Claim 1: "We have made significant progress in fighting drug use and drug trafficking in America. Now is not the time to abandon our efforts."
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Claim: On the demand side, the U.S. has reduced casual use, chronic use and addiction, and prevented others from even starting using drugs. Overall drug use in the United States is down by more than a third since the late 1970s. That’s 9.5 million people fewer using illegal drugs. We’ve reduced cocaine use by an astounding 70% during the last 15 years. That’s 4.1 million fewer people using cocaine. Fact: And from 1980 to 1995, alcohol consumption dropped by 23% (http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh27-1/30-38.htm), while from 1973 to 2006 cigarette smoking dropped by 59% (http://www.lung.org/finding-cures/our-research/trend-reports/Tobacco-Trend-Report.pdf) - all while alcohol and cigarettes remained legal. Correlation is not causation. Here the DEA commits the ancient logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc ("after this therefore because of this") - like the rooster who claimed his crowing caused the sun to rise. -
Claim: Almost two-thirds of teens say their schools are drugfree, according to a new survey of teen drug use conducted by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University. This is the first time in the seven-year history of the study that a majority of public school students report drug-free schools. Fact: That's what teens think other teens are doing. Here's what teens say about what they themselves are doing: The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse reported in 2002 that teens said for the first time that they could get marijuana more easily than cigarettes or beer (http://www.casacolumbia.org/download.aspx?path=/UploadedFiles/b0ooqrvk.pdf). This is the DEA's idea of "progress"? What this shows is that the best way to restict teens' access to drugs is to make them legal for adults only (thus giving those who sell to adults a disincentive to sell to kids - namely, the loss of their legal adult market). -
Claim: The good news continues. According to the 2001-2002 PRIDE survey, student drug use has reached the lowest level in nine years.
Fact: And 8 years later, the percentage of daily marijuana use was essentially unchanged (http://www.pridesurveys.com/Reports/index.html), despite ever-rising spending on drug enforcement. Trends in youth drug use simply don't correlate with drug criminalization efforts. Claim: According to the author of the study, “following 9/11, Americans seemed to refocus on family, community, spirituality, and nation.” These statistics show that U.S. efforts to educate kids about the dangers of drugs is making an impact. Like smoking cigarettes, drug use is gaining a stigma which is the best cure for this problem, as it was in the 1980s, when government, business, the media and other national institutions came together to do something about the growing problem of drugs and drug-related violence. This is a trend we should encourage — not send the opposite message of greater acceptance of drug use. Fact: Legalization does not "send the opposite message of greater acceptance of drug use." We manage to educate kids about the dangers of alcohol and tobacco despite their legality. If we're going to criminalize everything we don't want kids doing, we've got a long list to work on. -
Claim: The crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s has diminished greatly in scope. And we’ve reduced the number of chronic heroin users over the last decade. In addition, the number of new marijuana users and cocaine users continues to steadily decrease. Fact: See the first fact, above. -
Claim: The number of new heroin users dropped from 156,000 in 1976 to 104,000 in 1999, a reduction of 33 percent. Fact: See the first fact, above. -
Claim: Of course, drug policy also has an impact on general crime. In a 2001 study, the British Home Office found violent crime and property crime increased in the late 1990s in every wealthy country except the United States. Our murder rate is too high, and we have much to learn from those with greater success—but this reduction is due in part to a reduction in drug use. Fact: Apparently the DEA hopes we won't notice that:
- All those countries also have anti-drug laws.
- There is no evidence that those countries had rising levels of drug use.
- As mentioned previously, correlation is not causation.
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Claim: To put things in perspective, less than 5 percent of the population uses illegal drugs of any kind. Fact: According to the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, in 2008 8% of Americans had used an illicit drug in the past month and 14.2% in the past year (http://www.samhsa.gov/data/nsduh/2k8nsduh/tabs/Sect1peTabs1to46.htm#Tab1.19B).
