If you were to go the LA County, or New York or Miami county jails, I'm guessing that a MUCH greater percentage of those either incarcerated or awaiting trial are there for drug related charges.
Again, this "drug problem" in the armed forces is a overblown or even fabricated story. And, surprise surprise, is one that has almost magically disappeared from press accounts since Barry's taken over.
If you were to go to any Ivy League school today and forced drug tests on the student body, I would wager a years salary that between 40-50% of the students would test positive for drugs.
In my 20+ years of service, including my time in Iraq, I never saw more than two people out of 800 ever pop positive on a piss test. The problem is hyper-exaggerated.
I didn’t post it here, but in scanning the news on the subject, I just came across one article that said 18 soldiers a week test positive (but this was the British Military, which has a very much smaller force there)...
So, at 18 soldiers a week with a smaller force, I would just “guess” that we’re not so much culturally different than the British and that the U.S. would have something similar happening. And there are reports there, about it...
You mention not seeing hardly anything in 20 years, but that doesn’t match up with the articles that I’m coming across...
At a PTSD blog, the blog owner was quoting a story on ABC about drug usage back in the field and what happens when they come back home... here is a little blurb of it...
“Lots of soldiers coming back from Iraq have been using drugs,” said Spc. William Swenson, who was deployed to Iraq from Fort Carson. “Right when we got back, there were people using cocaine in the barracks; there were people smoking marijuana at strip clubs; one guy started shooting up,” he said.
Fort Carson, just outside Colorado Springs, is home to 17,500 active duty personnel. Four thousand eight hundred service members are currently deployed in the “sand box,” as soldiers call Iraq and Afghanistan. ABC News spoke to more than a dozen soldiers who described widespread abuse of illegal drugs at Fort Carson by service members back from the war. ...
http://ptsdcombat.blogspot.com/2007/11/2020-abc-news-uncovers-soldiers-and.html
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It’s like I said, in scanning through a bunch of articles (and I’m definitely not including them all here... LOL...), I’m seeing a whole lot of this kind of thing...
I would say that there is a problem...