Blow In The Wind

COCAINE INTERDICTION FICTION

"There were those who did not think it was possible to change the
availability of cocaine in the United States," drug czar John Walters
said during a November visit to Colombia. "There's no question that's
happened." But according to a report from the Government
Accountability Office (GAO) published that same month, there's no
shortage of cocaine, or of questions about the impact of
interdiction. The report used the word "problematic" 11 times to
describe the evidence on which the government relies to measure its success.

To begin with, the government does not know how much cocaine moves
from Latin America to the U.S. each year. The estimate for 2004, the
GAO noted, was "between 325 and 675 metric tons," but "such a wide
range is not useful for assessing transit zone interdiction efforts."

Walters' Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) bragged that
cocaine production was cut by nearly a third between 2001 and 2004,
while "seizures and disruptions" increased by more than 40 percent,
reaching almost 200 tons. "Despite these reported successes in
disrupting cocaine trafficking," the GAO noted, a 2004 RAND
Corporation study "indicates that the retail price of cocaine in the
United States continued to decline through the second quarter of 2003
while retail purity remained relatively high, indicating that the
supply of cocaine had not been reduced."

More to the point, the dramatic increase in interdiction has not had
a noticeable impact on cocaine use. In the National Survey on Drug
Use and Health, the number of past-month cocaine users was almost
exactly the same in 2004 as it was in 2002 (around 2 million). During
the same period, past-month cocaine use among high school students,
as measured by the Monitoring the Future study, likewise remained
essentially flat.

The report also observes that there are no good nationwide data on
drug use among populations not covered by such surveys-a significant
problem, since "a large portion of major cocaine (and other drug)
users are members of generally hard-to-survey populations, such as
the homeless or incarcerated." The fact that drug use is common in
prisons not only makes it hard to measure the impact of interdiction;
it also makes you wonder how people like Walters can believe that
preventing drugs from entering the country is a practical mission to begin with.