From: [f--ca--t] at [paranoia.com] (Tommy Ranks)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.drugs,alt.drugs,rec.drugs.misc
Subject: Drug Czar Press Briefing (long)
Date: 2 May 1996 01:44:17 GMT
found at: http://www2.whitehouse.gov/WH/html/briefroom.html
April 29, 1996
PRESS BRIEFING BY GENERAL BARRY MCCAFFREY
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
(Coral Gables, Florida)
_____________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release April 29, 1996
PRESS BRIEFING
BY
GENERAL BARRY MCCAFFREY
The Biltmore Hotel
Coral Gables, Florida
12:25 P.M. EDT
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: I thought perhaps I'd make a couple of
opening remarks and then respond to your own interests.
The news strategy we came here to Miami to unveil is focused
around five goals. We got the government involved over the space of the last
seven weeks in writing it. There were several iterations of it, we wanted to
make it more coherent, easier to follow and to clearly be constructed around
these five pillars. Then underneath those goals we have supporting
objectives. We have attempted to define these supporting objectives so that
they lend themselves to accountability of funds, programs, resources. Now, at
some point we need measures of effectiveness of those objectives, so that's
where we're going.
We came here to Miami because in a lot of ways you can learn
how to effectively address a problem here in Miami. A lot of the concepts
that are working elsewhere, some of them started here or were certainly given
prominence. One of them I would go to is the majority -- over 50 percent of
the companies here in Miami have drug policies, so they understand that it's
part of the workplace concern to address this issue.
Of most importance, and the reason we selected this school to
go to, is that drug education here in this city goes from K through 12 -- that
it isn't just the DARE program, fifth and sixth grades, it isn't just the
programming that high school junior or seniors -- but it goes from K through
12.
And then, finally, we've seen enormous success here. You
know, and all these numbers are arguable. But probably drug use in Miami has
gone from a disaster down to half of a disaster. No one is satisfied with it.
Now, I spent Thursday and Friday wandering around MIami listening to some of
these programs -- Espera, the Family Health Care Center, et cetera. No one is
satisfied with where they are, but they've made remarkable progress.
Now, we also came here to Miami because we wanted to try and
capture as much attention of the country as we could. We wanted to understand
that there is a strategy. We wanted to underscore that if you back off the
problem and look at it in a 15-year time frame, that we have made enormous
progress. People are surprised when I say this, but drug use in America has
come down by about half, from 22 million to 11 to 12 million over the last 15
years.
The use of cocaine, in terms of the number of people using it,
has plummeted. And, indeed, it continued to come back down in the last few
years. The death of -- the tragic death of Len Bias in some ways was a gift
to American young people.
But having said all that, we wanted to underscore
that goal number one of the five-goal strategy is to focus on
motivating American youth to reject illegal drugs and substance
abuse. And this is the priority of the program. It's one of
five goals, but it has clearly got to be the priority. And we
are concerned about it. There is no question that we have had
probably a doubling in the rate of use of illegal drugs by young
people. And we're also seeing it start as early as the sixth
grade.
The second goal we laid out was reduce crime-related
violence as an aspect of the drug epidemic. So one of the
slogans I will offer for people's consideration is: If you don't
like crime, then you will like drug treatment programs for those
involved in the criminal justice system. There's three main
chronic addicts, they commit a disproportionate amount of the
crime in America. One of the numbers we use is 170 crimes per
year. And so we have to go there and deal with that problem. We
cannot have effective law enforcement unless we combine it with
an intelligent drug treatment and prevention program for those in
the criminal justice system.
Our other approaches, of course, acknowledge the
importance of reducing the costs of drug abuse. It dominates
many of the other social challenges in America. It's $20 billion
in the health care system is directly related to illegal drugs.
But it is clearly an aspect of a lot of other social ills. It's
a good part of the AIDS epidemic. It's a good piece of the
problem with child abuse, et cetera.
The last two parts of the strategy are: shield
America's air, land, and sea frontiers. Great argument. How
effective is this? Does it relate directly in some algorithm to
the cost and availability of drugs? Maybe not. But I'll tell
you flat out, that we took 200 metric tons of cocaine away from
drug criminals, somewhere between the Chipari and Inagua Valley
and the streets of America -- 200 metric tons, a third of the
total drugs that are produce.
