Pushing Back : Setting the Record Straight: Losing the War on Drugs?
Today’s New York Times has published an editorial that willfully cherry picks data in order to conform to their tired, 1970′s editorial viewpoint that we’re “losing the war on drugs.”Despite our numerous efforts to provide the Times with the facts, their editorial staff has chosen to ignore irrefutable data regarding the progress that has been made in making our nation’s drug problem smaller.
The bottom line? America’s drug problem is now half as big as it used to be.
Overall drug use America has been cut by about fifty percent since the peak year of illegal use in 1979. In that year, about 14% of Americans had used an illegal drug sometime in the past month. This compares to about 7 percent today. Declines in cocaine use are even more dramatic, with a two-thirds reduction in use since the mid-80’s. Moreover, since 2001 there has been a 24 percent decline in youth drug use (860,000 fewer youth using drugs today than in 2001) and is mirrored by record declines in positive workplace drug tests among the U.S. adult workforce.
Well, I’m a little bummed out that the Drug Czar chose to reply to the NY Times’ rather tepid criticism of the War on Drugs instead of my latest essay up at LewRockwell.com. Then again, they are the New York Times and I’m just an anti-prohibition blogger on the West Coast.
Nonetheless, go click the link and read their pathetic defense of their thirty-five-year, $31-billion effort to win the War on (Certain American Citizens Using Non-Pharmaceutical, Non-Alcoholic, Tobacco-Free) Drugs. I posted a nice rebuttal in their comments section that I doubt will ever see the light of day, so I reproduce it here for your reading pleasure:
Talk about “cherry picking”…
The DEA has existed since 1973, yet you want to claim success by comparing figures from the peak year of 1979 to today.
OK. In 1979, 31.3% of US pop. aged 12+ had ever used an illegal drug. Today, it’s 45.4%. (http://www.briancbennett.com/charts/nsduh/any-illicit.htm)
In 1979, 513 Americans died of drug overdoses. Twenty years later that figure increased by nine times. (http://wonder.cdc.gov/mortSQL.html)
Two years later, 1981, since then, price-per-pure-gram of cocaine is 1/5th, crack 1/3rd, heroin 1/6th, and meth one-half as expensive now as back then. (http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/publications/price_purity/price_purity.pdf)
Also, purity of cocaine increase by half, marijuana doubled, heroin tripled, and crack and meth stayed the same compared to 1981. (http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/pdf/FullPotencyReports.pdf)
As for why your youth anti-drug ad money was slashed, it’s because the government says your ads don’t work or increase youth experimentation. (http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/pdf/PMA.pdf)
As for your use of punitive measures: drug war arrests tripled from 1973-2006 (http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm), and your claims of “balanced” priorities including treatment and prevention are only achieved by Enron-style accounting, so that “only funding for agencies involved in so-called ‘primary’ drug war activities is now tabulated in the national anti-drug budget. As a result, more than two-thirds of the agencies included in past years’ budgets are conspicuously missing from this year’s financial totals!” (http://mises.org/story/1173)
Your readers (should you be honest enough to actually post critiques of your blog, which I doubt) can read my full review of the DEA’s “success” at LewRockwell.com (http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig9/belville1.html) and stash.norml.org.
