XN000022-1996-09-25 — Page 7

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As happened after the first summit, I asked the Chairman of ACAN, Professor Chen, and I asked Raymond Wong, the Commissioner for Narcotics, to set up a working group which would examine the 60 proposals and put forward suggestions as to how we could implement them which ones should have priority, which ones were slightly less important.

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I am very pleased that the committee has managed to put forward its We will, for recommendations so rapidly and we will be responding to them. example, be stepping up our preventive education to deter people from the use of so- called soft drugs; we will be speeding up the outreaching Social Services work with young people who may be abusing drugs; and we will be trying to strengthen the liaison between the Police and the Housing Department to deal with the problem of drug-abuse on public housing estates.

At the summit we discussed, of course, the decision that we had made to set up a $350 million Beat Drugs Fund. I am delighted that we are now in a position to announce the first successful applications for funds from that fund. The decisions have been made by ACAN and the working group set up for the Beat Drugs Fund Association. In all, I think they had to consider about 44 applications. Twenty-four have been successful at this stage and they have successfully applied for about $8.7 million of support. $5.3 million of that will be going to projects in the rehabilitation and treatment area and about $3.2 million will be going to preventive education projects.

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I am sure the successful applicants will be pleased by that and will be able to join the whole community the Fight Crime Committees, the Non-Government Organisations, every aspect of the Public Service, our schools and community leaders

the whole community, in carrying forward this campaign.

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We have seen some success in the figures. Looking, for example, at the second quarter figures for this year, they showed again a fall in the number of young people involved in drug-abuse and that is of course in sharp contrast to what is happening in other countries, in other communities. But there are no grounds for complacency, we have got to go on driving the figures down and that is why I want to underline once again the Government's commitment to give a strong lead to the whole community's campaign to beat drugs. I am sure that working together we can beat drugs and we are determined to do everything that is necessary in order to try to accomplish that objective.

Question: Governor, I understand that only the (inaudible)