And we're going to have to keep it up. And we're
going to have to keep it up understanding that it is not just
cocaine we're facing. There is a whole series of other drugs
--methamphetamine, Rohypnol. We're seeing heroin now coming back
in ever-increasing amounts, higher purity, lower cost. We
consumed now 13 metric tons of heroin. Again, another
devastating cost to America.
The Attorney General, Janet Reno, outlined another
strategy, and DEA Administrator Tom Constantine has really been
in the lead on this, which is to get the point on methamphetamine
before it becomes the poor man's cocaine of the late 1990s.
That's where this thing is going. So we're finding it popping up
around the country. And Tome Constantine brought together the
police officials, the health care guys, and we had a conference
on it. We tried to understand what is going on. It's an
absolutely devastating drug.
One of the problems is, you can make it anywhere.
You can make it in rural Iowa. You can make it Mexico. And it
has just got an abysmal effect on people. They're up for 15 days
straight, awake, and then crashing for 5 days, and getting
increasingly paranoid. They're enormously dangerous to law
enforcement officials under the influence of methamphetamine. So
it's one of the many new challenges that we can't let get settled
in America before we respond to it. So Janet Reno stepped
forward and outlined some thinking, supporting strategy on
methamphetamine.
Finally, I'll just wrap up by telling you, I think
the bottom line to the strategy is this: It is a 10-year
program, it is not a war campaign. It's a 10-year commitment to
confronting the issue. The second aspect of it is, it is a
systems approach. There are five goals. You can't choose one of
them to do. You can't do either drug treatment or interdiction.
You have to have some coherent strategy to address the problem.
And then finally, if you'll allow me to say it, I
think one of the biggest challenges we face is that we lost our
common-sense optimism that we can organize ourselves and address
the problem. This is not a difficult issue to face up to.
Unlike a lot of things in life, this lends itself, in our
judgment, to getting organized and to doing hard work over time.
And there are a lot of things in life that don't necessarily
respond to hard work and organization, but this isn't one of
them.
Now I will go on on Wednesday to release the Gallup
Poll at the National Press Club. January, February of this year,
we commissioned a Gallup Poll to go out and do a Consult With
America and ask Americans what are they thinking about on this
issue, what's their own viewpoint. I think it's helpful and it
will underscore the common sense, thank God, of the American
people.
On that note, what are your own interests? And I'll
be glad to respond to your questions.
Q Where is methamphetamine most common in this
country? The President said that you don't see it down here in
Miami. Where are you seeing it?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: For years -- it's been around
for a long time -- it was a California biker drug, and therefore
associated with, sort of, gang violence. It was a California
drug. It's now -- again, the numbers are suspect -- probably
half of it is being produced in Mexico, half of it up here. And
it's showing up in odd places. It's in some rural parts of the
middle of our country. But it's not everywhere. It's not in
Washington, D.C. and it's not in Miami. It's enormously
inexpensive to make this stuff. And I might add it's also one of
the most dangerous chemical process of any of these illegal
drugs, a terrible environmental hazard.
So there's no rhyme nor reason to where
methamphetamine are showing up, but it's cheap and incredibly
dangerous.
Q Critics -- Republicans and other critics have
been citing the increased use of marijuana among teenagers, high
school students, as evidence that the President's policies on
drugs are not working. What do you think about that charge; and,
if that is not the reason, why is marijuana use going back up so
dramatically?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: Well, you know, marijuana use
among young people is going to be a major challenge to all of us.
And part of the challenge is there are 90 million Americans who
have used illegal drugs. I mean, there was an age of revolution,
a lot of good came out of it, the Vietnam generation. And one
thing that didn't stay with us that was productive was the use of
illegal drugs. Marijuana was one of them.
And, without overstating it, most people who are
expert in the field are absolutely persuaded that the use of
marijuana, this three to five times higher THC concentrations
than 20 years ago, by adolescents in particular is devastating to
their physical and emotional growth. And what I would also lay
on the table is, you know, having been a undergraduate engineer,
that while I don't imply a scientific causal relationship, the
statistical relationship between marijuana use by young people
and later problems in life are enormous.