Supply Reduction
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Claim: There have been many successes on the supply side of the drug fight, as well. For example, Customs officials have made major seizures along the U.S.-Mexico border during a six-month period after September 11th, seizing almost twice as much as the same period in 2001. At one port in Texas, seizures of methamphetamine are up 425% and heroin by 172%. Enforcement makes a difference—traffickers’ costs go up with these kinds of seizures. Fact: Based on available federal government data (http://www.justice.gov/ndic/pubs44/44849/44849p.pdf, http://www.abtassociates.com/reports/american_users_spend_2002.pdf), no more than 21% of the cocaine that enters this country is seized, and no more than 19% of the heroin. The DEA is grading itself on a very generous curve if it calls a score of 21% anything better than failing. -
Claim: Purity levels of Colombian cocaine are declining too, according to an analysis of samples seized from traffickers and bought from street dealers in the United States. The purity has declined by nine percent, from 86 percent in 1998, to 78 percent in 2001. There are a number of possible reasons for this decline in purity, including DEA supply reduction efforts in South America. Fact: Cocaine purity rises and falls with no correlation to drug enforcement activity; after that cherry-picked dip in 2001, purity rose again (https://www.ncjrs.gov/ondcppubs/publications/pdf/price_purity.pdf). -
Claim: One DEA program, Operation Purple, involves 28 countries and targets the illegal diversion of chemicals used in processing cocaine and other illicit drugs. DEA’s labs have discovered that the oxidation levels for cocaine have been greatly reduced, suggesting that Operation Purple is having a detrimental impact on the production of cocaine. Fact: Oxidation is used to remove impurities; whatever the significance of these reduced oxidation levels, it hasn't meant a reduction in cocaine purity, as shown above. -
Claim: Whatever the final reasons for the decline in drug purity, it is good news for the American public. It means less potent and deadly drugs are hitting the streets, and dealers are making less profits — that is, unless they raise their own prices, which helps price more and more Americans out of the market. Fact: Speaking of prices: powder cocaine prices have declined by roughly 80 percent since 1981, with the average price of one expected pure gram of cocaine purchased at Q1 (i.e., 0.1 to 2.0 bulk grams) costing approximately $107 in 2003. (https://www.ncjrs.gov/ondcppubs/publications/pdf/price_purity.pdf)
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Claim: Purity levels have also been reduced on methamphetamine by controls on chemicals necessary for its manufacture. The average purity of seized methamphetamine samples dropped from 72 percent in 1994 to 40 percent in 2001. Fact: Methamphetamine purity did decline during that period - but then it rose again. (https://www.ncjrs.gov/ondcppubs/publications/pdf/price_purity.pdf) As with cocaine, purity rises and falls with no correlation to drug enforcement activity. -
Claim:The trafficking organizations that sell drugs are finding that their profession has become a lot more costly. In the mid-1990s, the DEA helped dismantle Burma’s Shan United Army, at the time the world’s largest heroin trafficking organization, which in two years helped reduce the amount of Southeast Asian heroin in the United States from 63 percent of the market to 17 percent of the market. In the mid-1990s, the DEA helped disrupt the Cali cartel, which had been responsible for much of the world’s cocaine. Fact: When Southeast Asian heroin declined, South American heroin picked up the slack. When the Cali cartel was disrupted, other cartels stepped in. These high-profile busts serve only to create opportunities for other traffickers. -
Claim: Progress does not come overnight. America has had a long, dark struggle with drugs. It’s not a war we’ve been fighting for 20 years. We’ve been fighting it for 120 years. In 1880, many drugs, including opium and cocaine, were legal. We didn’t know their harms, but we soon learned. We saw the highest level of drug use ever in our nation, per capita. There were over 400,000 opium addicts in our nation. That’s twice as many per capita as there are today. And like today, we saw rising crime with that drug abuse. But we fought those problems by passing and enforcing tough laws and by educating the public about the dangers of these drugs. And this vigilance worked—by World War II, drug use was reduced to the very margins of society. Fact: The only anti-drug laws passed in the 1880s were against smokable opium, and were targeted at the recently immigrated Chinese laborers. Even when the Harrison Narcotic Act was passed in 1914, "The supporters of the Harrison bill said little in the Congressional debates (which lasted several days) about the evils of narcotics addiction in the United States. They talked more about the need to implement The Hague Convention of 1912," which was "aimed primarily at solving the opium problems of the Far East, especially China." "Even Senator Mann of Mann Act fame, spokesman for the bill in the Senate, talked about international obligations rather than domestic morality. On its face, moreover, the Harrison bill did not appear to be a prohibition law at all." (http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/cu/cumenu.htm) And if the use of opiates and cocaine declined in the early part of the twentieth century (although the use of barbiturates and amphetamines was widespread), they rose again later despite not a single anti-drug law being repealed. Again we see that trends in drug use do not correlate with anti-drug laws and enforcement.
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