President Bush’s drug tsar wants to use the New York Police Department’s successful statistics-based police strategies to drive down drug crime, he said in an interview yesterday.

The director of the Office of National Drug Policy, John Walters, was in the city yesterday visiting the NYPD, editorial boards, and the Harlem Armory Center in Manhattan.

He spent part of the day meeting with Commissioner Raymond Kelly and two of his top deputies, Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence David Cohen and Deputy Commissioner of Operations Phil Pulaski. He attended one of the department’s Compstat sessions, during which commanders are grilled about crime statistics in their precincts.

“New York’s program has driven down crime,” Mr. Walters said. “I’m looking at ways we can take this management technique and bring it to the federal, state, and international levels.”

Mr. Walters said he was also in town to discuss ways to promote his office’s recent findings on prescription drug abuse. One in 10 teenage girls reported using a prescription drug to get high once in the past year, his office reported on Monday. The ratio for boys was about one out of 13. The study was based on data from the 2005 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.

He visited the recently renovated Harlem Armory Center, which is funded partially by his office, as well as Mayor Bloomberg and other agencies. The Police Athletic League provides after-school activities and summer programs for youths in the area. He said similar programs, funded with assets seized from drug traffickers, could be built across the country to bring a positive influence into young people’s lives.

Mr. Walters’s visit comes at a time of increased enforcement against drug trafficking and drug crime in the city. Between January 1 and May 1, there were 25,000 arrests in New York City for narcotics crimes, a 16.8% increase versus the same period in 2006, Compstat reports show.

“While overall crime has decreased to historic lows in the last five years, drug trafficking and drug use remain underlying contributors to crime, including murder,” the police department’s chief spokesman, Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne, said. “So we continue to pay close attention to it, which is reflected in arrests.”

The New York office of the Drug Enforcement Agency has also been seizing more heroin and cocaine in the city, the special agent in charge, John Gilbride, said. In fiscal 2006, 233 kilograms of heroin were seized, compared with 140 kilograms in 2004. The DEA seized $67.5 million — $55 million of it in cash — from drug dealers in fiscal 2006, Mr. Gilbride said.

The market is so strong for drugs that traffickers are devising “ingenious methods” to bring drugs into the city, which are dispersed to cities in the Northeast and as far west as Detroit, he said.

“We’ve seen heroin concealed in artwork, secreted in clothing, in plastic-shaped kidney beans that were hollowed out,” Mr. Gilbride said.

Although the city has seemed mostly immune to crystal methamphetamine use — a problem that has ravaged some cities in California and the Midwest — there have been signs of production in New York. Seven crystal methamphetamine labs were closed down this year, including one in a penthouse apartment overlooking the United Nations.

To avoid the risks of smuggling drugs into the city, some dealers have been setting up marijuana plants in buildings with sophisticated irrigation, lighting, and fertilizer systems. The DEA has closed down two such plants in the city, in Washington Heights and in Harlem, in the past month and a half, Mr. Gilbride said.

The commissioner of the Department of Mental Health and Hygiene, Thomas Frieden, said drug deaths are the third-leading cause of preventable death in New York City. About 900 people die from overdoses every year and another 800 people die from AIDS contracted through drug use, he said. Still, according to a recent survey of youth behavior, marijuana and alcohol use by teenagers is decreasing.

Mr. Frieden said the city’s antismoking drive is helping to prevent drug use.

“Kids who don’t smoke are many times less likely to use marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol,” he said. “Tobacco is a gateway drug — that’s our theory, it’s the best explanation we have.”

About 11% of youths smoke in New York City, compared with about 23% nationally, Mr. Frieden said.