Phantom Numbers Haunt the War on Drugs

By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN

Politicians are said to use statistics the way drunks use lampposts: for
support rather than illumination. The aphorism seems more apt for the war
on drugs, which abounds with statistical lampposts that shed little light
on the nation's preoccupation with illegal substances.

America's drug problem seems impossible to grasp without some sense of its
size and scope. But elected officials, and their constituents, want
concrete evidence of what is essentially a shadowy illegal activity.

And when sensibly vague estimates based on the little that is known won't
suffice, law enforcement officials oblige them with numbers that one police
officer characterized as "PFA," or "pulled from the air."

Left unchallenged, even the wildest guesses take on the certitude of fact.
In his 1971 study, "The Vitality of Mythical Numbers," published in the
journal The Public Interest, Max Singer, a public policy analyst who is now
president of the Potomac Organization in Chevy Chase, Md., once crunched
the figures for thefts attributed to New York City's heroin addicts: they
were responsible for 1,200 percent of the reported thefts.

In 1978, Congress created the National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers
Committee as a repository for drug statistics. The committee led to what
Mark A.R. Kleiman, a drug policy expert at the University of California at
Los Angeles, calls "estimation by negotiation," as intelligence officials
sat down to debate what the official numbers should be.

Such numbers are irrelevant anyway, says Peter Reuter, a drug policy
specialist at the University of Maryland, because they play virtually no
role in shaping the nation's drug policies.

Wild figures distract attention from the true nature of the problem. Last
December alarms went off about rampant drug use among American youth after
an annual survey by the University of Michigan reported that half of high
school seniors said they had tried drugs, up 20 percent from 1992.

The survey indicated the experimenting mostly involved marijuana. Less than
2 percent of seniors said they had used cocaine in the previous month; 0.6
percent had used heroin. In other words, most teenagers are not abusing
hard drugs.

The latest estimate of 12.8 million drug users in this country is little
more than half of the 25 million users reported in 1979. But what worries
researchers like Lloyd D. Johnston, the author of the survey, is that more
kids are trying marijuana at a younger age, which may put them at risk for
harder drugs.

Statistics on drugs are understandably subject to manipulation by people
who hold emotional views. But as Eric D. Wish, director of the Center for
Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland, wrote recently,
"What is not so obvious is that the federal agencies that produce these
statistics are also agents of the administration in power, and are not
immune from pressures to interpret national drug statistics consistent with
the ruling administration's views."

Consider these widely accepted findings:

(italics)Statistic:(end italics) Colombia's cultivation of coca, the raw
ingredient for cocaine, jumped 32 percent from 1995 to 1996. Administration
officials brandished these numbers to defend President Clinton's decision
on Feb. 28 to decertify Colombia, while declaring Mexico an ally in
fighting drugs despite its role as a conduit for the bulk of cocaine
crossing the border.

(italics)Background:(end italics)The State Department's annual report shows
that Colombia's fields of potentially harvestable coca indeed increased
from 125,774 acres in 1995 to 166,051 acres in 1996.

But it omitted mentioning how many acres of coca crops were destroyed by
the Colombian police, a figure included in previous years. Colombia
reported fumigating 55,715 acres last year, which, if successful, would
mean that harvestable coca slightly decreased. Despite reporting an
increase in fields, the State Department estimated Colombia's potentially
harvestable coca leaf last year to be 40,800 metric tons, which is
unchanged from 1995.

A State Department official said Colombia's crop eradication was omitted
because the Department did not yet have available figures. The same report
credits the Colombians with spraying 40,000 acres but contends that they
used an inferior herbicide.

(italics)Statistic:(end italics) Children who smoke marijuana are 85 times
more likely to use cocaine than those who don't. This finding in 1994 by
the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University
is often cited as proof that marijuana leads to harder drugs.

(italics)Background:(end italics) The survey reported that 17 percent of
the marijuana users interviewed said they had tried cocaine. Only 0.2
percent of those who had not used marijuana said they had tried cocaine.
Put another way, though, 83 percent of the pot smokers, or nearly five out
of six, said they hadn't tried cocaine, which may undercut marijuana's
threat as a "gateway drug."

(italics)Statistic:(end italics) Law enforcement authorities interdict only
10 to 20 percent of the drugs entering into this country.

(italics)Background:(end italics) "There's no way of telling," said a
government official, who asked for anonymity. "One year you might be
seizing 50 percent. The next year you might seize 5 percent. It's a matter
of your best guess." The 10 percent figure, by one account, came about a
decade ago from a law enforcement official who was pressed for a precise
number at a Congressional hearing.

(italics)Statistic:(end italics) Marijuana has quietly become one of the
largest cash crops in the United States.

(italics)Background:(end italics) Nobody knows how much marijuana is grown
in this country because much of it is cultivated indoors or concealed among
other crops. Kleiman said he believed that the notion of marijuana as a
vast crop came from an exasperated agriculture official filling out a
government questionnaire about his neglected county in northern California.

The search for credible figures is apparent in the State Department's
annual survey, called the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.
It listed Mexico's marijuana production as 5,655 metric tons in 1988,
30,200 tons in 1989, 19,715 tons in 1990, and 7,775 tons in 1991.

Improved satellite and area surveillance has brought the estimate down to
3,650 tons in 1995 and a mere 3,400 tons last year.

Reuter attributed the swings to changes in Washington's methodology and not
Mexico's crop, perhaps half of which winds up in the United States. To
consume 1989s reported herbaceous output, "half the population between 15
and 40 in this country would have had to smoke a joint a day," he said.

As for the actual tonnage for Mexican pot? That's anybody's guess.

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company