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US claims success in war on drugs

The top US drugs official has said anti-drug efforts are having the best results of the past 20 years.

John Walters, head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said cocaine shortages had led to a jump in prices in 37 American cities.

Efforts on both sides of the Mexican border have disrupted the flow of all drugs into the US, Mr Walters said.

But he said it had not yet been proven if the results could be sustained over the long term.

Mexican traffickers extradited

Mr Walters was speaking as the US and Mexico work out the details of an aid plan - expected to total $1bn - for Mexico to help combat drug cartels.

About 90% of the cocaine entering the US comes through Mexico.

"What's happened for the first time in two decades is we now see widespread reports of cocaine shortages in the United States," Mr Walters said.

Thirty-seven cities had reported "the lack of the ability to receive wholesale amounts, kilo amounts, of cocaine in the quantities previously supplied at prices previously charged", he said.

As a result of the drop in supply, the price of cocaine had increased by 24% and nearly doubled in some cities.

The drugs tsar credited Mexican President Felipe Calderon for some of the success.

He said US investigators had been working closely with Mexican authorities in their fight against the drug cartels.

Since Mr Calderon took office in December he has sent 25,000 soldiers and police to Mexican provinces plagued by drug violence and it seems to be working, says the BBC's Duncan Kennedy in Mexico City.

Several high-profile Mexican traffickers have been extradited to the US in recent months.

Mr Walters also said that fewer American workers were showing positive on drug tests and that there were fewer cocaine-related hospital admissions.

The real challenge, he said, would be maintaining the results over the long term.

Source

The 'war' on drugs is a war that can't be won. For every drug dealer or cartel you bust another will rise up to fill the void. I do admit it is a good way to suck in funding for the executive branch.

Prices go up = dealers make more money.


Success!

Strange... I could of sworn I smoked some dankity DANK this afternoon...

Spinning a Failed War on Drugs
By Bruce Mirken, AlterNet
Posted on September 11, 2007, Printed on October 4, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/61842

Our government says we're winning the war on drugs. At a press conference to release results of the government's major annual drug use survey Sept. 6, both White House drug czar John Walters and Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt said so, with Walters touting "fewer teens using drugs today."

Not quite. When you cut through the spin and look at the actual numbers, it's clear that Walters is again trying to fool the public -- much as Richard Nixon did back in 1972, when he first claimed we were "winning" the war on drugs.

While drug use rates reported in the just-released 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health are essentially unchanged from 2005, Walters and Leavitt touted declines in current teen use of illicit drugs since 2002, from 11.6 to 9.8 percent, and a parallel decline in current marijuana use from 8.2 to 6.7 percent.

That sounds impressive -- until you look at the long-term trends. If you go back another 10 years, to 1992, the rate of current teen use of illicit drugs was just 5.3 percent, and current marijuana use was at 3.4 percent. So while it edged down a bit in the last five years, teen drug use is actually nearly double what it was 15 years ago.

Walters and Co. have an explanation for this, of course. They say that the methodology of the survey was changed in 2002, so you can't compare earlier figures with recent ones. But that claim is shaky at best.

First, not all experts agree that the changes in the survey were enough to drastically alter the results. Second, another government-funded survey of teen drug use that hasn't changed its methodology, called Monitoring the Future, has documented strikingly similar trends.

In the 2006 Monitoring the Future survey, released last December, 16.8 percent of 10th-graders reported current use of at least one illicit drug -- a drop from 20.8 percent in 2002, but a substantial increase over the 11 percent rate in 1992. For marijuana, current use among 10th-graders soared from 8.1 percent in 1992 and 14.2 percent in 2006.

None of this stopped Leavitt from claiming, "The trends in general are very encouraging." Do these people not read their own data, or do they just think we're fools? The fact is that Walters and colleagues have squandered well over a billion of our tax dollars on a failed ad campaign, mostly aimed at demonizing marijuana, and are desperate to show some results. So they cherry-pick a few numbers that seem to make their case, and ignore the rest.

And before you buy Walters' frequent claim that "we took our eye off the ball" fighting drug abuse in the '90s, don't forget that between 1991 and 2000, marijuana arrests skyrocketed from 282,000 to 734,497.

But buried in the new NSDUH results are some fascinating and sometimes disturbing tidbits. The percentage of Americans who reported using illicit drugs in the past year or past month edged up slightly, and this increase was driven by jumps in use of some of the most dangerous drugs: cocaine, narcotic pain drugs, and stimulants (a category that includes methamphetamine).

While most of the changes were small and not statistically significant, those that were significant are alarming. For example, among 14- to 15-year-olds, past-month use of deadly inhalants rose significantly, as did past-month use of sedatives. This raises the disturbing possibility that scare campaigns focused on marijuana are driving kids to try drugs that are far more dangerous.

The drug czar will never admit it, but the long-term picture is clear: Our current drug policies don't work. The government's bizarre overemphasis on marijuana -- a drug that is beyond question safer than such legal drugs as alcohol and tobacco -- has had little effect on marijuana use, but may well be making our hard-drug problem worse.

It's long past time we had policy based on facts, not spin.

Bruce Mirken is communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project.

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