The one that I cite, since it's such a clean-cut
number is, if you smoke marijuana and you're age 12, the chances
of you having a significant drug addiction problem later on in
life are 79 times greater than if you didn't. Now, again,
there's no scientific causal relationship stated there. But if
you're a statistician you better buy into the fact that this
sounds like something you don't want your kids doing. And that's
where we've got to take that message.
But it's parents and school teachers who have got to
take the message. We've got to find the people -- the religious
leaders, the coaches, the folks that young people trust and look
up to for standards.
Q Why, in your view, is it going up; and is it
related to what --
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: I think it's going up for
probably a lot of reasons. One of them I just offered was 90
million Americans have used illegal drugs and walked away from it
and said it's not for me. They left behind a lot of casualties
when they did it.
But I think there's probably been a reluctance on
the part of some parents to understand that even though you drove
drunk while you were a student at U-CAL in 1970, that doesn't say
that you're not to step forward now and tell your own children
that this is enormously dangerous. And I think the same thing is
going to have to go on with marijuana. But it's not only
marijuana. It's also sniffing inhalants, it's using cocaine,
it's alcohol abuse, which may be, again, one of the biggest
challenges to the university population.
So we're seeing young people with a greatly
increased predisposition to drug and alcohol abuse. And that's
going to predictably yield a giant crop of violence and addiction
down the line. Make no mistake about it, that mathematical
relationship is fairly well understood. So that's why we're
going to focus on youth.
Q I'm pretty sure you've addressed this before
but, frankly, I don't remember what the administration's
statements have been. Is it the administration view that it was
a mistake early in the Clinton presidency to cut the Office of
Drug Control and they regret that, or just that circumstances
have changed?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: Look, when they came into office
-- and there's an element that I completely agree with -- their
feeling was two things. One, they needed to gain some manpower
savings in government and they were looking for places to cut.
And the second thesis they advanced was if you want to make
progress on an issue as complex as drugs, you've got to make the
other Secretaries sign up for it. And so they elevated the Drug
Czar's position to Cabinet-level staff and cut the staff.
It didn't work out. You can't monitor 50 federal
agencies, you can't listen to 17,000 city governments, you can't
deal with 3,000 counties, effectively. Now, right now I will
tell you flat out, since my appointment we're getting 15,000
letters a month, we're getting 6,000 phone calls a month. I'm
trying to sort out where the senators' and congressmen's letters
are in the piles.
So this is a big program. It's an important
program. And now the full support of the President, the Vice
President, OMB and Congress -- I went down to Congress to make
the case now. Senator Hatch and Biden and Rangel and Zeliff have
played a very important role in this. They gave us some money to
create a management team of about 154 people. So we think now
we're going to put together what we need to respond to the
federal law on it. That's really what we have to do.
Q Can you give us the specifics of what Attorney
General Reno was talking about, the methamphetamine
legislation --
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: We've put together a strategy,
and I'll be glad to give you a copy of it, and we've been working
that for the last several weeks. It's based primarily upon the
conference that Tom Constantine paneled.
And we've come up with a series of initiatives.
And, again, we took the methamphetamine as the challenge and
tried to see how is it produced, where is it coming from, what
are its medical effects. And we got HHS involved in it. We have
EPA involved in it. But we came up with what we think is an
approach to address every aspect of it. That will include new
penalties to recognize that this thing probably rivals crack
cocaine in its potential danger.
We have got to control -- this has a different set
of precursor drugs: ephedrine and other things. We've got to
figure out how do you control these things. They're used in cold
medicines and things like that. How are going to get a handle on
where the precursor drugs are coming from? So I'll give you a
copy of it, but we think it's a decently thought out,
comprehensive way to go at this problem before it gets on center
stage.
Q I know you said that it would be irresponsible
to make this a political issue. Do you think that that's -- is
it too late for that? I mean, isn't it already a political
issue?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: Look, I'll tell you, I just got
into office on 1 March. I went down to the Hill. I have -- this
campaign didn't start with my appointment. That's the first
thing I got to underscore. There are literally hundreds of
thousands of people around America who know a ton about these
issues and are already working on them, and a lot of them are in
Congress.
