SPINNING A FAILED WAR ON DRUGS

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
President 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. has 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 using 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?

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 national survey on drug use 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 (glues,
spray paints and solvents) 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 drug policies don't work. The government's bizarre
overemphasis on marijuana - a drug that is 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.