21 U.S.C. § 1705 — Development, submission, implementation, and assessment of National Drug Control Strategy

(a) The Director must release a statement of drug-control policy priorities by April 1 in any year a new President's term begins. Then, by the first Monday in February after each presidential term starts, and every 2 years after that, the President must send Congress a National Drug Control Strategy. (b) Building the Strategy: (1) The Director creates the Strategy, a full plan to cut illegal drug use and its harms by limiting drug supply, reducing demand, and promoting prevention, early help, treatment, and recovery support. (2) The Director must work to get state, local, and tribal officials committed to building and carrying it out. (3) The Strategy must rest on the best available evidence about what actually reduces drug supply and demand. (4) In developing and carrying out the Strategy, the Director must (A) consult with the heads of drug-control agencies, each Coordinator named in section 1703, the Interdiction Committee and Emerging Threats Committee, relevant congressional committees, state, local, and tribal officials, private citizens and organizations (including faith-based groups) experienced in reducing demand, private citizens and organizations experienced in reducing supply, and representatives of foreign governments; and (B) through that consultation, make sure, as much as possible, that state, local, and tribal officials and relevant private groups commit to supporting the Strategy's goals. (c) What the Strategy must include: (1) (A) a mission statement describing the drug-control program's main functions; (B) research-based, long-range, measurable goals for reducing illicit drug use and its consequences; (C) yearly measurable objectives and specific targets toward those goals; (D) a 5-year budget and priorities projection; (E) a review of international, state, local, and private drug-control efforts, to keep every level of government coordinated; (F) for each goal, a description of how it will be achieved, including (i) which agencies, programs, and resources will help and how; (ii) which stakeholders are involved and their roles; (iii) an estimate of the federal funding needed; (iv) any new coordination mechanisms needed; and (v) the Office's role in reaching the goal; (G) for each year, a performance-evaluation plan per goal per agency, including (i) specific performance measures; (ii) yearly, and where practical quarterly, targets; and (iii) an estimate of the funding needed; (H) a list of the data sources needed to measure performance, and how the Director will get that data; (I) a list of expected challenges and plans to address them; (J) an explanation of how each goal was set, including how required consultations shaped it and what data or research informed it; (K) a description of how common illicit drug use currently is, including both drug availability and how common substance use disorders are; (L) any other statistics the Director considers useful for tracking trends in illicit drug use, its effects (including on children), supply and demand reduction, drug-related law enforcement, and how the Strategy is being carried out; (M) a plan for expanding data collection to allow real-time monitoring of drug threats, including (i) the policy questions the Director wants evidence to answer; (ii) the data the Director and each agency plan to collect, use, or acquire; (iii) the methods that may be used to build that evidence; (iv) any obstacles to developing it, including barriers to getting data; (v) the steps the Director and each agency head will take to carry out the plan; and (vi) any other relevant information; and (N) a plan to expand treatment for substance use disorders, which must (i) identify unmet treatment needs and a strategy for closing the gap; (ii) describe each agency's role in carrying out the plan; (iii) identify the resources each agency needs; and (iv) identify the resources, including private ones, needed to eliminate the unmet need for evidence-based treatment. (2) In building the data-collection plan required by (1)(M), the Director must consult the public, the Office's evaluation staff, the Office's privacy officials, its data-governance officials, relevant congressional committees, and anyone else the Director chooses. (3) Additional required strategies: (A) The Director must include these in the Strategy and must (i) give copies to the relevant congressional committees, including the House and Senate Armed Services and Homeland Security committees; (ii) develop them together with the relevant agencies, state, local, or tribal officials, and other countries' governments; (iii) not change any agency's existing legal authority, though the Director may recommend changes; and (iv) present classified or sensitive information separately from the rest of the Strategy. (B) The Southwest Border Counternarcotics Strategy must (i) lay out the government's plan for stopping illegal drug trafficking across the U.S.-Mexico border, at and between ports of entry, state each relevant agency's role, and identify the resources needed; and (ii) specifically address cross-border drug tunnels, including a plan to stop their construction and use, and recommended criminal penalties for building or using one. (C) The Northern Border Counternarcotics Strategy must (i) lay out the federal plan for stopping drug trafficking across the U.S.-Canada border, at and between ports of entry, state each agency's role, identify needed resources, be designed to support rather than hinder legitimate trade and travel, and reflect the unique nature of small border communities, cooperation with Canadian law enforcement, and differences in border traffic volume; and (ii) specifically address drug trafficking to or through border-area Indian reservations, including a plan to stop it and recommendations for additional help for tribal law enforcement, including an evaluation of federal technical and financial assistance, infrastructure, and interoperability gaps. (4) Any part of the Strategy involving properly classified information must be presented to Congress separately from the rest. (5) In choosing data for the Strategy, the Director must include data that lets year-over-year trend comparisons, and data that allows a standardized, uniform assessment of how effective drug-treatment programs are. (d) The President may submit a revised Strategy at any time the President, after consulting the Director, decides the current one is not effective enough, or whenever a new President or a new Director takes office. (e) If the Director does not submit the Strategy on time, within 5 days after the deadline the Director must notify the relevant congressional committees explaining why, and stating when the Strategy will actually be submitted. (f) Drug Control Data Dashboard: (1) The Director must collect and share, as appropriate, at least the information described