THE DRUG DEBATE

Editor:

In your November 5 issue you use SAMHSA's (Substance Abuse and Mental
Health Services Administration) 1997 report to compare to the "drug" arrest
rate through 1995 from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting System ["Drug
Warriors"]. More recent data is available, and is not a pretty picture.

First, the arrest rate for drug offenses is up 6% for adults and 15.6% for
juveniles, 1995 through 1997.

Second, the latest SAMHSA report (1998) shows that past-month use of any
illicit drug has risen slightly since 1995 to 6.2%. A more reliable
indicator of drug use can be found in the University of Michigan's
Monitor-the-Future survey of high school seniors, a survey U.M. has been
doing since the mid-Seventies. It increased from 1995 to 1998, 23.6% to
25.8%, of high school seniors reporting use of an illegal drug in the past
month.

Third, the quote you attribute to SAMHSA is not false but hardly full
disclosure. You quote them, " -- standard drug surveys indicate that
between 1979 and 1990, the percentage of the population that reported
"using drugs in the past month' dropped from 14.1% to 6.7%, falling to 6.1%
by 1995." In fact, drug use plummeted from 14.1% in 1979, its all time
high, to 5.8% in 1992, and has been rising almost every year since then.
Small wonder that some of our citizens are calling for other ways to solve
our collective drug problem.

John Chase

Palm Harbor, Fla.