PORTLAND - Illegal drug use in the United States has dropped sharply since 2001 but abuse of prescription drugs remains a problem, the director of National Drug Control Policy said Friday.

John Walters said that President Bush's anti-drug plan for 2007-08 - which was released in Portland - is to reduce prescription drug abuse by 15 percent over three years. The administration ranks the problem second only to marijuana.

The plan singled out the pain reliever OxyContin as one of the prescription drugs most abused. The strategy calls for more states to adopt prescription drug monitoring programs to prevent “doctor-shopping” to get prescriptions for more drugs.

Seventeen states, including Oregon, lack such a program, but the Oregon Legislature is considering one.

The American Civil Liberties Union has questioned whether such programs violate doctor-patient confidentiality.

Walters said overall use of illegal drugs among young people is down 23 percent from 2001, with 840,000 fewer teenagers using drugs now.

Since 2001, the survey showed drops of 50 percent in use of methamphetamine, 21 percent for steroids and 25 percent for marijuana among teenagers.

Walters credited drug testing for much of the decline and urged its expansion in schools and elsewhere. He also said abuse among older people declined.

Walters said the data came from a survey done at the University of Michigan for the National Institute For Substance Abuse.

The administration report says about 19.7 million Americans reported using at least one illegal substance in the previous month.

Bush's program calls for a media campaign, nonpunitive random student drug testing and more local anti-drug coalitions.

It provides $12.9 billion for prevention, treatment and supply reduction campaigns. Walters said most of it is destined for communities to develop their own drug programs.

Walter said the number of small methamphetamine labs found in Oregon dropped by 87 percent from 2004-2006, the year Oregon became the first state to require a prescription for cold remedies containing pseudophedrine, a key ingredient in making methamphetamine.

Baby boomers had heavy exposure to alcohol and drugs in the 1960s and 70s, he said, “and they brought that danger with them” to adulthood.

He said about 1,000 school districts carry out drug tests and the number is growing by about one a week and can lead to intervention that can stop a young drug abuser from carrying the habit into adulthood.

Drug testing, he said, is a way to eliminate peer pressure, allowing a person to say, “I can't, I'm being tested. End of argument.”

“Afghanistan is responsible for 95 percent of the world's opium production,” he said, “but not one U.S service member has tested positive” for opium there, he said.

Despite some concerns for invasion of privacy, he said, the United States will “look stupid in five or ten years if we don't do this.”

He called more intervention instead of concentrating on jailing abusers. “Warehousing does not work,” he said.

“The Bush Administration has made drug testing a priority,” the strategy says, noting that in 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court broadened the authority of schools to test students in extracurricular activities for drugs.

It says such programs should be locally administered and are not linked to federal school funding.

In Washington, D.C., Bill Piper, director of affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, called the strategy a “spin on the failure of the war on drugs.” He said in a statement that drugs are as available as ever and that communities continue to be devastated and that related harms of addiction, overdose, and the spread of disease continue to mount.

He said drug use rates are less important than whether the death, disease, crime and other suffering associated with abuse go up or down.