Is Life Abuse logo--on almost every place it will fit.

The foundation also sponsors classroom visits by sheriff’s deputies. It recently published a booklet that the deputies distribute to students between fourth and eighth grade. Titled “Positively No Drugs,” it was done with the help of Rams quarterback Jim Everett.

According to Sheriff’s Deputy Brad Warner, who travels to the Orange County classrooms, one out of every 10 sixth-grade students has smoked marijuana. By sixth or seventh grade, he said, most children have decided whether they will take drugs or not.

In Orange County, he added, a person dies every 36 hours from heroine or cocaine use.

Officials said they do not know how much money the foundation has raised since it was started in September, 1988. And they declined to provide the public records about finances that federal regulations require nonprofit organizations to make available.