AMERICANS PREFER SMACK TO CRACK

THE PRECISE figures for drug use in the United States are notoriously
unreliable but the overall trend during the Nineties indicates convincingly
that cocaine use, especially in the form of crack cocaine, is down and
heroin use is up.

The statistical difficulties emerge from the fact that data on drug use is
collected by more than 50 government bodies, many of them employing
different criteria to evaluate their findings, and often to extrapolate
them. Some base their conclusions on questionnaires, some on arrest
figures, some on hospital admissions, some on urine samples taken from jail
inmates. All figures vary depending on geographical region.

Taking this ample proviso into account, all findings indicate that the
number of drug users in America has declined by half since the late
Seventies, down from about 25 million to 13 million. According to figures
compiled by the Department of Health and Human services the number of
people who use cocaine, which includes crack, fell from a 1985 peak of 5.7
million to 1.4 million in 1994. The figures since have remained stable,
although regional breakdowns show decreases in big north-eastern urban
centres like New York and increases in smaller Southern cities like
Birmingham, Alabama.

Heroin, by contrast, has increased significantly in popularity during the
Nineties at a rate comparable to what government officials call the
epidemic of the late Sixties.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration's figures, which tend to
tally in general terms with those of other government bodies, heroin use
has more than doubled in America since 1990. The DEA's conclusion is based
on hospital emergency room admissions for heroin users, which rose from
33,052 in 1990 to 74,714 in 1995 and appears to be continuing to climb.

Donna Shalala, the Health and Human Services secretary, said last August
that heroin use had been climbing steadily for three successive years, the
biggest increases being noted among those who smoked or snorted the drug
rather than those who favour the traditional method of intravenous
injection. She said a growing number of teenagers were trying heroin for
the first time.

The actual number of people who use cocaine remains significantly higher
than the number who use heroin, possibly by a factor of five judging from
hospital and police figures. But the trend away from cocaine and towards
heroin remains clear.

Why? If the statistics are elusive, assessing the complex combination of
factors that make up the shadowy drug market - from cultivation in South
America to consumption in America's inner cities and middle-class suburbs -
remains a matter of informed speculation.

Barry McCaffrey, the White House drugs tsar, patted himself on the back
after coming up with figures last year suggesting a 6 per cent decline from
1995 to 1996 in overall drug use. "The reasons for this apparent
turn-around involve everyone in America - parents, teachers, coaches,
religious leaders and community coalitions," General McCaffrey said.

He might have noted that the US has quadrupled its spending on combating
drugs in the past decade and that where the effect has been most noted,
possibly due in part to some measure of collaboration with the governments
of Colombia and Bolivia where previously there was none, has been with
cocaine.

Which, in turn, could suggest that the drug mafias have chosen to diversify
to some degree, turning their energies more to the heroin market. One
significant statistic provided by the DEA shows that whereas five years ago
65 per cent of the heroin used in the United States came from the
traditional Latin American cocaine exporters, today the figure stands at 95
per cent.

Right now the biggest cause of concern for the US government, however, is
the spectacular increase in marijuana use, in particular among young
people. In the 12 to 17 age group marijuana use has more than doubled since
1991.