MARIJUANA BECOMES FOCUS OF DRUG WAR

Less Emphasis on Heroin and Cocaine

The focus of the drug war in the United States has shifted significantly
over the past decade from hard drugs to marijuana, which now accounts for
nearly half of all drug arrests nationwide, according to an analysis of
federal crime statistics released yesterday.

The study of FBI data by a Washington-based think tank, the Sentencing
Project, found that the proportion of heroin and cocaine cases plummeted
from 55 percent of all drug arrests in 1992 to less than 30 percent 10
years later. During the same period, marijuana arrests rose from 28 percent
of the total to 45 percent.

Coming in the wake of the focus on crack cocaine in the late 1980s, the
increasing emphasis on marijuana enforcement was accompanied by a dramatic
rise in overall drug arrests, from fewer than 1.1 million in 1990 to more
than 1.5 million a decade later. Eighty percent of that increase came from
marijuana arrests, the study found.

The rapid increase has not had a significant impact on prisons, however,
because just 6 percent of the arrests resulted in felony convictions, the
study found. The most widely quoted household survey on the topic has shown
relatively little change in the overall rate of marijuana use over the same
time period, experts said.

"In reality, the war on drugs as pursued in the 1990s was to a large degree
a war on marijuana," said Ryan S. King, the study's co-author and a
research associate at the Sentencing Project. "Marijuana is the most widely
used illegal substance, but that doesn't explain this level of growth over
time . . . The question is, is this really where we want to be spending all
our money?"

The think tank is a left-leaning group that advocates alternatives to
traditional imprisonment. Criminologists and government officials confirmed
the trend, which in some ways marks a return to a previous era. In 1982,
marijuana arrests accounted for 72 percent of all drug arrests, according
to the study.

Bush administration officials attribute the rise in marijuana arrests to a
variety of factors: increased use among teenagers during parts of the
1990s; efforts by local police departments to focus more on street-level
offenses; and growing concerns over the danger posed by modern, more potent
versions of marijuana. The White House Office of National Drug Control
Policy released a study yesterday showing that youth who use marijuana are
more likely to develop serious mental health problems, including depression
and schizophrenia.

"This is not Cheech and Chong marijuana," said David Murray, a policy
analyst for the anti-drug office. "It's a qualitatively different drug, and
that's reflected in the numbers."

The new statistics come amid signs of a renewed debate in political circles
over the efficacy of U.S. drug policies, which have received less attention
recently amid historically low crime rates and a focus on terrorism since
the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, for
example, has formed a national committee to oversee prosecution of violent
drug gangs and has vowed to focus more resources on the fight against
methamphetamine manufacturers and other drug traffickers.

But increasingly, some experts have begun to argue that the U.S. drug war,
which costs an estimated $35 billion a year, has had a minimal impact on
consumption of illicit substances. The conservative American Enterprise
Institute published a report in March titled "Are We Losing the War on
Drugs?" Its authors argue that, among other things, "criminal punishment of
marijuana use does not appear to be justified."

The study released yesterday by the Sentencing Project found that arrests
for marijuana account for nearly all of the increase in drug arrests seen
during the 1990s. The report also found that one in four people in state
prisons for marijuana offenses can be classified as a "low-level offender,"
and it estimated that $4 billion a year is spent on arresting and
prosecuting marijuana crimes.

In addition, the study showed that although African Americans make up 14
percent of marijuana users generally, they account for nearly a third of
all marijuana arrests.

Among the most striking findings was the researchers' examination of arrest
trends in New York City, which focused intently on "zero tolerance"
policies during Rudolph W. Giuliani's mayoral administration. Marijuana
arrests in the city increased tenfold from 1990 to 2002, from 5,100 to more
than 50,000, the report said. Nine of 10 of arrests in 2002 were for
possession rather than dealing.

The study also found a wide disparity in the growth of marijuana arrests in
some of the United States' largest counties, from a 20 percent increase in
San Diego to a 418 percent spike in King County, Wash. (The only decrease
in the sample came in Northern Virginia's Fairfax County, where marijuana
arrests declined by 37 percent.)

"There's been a major change in what's going on in drug enforcement, but it
clearly isn't something that someone set out to do," said Jonathan
Caulkins, a criminology professor at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh. "It's not like anyone said, 'We don't care about cocaine and
heroin anymore.' . . . The simple answer may be that police are now taking
opportunities to make more marijuana arrests than they were when they were
focused on crack cocaine in the 1980s."