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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
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.
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.
Almost two-thirds
of teens say their schools are drug-free, 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.
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.
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.
The number of
new heroin users dropped from 156,000 in 1976 to 104,000 in 1999, a
reduction of 33 percent.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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