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Fact 1: We have made significant
progress in fighting drug use and drug trafficking in America. Now is
not the time to abandon our efforts.
Demand Reduction
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Legalization advocates claim that the fight against
drugs has not been won and is, in fact, unconquerable.
They frequently state that people still take drugs, drugs
are widely available, and that efforts to change this
are futile. They contend that legalization is the only
workable alternative.
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The facts are to the contrary to such pessimism. 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.
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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.
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The good news continues.
According to the 2001-2002 PRIDE survey, student drug use has reached
the lowest level in nine years. 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.
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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.
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The number of new heroin users dropped from 156,000
in 1976 to 104,000 in 1999, a reduction of 33 percent.
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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.
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There is still much progress to make. There are still
far too many people using cocaine, heroin and other
illegal drugs. In addition, there are emerging drug
threats like Ecstasy and methamphetamine. But the
fact is that our current policies balancing prevention,
enforcement, and treatment have kept drug usage
outside the scope of acceptable behavior in the U.S.
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To put things in perspective, less than 5 percent of the
population uses illegal drugs of any kind. Think about
that: More than 95 percent of Americans do not use
drugs. How could anyone but the most hardened
pessimist call this a losing struggle?
Supply Reduction
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Another
likely cause is that traffickers are diluting their
cocaine to offset the higher costs associated with
payoffs to insurgent and paramilitary groups in
Colombia. The third possible cause is that cocaine
traffickers simply don’t have the product to
simultaneously satisfy their market in the United States
and their rapidly growing market in Europe. As a
result, they are cutting the product to try to satisfy
both.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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. And that’s just where we want
to keep it. With a 95 percent success rate — bolstered by
an effective, three-pronged strategy combining education/prevention,
enforcement, and treatment — we shouldn’t
give up now.
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