below, made publicly available in machine-readable form on the Office's website and, where practical, on the Dashboard. (2) The Director must publish this data on the Office's website in a machine-readable, sortable, searchable format and, where practical, build and maintain a "Drug Control Data Dashboard" with a modern, user-friendly design, searchable by year, agency, drug, and location. (3) This data must be updated quarterly where practical, but at least once a year, and must include at minimum: (A) for each substance the Director identifies as significantly affecting illicit drug use, (i) data on how much of it is available in the U.S. — the total amount seized in the current and each of the previous 3 years (including seizures by state, local, and tribal governments), estimated flows into the U.S., the amount that could not be interdicted, known and estimated domestic-production levels (including of regulated prescription drugs), average and 10-year-high street prices, and, where practical, related state, local, and tribal prosecutions; and (ii) data on how often it is used — use in the workplace and lost productivity, use by arrestees, probationers, and parolees, related crime, and related prosecutions; (B) for the current and each of the previous 3 years, broken down by state (and, where feasible, by smaller region, county, or city): the number of fatal and non-fatal overdoses per identified drug, how common substance use disorders are, how many people received treatment (including medication-assisted treatment, including through public health programs), and the extent of unmet treatment need, including for medication-assisted treatment; (C) data on prescription drug diversion, trafficking, and misuse for the current and each of the previous 3 years; and (D) any other measures the Director considers useful for showing progress toward the Strategy's goals. (g) Annual assessment: (1) By the first Monday in February each year, the Director must give the President and Congress a report assessing how much progress each agency made toward the prior year's Strategy goals, objectives, and targets. (2) By November 1 each year, each agency head must send the Director an evaluation, following the Director's guidance, of that agency's progress on the Strategy's goals using its own performance measures, covering (A) success in achieving the Strategy's goals; (B) success in reducing domestic and foreign sources of illegal drugs; (C) success in expanding access to, and improving the effectiveness of, substance-use-disorder treatment; (D) success in protecting U.S. borders, especially the Southwest border, from drug smuggling; (E) success in reducing drug-related crime; (F) success in reducing drug use's negative health and social effects; (G) how well evidence-based treatment and prevention programs are being used and improved; and (H) success in increasing prevention of illicit drug use. (3) The Director's annual assessment must include (A) a summary of each agency's evaluation; (B) a summary of each agency's progress toward its Strategy goals, using its own performance measures; (C) an assessment of how effective each agency and program was in achieving the prior year's Strategy, including whether its specific goals, measures, objectives, and targets were met; and (D) all of this based on the Performance Measurement System. (h) By February 1 each year, as part of the Strategy, the Director must give Congress a description of a national drug-control performance-measurement system that (1) sets 2-year and 5-year performance measures and targets for each Strategy goal and objective for reducing drug use, availability, and consequences; (2) describes the data sources behind each performance measure; (3) identifies the major agency programs and activities supporting the Strategy's goals and annual objectives; (4) evaluates how much each agency's demand-reduction and supply-reduction activities (as section 1701 defines them) contribute to the Strategy; (5) checks that each agency's drug-related goals and budgets stay consistent with the Strategy; (6) coordinates the development of national drug-control data-collection and reporting systems to support policy and performance measurement, assessing (A) the quality of current tools for measuring drug use, supply reduction, and demand reduction; (B) whether current national drug-use measurement tools adequately cover the population of illicit drug users and at-risk groups; (C) whether current treatment-outcome tracking systems adequately measure how well treatment reduces illicit drug use and criminal behavior during and after treatment; and (D) what the Director will do to fix any gaps found under (A) and (B); and (7) sets performance measures and targets for the supplemental border strategies (Southwest, Northern, and Caribbean Border Counternarcotics Strategies), and where the standard performance-measurement system does not adequately fit those region-specific goals, may instead evaluate things like interdiction efforts at and between ports of entry, interdiction technology, intelligence sharing, and diplomacy, as the Director determines fits each region. (i) Each report submitted under subsection (b) must describe any changes made during the past year to the national drug performance-measurement system described in subsection (c), as the text of this section states.

The record shows that this section was enacted by Public Law 105–277, division C, title VII, §§ 706 and 715, approved October 21, 1998, and published at 112 Stat. 2681–681 and 2681–693. The source credit indicates that the section has since been amended five times: by Public Law 109–469 (2006), Public Law 115–271 (2018), Public Law 116–74 (2019), and Public Law 117–263 (2022). This pattern reflects sustained and recurring congressional attention to the section over roughly a quarter century, with successive Congresses revising and expanding its requirements. Public Law 105–277 was an omnibus appropriations act for fiscal year 1999, and its division C is commonly understood to contain the reauthorization of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. The broader statutory scheme in which this section sits is generally understood to have originated in the late 1980s effort to centralize federal anti-drug policy under a single coordinating office, with periodic reauthorizations used by Congress as vehicles to update strategy, reporting, and accountability requirements as national priorities around drug enforcement and treatment evolved. Beyond this general institutional history, the record does not establish the specific reasons Congress chose the particular provisions, deadlines, or content requirements found in the current text, nor does it document the legislative rationale behind each subsequent amendment. Any more detailed account of intent would require consulting committee reports or other legislative history not present in the supplied material.