There is no question in my mind that Senator Biden
and Congressman Rangel in the House, Senator Nunn -- Senator
Hatch has been probably the stalwart keeping the issue on the
table, a Republican Senator. Bill Zeliff, a Republican
Congressman in the House, Mr. Hastert -- and I will also tell you
I got a call from Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and he said,
Barry, we will support on a bipartisan basis this issue. So I
don't think so.
I mean, it seems to me what is at stake here is some
kind of partnership to get sensible policies, adequate funding
-- demand accountability. Now, we don't have credibility in some
of the subcomponents of this strategy, meaning we haven't made
the case adequately. So that's where we're going with it, and I
think I have got a very responsible and cooperative leadership
I'm working with.
Q Another point, General, when the President puts
forward or trumpets this new strategy well into the fourth year
of his Presidency, doesn't it make it politically suspect?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: What do you want him to do? I
mean, you either want him -- expect leadership or you don't want
him -- of course, we want him to carry out leadership. Now,
again, I'll be honest with you, I think the President of the
United States and the Vice President, Janet Reno and Dr. Perry
and Tom Constantine and Louis Freeh and the rest of these people
are -- they're parents and they're responsible people and of
course they're committed. The question is, what are we supposed
to do about it. That's a legitimate question.
And, you know, Senator Dole has been one of my
personal heroes for years. Of course he is committed to this
issue. So I think what I'm going to have to do is to tell the
Congress, hold us accountable now and make us come back and
explain what we're doing with the policy and the resources you
give us. And that's a charge I'll take on.
Q General, isn't the government already doing all
the things it says here in the strategy; and can you cite a few
things that you are actually doing, that's actually new, and that
we're not doing?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: Yes, everything in the strategy
is already being done, absolutely. There is no magic jujitsu
solution in the drug issue. There is no question that drug
treatment, prevention, education, interdiction and law
enforcement have fundamentally been part of the solution from the
start.
So the new drug strategy probably makes more
coherent and easier to follow that fact, and it also demands not
only that you see a system there, but demands that you see a
longitudinal approach to it, that you can't expect this to be a
punchy campaign. That's why I've had such a problem with the
metaphor on war, to be honest.
The language is vivid, it's colorful, it implies
progress; but, unfortunately, it's inadequate to deal with what
we're talking about. And I suspect it may be more helpful to
those of us involved in it to talk about it in terms of cancer,
in which you've got root cause, and you have to treat that, you
still have to manage the pain of the whole issue. You've got to
have a holistic approach.
So I think your point is a good one. I don't think
the new drug strategy has new tricks in it. It's a coherent,
broad-based systemic approach to the problem.
Q How did you come up with the 10-year time
frame?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: Well, pick a number. What it
can't be is a year. It can't be a year. And since we're dealing
with a generation of youth at risk, in 10 years -- first of all,
it takes three years to affect the budget system of the United
States. It gets five years for an idea to become fixed in the
American public's mind. And we've got to work on this thing, it
seems to me, for half a generation. I want us to understand that
this is a permanent commitment to young people, a permanent
commitment to a balanced approach to the problem.
We don't need to put up with the levels of violence,
of health care cost, of destruction of families and neighborhoods
that came upon us in the late '60s. We do not need to continue
to tolerate that kind of violence to our society. And a lot of
people are doing something about it, to include right here in
Miami, to include New York City. It is astounding the progress
they're making.
Two years ago, I drove around with the New York
undercover counter-narcotics guys, and it was a nightmare. I
came back and did it last week, with the same police lieutenant,
and it's measurably better. It's still a devastating consequence
on parts of New York City, but it's absolutely moving in the
right direction. So we can do something about it.
Q With the mandatory minimum sentence for
possessing methamphetamine, do you anticipate that causing a
similar increase in the prison populations that the mandatory
minimum sentences for crack cocaine caused?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: Well, you know, the whole
sentencing issue is one that I have to learn a lot more about.
But let me, if I may, suggest two things. The first, it seems to
me unarguable, is that effective law enforcement is a
prerequisite to drug treatment and prevention programs working.
They don't work in isolation. You have to ask the police
officers of America to enforce the law. And if you've got that,
then drug education programs start having some meaning and drug
treatment programs start having a hammer that is associated with
the reward.
