MORE FUZZY DRUG-WAR MATH

Yesterday I took issue with the bogus numbers cited by former drug czar
William J. Bennett to back up his claim that, before Clinton came to town,
the drug war was moving along swimmingly.

Misleading numbers are the stock and trade of drug warriors, it seems.
Arguing against medical marijuana in his April 2 column, for instance, Don
Feder rattles off an alarming statistic:

"According to the Drug Abuse Warning Network," says Feder, "marijuana use
accounted for 87,150 emergency-room admissions in 1999, up 455 percent from
a decade earlier."

First off, this is a red herring, since the discussion is not about
all-purpose marijuana use, but medical. The DAWN data are not controlled
for why an emergency-room patient may have been using marijuana; it only
records the presence of the drug in his system. So to use this statistic as
an argument against medical marijuana is meaningless. Given the discussion,
the target population should be medpot users, but DAWN makes no
distinction, lumping in anyone with a trace of pot for whatever reason.

Then there's the question of causation. Feder says that "marijuana use
accounted for" the spike in ER admissions. That claim is not, however,
warranted by the data. All DAWN shows is that a trace of the drug can be
found in the patient's system when admitted; it doesn't give any leeway in
postulating about the relation of the drug to the accident that landed the
sorry chap on an ER gurney. Considering the way evidential traces of pot
can linger in a person's system, the patient could have, after all, used
marijuana a week before the accident -- the pot could have less than
nothing to do with the accident.

Since DAWN only reports the presence of a drug, there is no way for Feder
to argue with anything approaching legitimacy that marijuana accounted for
anything. More thorough research would have to be done to determine what
actually accounted for what.

To be sure, Feder has a scary statistic, but it doesn't do much to back his
case, since he's drawing a conclusion from the data that the data do not
support.

This is nothing new. DAWN's statistics have suffered a lot of misuse over
the years.

Back in the middle 1980s, when cocaine fright was a growth industry,
fearmongers used the DAWN data to paint a dire picture of chemical chaos
caused by the Peruvian poison.

"Emergency rooms nationwide report incidents of overdose and other
drug-related emergencies to DAWN," explains journalist Dan Baum in his
invaluable drug-war history, "Smoke and Mirrors," going on to explain that,
"The numbers are notoriously inaccurate because if cocaine is found in the
body of a heroin addict who overdoses or a drunk who passes out and never
wakes up, the incident may be recorded as a 'cocaine death.'"

It doesn't take an MIT grad to figure out that using the DAWN numbers made
overstating the nation's cocaine problem a cinch for drug warriors -- much
like Feder's use of the pot stat. To this day, people look back on the
so-called cocaine and crack epidemics of the '80s as if we narrowly escaped
unspeakable doom and destruction by the skin of our teeth -- which is utter
hogwash.

The 1984 DAWN stats, so hyped by the media, showed 604 deaths in which
cocaine was "mentioned." As Baum reminds, however, "That doesn't mean
cocaine killed that many people, just that the drug was present in the
bodies of 604 people who died suddenly from substance abuse." Some of them
could have very well died of alcohol poisoning, which, as WND columnist
Alan Bock points out in "Waiting to Inhale," is fingered in the DAWN data
more than any other drugs combined.

The funny thing about the 1984 data, however, was that no one was talking
about an epidemic in aspirin or flu, which -- to use Feder's word --
"accounted" for more deaths that year than cocaine. In fact, strangely
enough, the drug warriors weren't at all concerned with the "epidemics" of
ulcers, choking on food, car wrecks and handguns that killed far more
people in 1984 than cocaine, either.

It was these types of overblown, misinterpreted statistics that helped to
fuel a decade of drug fear. To show you how bad the scaremongering could
get, Newsweek Editor in Chief Richard M. Smith wrote in July 1986 that
afoot in America is "an epidemic =85 as pervasive and dangerous in its way
as the plagues of medieval times."

Perspective anyone?

Baum reports that in 1986, 1/400,000 of the U.S. population owed their
deaths to cocaine. Consider for comparison the words of one Henry Knighton,
writing between 1348 and 1350 about the Black Death:

There died in Avignon in one day one thousand three hundred and twelve
persons, according to a count made for the pope, and, another day, four
hundred persons and more. Three hundred and fifty-eight of the Friars
Preachers in the region of Provence died during Lent. At Montepellier,
there remained out of a hundred and forty friars only seven. =85 Then that
most grievous pestilence penetrated the coastal regions [of England] =85
and people died as if the whole strength of the city [Bristol] were seized
by sudden death.

All told, the accepted figure of the Plague's impact in Europe is one-third
of population killed by the Black Death, leaving the continent in utter
devastation and disarray for years to come, as Knighton makes clear in his
account of the events.

So, cocaine kills 1/400,000; the Plague kills one-third -- and who says
Smith isn't a comedian?

Whether by misreading the numbers or an outright deceptive desire to
hoodwink the nation, drug warriors conjure statistics and figures that
twist reality and display a vision of the world that is far off kilter.
Drug abuse, for certain, is nasty business and kills many, but to inflate
or misrepresent the fact in order to whip up the public into an antidope
frenzy the way prohibitionists did in the 1920s and before with alcohol is
utterly loathsome.

Unless we seek to mimic the legacy of Bill Clinton, outright lies and
misrepresentations should have no place in America's public policy -- not
even to excuse a war on drugs.

Joel Miller is the commentary editor of WorldNetDaily. His publishing
company, MenschWerks,recently published "God Gave Wine" by Kenneth L. Gentry Jr.