By the way, I got a wonderful line. I went to this
drug court here and listened to them several hours. One of the
lines I got that made a big impact on me was, nobody in America
wants to be a drug addict. Some people want to be criminals, but
nobody wants to be addicted to drugs, it is absolute misery. So
law enforcement is clearly part of the effort.
Now, the second part, observation I'd make is we've
got a million Americans in jail right now at state and local
level, and 100,000 in the federal system. An explosion in the
number of people under arrest. And contrary to -- you know,
sometimes they're in there for simple drug possession, that ain't
the case. That's for drug-related violence, crime, drug dealing,
et cetera. If you extrapolate those numbers out, it's going to
get a lot bigger. That is not the solution. We will not arrest
our way out of the drug problem.
So that's why the strategy, it seems to me, is so
important. For those of you that were mathematics people, the
prison population is a dependant variable. That is not an
initiative. You can't talk about spending dollars on prisons or
drug treatment. You've got to pay for the prison and law
enforcement systems. If you want it to not have another million
Americans behind bars, we've got to do the other aspects of the
strategy. So that's where the priorities are.
Q This nine percent increase, can you tell us
where it's going?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: Yes. I have a handout that you
may find useful. We tried to put it in pie chart form and show
you exactly how the '96 enacted budget -- following the numbers
has been tough for me to finally puzzle through.
What I would offer is, look at the '96 enacted
money, and then look at the '97 proposed budget. And then follow
where we go with it. On Wednesday I'll go down and submit the
strategy to a Senate hearing. And then the mark-up July, August
time frame -- September, whatever -- will be the '97 budget.
So we've got a pretty good piece of paper that will
lay out the numbers for you.
Q I should clarify, since you mentioned Senator
Dole -- and I'm told he's going to be talking about drugs later
this afternoon at a political event -- when you said, don't
politicize this issue, it's too important, were you specifically
thinking of the presidential campaign and him?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: I think that we need a
partnership with Congress, and that the issue has to be a
bipartisan approach. And I have had every indication that that's
how they're going to respond to me.
You know, the Senate unanimously confirmed me in
office, and that was Senator Trent Lott, Senator Dole and John
Warner. So I don't think we have anything but a commitment to a
bipartisan approach in the drug issue.
Q You must have thought it was enough of a
concern to mention it as a, please don't do this.
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: What I'm saying is that we can't
move forward unless this is an issue on the defense of the
American people. And I have every indication from personal
contact on the Hill that that's the way it will move. I am
absolutely astounded and my morale has been raised by the kind of
support that they're telling me. And I take the Speaker of the
House at his word, I've known him for years.
Q How specifically has President Clinton dealt
with the issue of drugs, as opposed to President Bush in the
past?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: I didn't hear you.
Q How has President Clinton dealt differently in
his attack on drugs than President Bush?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: Well, I don't know that I'm a
good person to answer that. I worked very, very closely to the
whole Bush administration on national security issues.
What I'll tell you is, without question is that
we're better off today. We know more about what's going on
today. We have sensible programs in place today that didn't
exist ten years ago. Now, a lot of these started, you know,
under previous administrations. So the last three presidents
have all been committed to this issue. I think, you know, I
thought the world of President Bush. I asked him for his advice
coming into this job. He sent me a wonderful letter. And I'm
asking for the guidance and sort of oversight of U.S. national
leadership. He's still part of it.
Q General, if ten years is the timeline, what is
the goal at the end of that ten years? Can you give us a little
bit of specifics about what you would like to see in terms of
reduction in use?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: Yes. You know, I was strongly
advised to not write down a guideline because it might look like
another cheap slogan. But I will offer you as a thought, there
is no reason why we can't return America to a 1960's level, a
pre-Vietnam era level of drug use. We won't achieve total
victory on drugs. We shouldn't expect that. We can't take every
heroin or crack addict and cure them necessarily of their
addiction. But we darned sure should expect to reduce the number
of young people by enormous amounts and to reduce the damage that
this epidemic does by great amounts.
And, oh, by the way, we are confident that there are
treatment programs that can take the 3 million hard-core drug
addicts and provide them systemic support that will make them
less of a threat to our population, to our health care system.
So if you'd asked me for a target, let's go back to pre-Vietnam
level -- eras -- of illegal drugs.
Q What about --
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: We've got numbers that will, you
know -- let me give you a number. It used to be in New York City
-- I wish I had this exact -- there were 300 murders a year in
the city and then it went up to -- we'll have to give you the
number. The NYPD just told me. It was like 3,000 or 4,000.
That's what we have to turn around. Why should, you know,
neighborhoods look like bombed-out sections of a European
battlefield. That's drugs. And we can drop that enormously.
Q General, can you address the issue of Mexico?
How significant a problem is Mexico, interdiction -- what do you
plan to do about it?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: Well, you know, I would put it
in this perspective. Mexico isn't the problem; the drugs are.
And both Mexico and the United States are fundamentally
threatened, as are our democratic institutions, by this
incredible corrupting influence of drug money by the enormous
violence that drug criminals are willing to employ and by the
sophistication with which they ignore international frontiers.
They are an international coalition based on greed.
And so what we have committed ourselves to doing,
we've got some -- we think President Zedillo, his opposition
party Attorney General Lozano, the Minister of Defense Cervantes
-- we think the leadership of the Mexican government is committed
to protecting the Mexican people from the influence of drugs, to
protecting their own young people. There's a crime wave going on
in Mexico City that's simply astounding. And we've said we will
work with you as part of a binational cooperation -- and, again,
not to solve the problem this year, but to commit ourselves to
steady, concrete goals which we will achieve. That's what we're
going to do with Mexico.
Q As a follow-up to that, the greatest increase
in the budget, which is in the handout, is in international
programs -- 25 percent, two and a half times the rest of the
stuff. Why is there such an emphasis on that now?
GENERAL MCCAFFREY: Well, I think the -- if there
are two priorities, two easy things to do, one is to go to youth.
If you run effective drug education prevention programs based on
the family, schools, religious institutions and coaches, we will
inoculate ourselves against the drug menace. So that's one
priority. The other one is go to the places where they produce
the drugs -- international programs -- and cut back on the impact
of our demand on their society.
And let me just you tell you flat out, if you think
we've got a drug problem, you've got to go to downtown Bogota,
Rio, Caracas, Mexico, Panama to see the impact of the drug
menace. It is killing their societies, too.
So we are not in this alone and what we have
suggested is that we have to create an international coalition to
protect the democracies that are under internal attack from this.
But their children are also at risk. And so that's another one.
And I might add, though, that's a pretty modest
piece of the budget. If you look at the budget, the $15.1
billion -- one of the other things I've asked the House
Appropriations Committee to consider is right now by law I'm
required to explain how we spent the money in terms of demand and
supply. By law, I have to tell them. And the answer is 67
percent and 33 percent -- 67 percent, supply; 33 percent, demand.
But it's completely misleading because it covers -- 55 percent is
in law enforcement and prisons.
So we've -- we're going to suggest to the Congress,
you need to hold us accountable for money in four areas:
interdiction, demand-supply -- demand and supply, and law
enforcement. And you'll get a better picture on how we're
expending these resources you've given us. And I think we'll
probably do that, too.
The final thing on budgets, if you'll allow me to
say it is, we're going to have a debate this year about this drug
strategy, and by next year what I would suggest to the country,
to the Congress, to all of us we serve, is that we don't need a
drug strategy every year. We need a drug strategy that is
largely agreed on and guides our actions for ten years.
And what I'd like Congress to ask me to do is to
come down each year and explain what I did with the money in the
last year and then submit a five-year budget plan for this
confrontation with the drug issue and let the debate not just
cover the '97 budget that starts on 1 October, but to look out
over the coming years and to be able to influence and shape
programs out five years.
That's a way we manage complex businesses, that's a
way we manage the country's defense, and this issue absolutely is
even higher salience to the American people. So those are some
of the other ideas I'll offer.
I do thank you for the chance to talk to this group.
Good luck. Thank you.
END 1:00 P.M. EDT
---
Tommy Ranks -- [f--ca--t] at [paranoia.com] -- http://www.paranoia.com/~foucault