A VICTORY IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

WASHINGTON -- One war appears to be going well for the United States
and its allies these days: the drug war.

The availability of all major illegal drugs -- except Afghan heroin --
is flat or down, according to newly released global figures. So is
drug use in the United States, the world's leading consumer. And drug
seizures are up sharply.

No one's saying the world's drug problem is solved, only that it's
contained for now.

"We seem to have reached a point where the world drug situation has
stabilized and been brought under control," Antonio Maria Costa,
executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, based in
Vienna, Austria, wrote in an analysis of world drug trends that was
released last month.

Some experts chide Costa for reading too much into small changes in
short-term supply and ignoring grimmer long-term forecasts. But U.S.
drug czar John Walters, director of the White House Office of National
Drug Control Policy, is also optimistic.

After years of global criticism for its gluttonous appetite for drugs,
Walters said in an interview, "the U.S. is now being looked on
favorably as an example of declining use."

By a traditional drug-war benchmark, the University of Michigan's
annual government-sponsored survey of U.S. teens, Walters is correct.
It says that the use of any illicit drug within the past month dropped
about 23% during the past five years. The study, which surveys
eighth-, 10th- and 12th-graders annually, often is used to predict
future abuse rates.

Walters and UN drug-trend analyst Thomas Pietschmann, a coauthor of
the 2007 World Drug Report, give much of the credit to authorities in
drug-producing countries such as Colombia, Morocco, Laos and Myanmar,
who have cracked down on farmers and traffickers.

The countries' motives differ. Colombia's U.S.-aided crackdown sucked
support from drug-funded rebels. Morocco followed the European Union's
pressure. Laos and Myanmar dried up insurgencies and appeased
neighboring China.

Walters and Pietschmann praised Mexico's bloody efforts against its
politically corrupting drug cartels. Also lauded: more generous
intelligence sharing -- mainly by the United States, Spain and the
United Kingdom -- with Mexico, Colombia and other drug-shipping countries.

The intelligence sharing is paying off in more seizures by more
countries, said the Vienna-based Pietschmann, especially when it comes
to coca and cocaine.

Whereas U.S. law enforcement did most of the seizing in the 1980s and
1990s, Latin America did nearly 60% of it in 2005, the latest year
tallied. The leading interdicting countries were Colombia, the United
States, Venezuela, Spain, Ecuador and Mexico, in that order.

Even in countries where supplies were up, as with coca in Bolivia and
Peru, seizures offset the increases, Pietschmann said.

Overall, authorities seized 42% of total cocaine production before it
reached consumers in 2005, according to the UN report. For heroin, the
figure was 24%. In 1999, seizure rates were 24% for cocaine and 15%
for heroin.

Cannabis' availability is down, according to the study, and
amphetamine-type stimulants have been stable for two years.

Pietschmann, who has been analyzing world drug trends since 1993, said
he had seen favorable signs before, just never so many at once.

He sees warnings, too. Afghanistan's opium crop last year was so big
that it offset steep declines in southeast Asian production, his
report concluded.

This year's crop probably will exceed it, he predicted, bringing new
waves of addiction to the country's neighbors and to Europe,
traditionally a leading customer for Afghan heroin.

Moreover, cocaine use, although down in the United States, is up in
Europe, South America and Africa, and it is likely to grow.

"There's been almost no crack in Europe," Pietschmann said, "so
cocaine still has the benign image of a celebrity drug that it had in
the U.S. in the '70s."

The overall trends say more about market shifts than declines, said
Thomas Babor, the associate editor in chief of the scholarly journal
Addiction.

"I'm sure there's been progress in different parts of the world," he
said. "But the UN seems to be seizing on some short-term trends in
seizures and distribution. I don't believe that drug-abuse rates are
all that susceptible to drug interdiction or production shifts."

Eric Sterling, president of the Washington-based Criminal Justice
Policy Foundation, a nonprofit group that focuses on drug laws and
treatment for drug abuse, said supply isn't the crucial measure of
success.

Rather, public health is. "Are we seeing reductions in overdose
deaths?" he asked. "Or declines in the implication of drugs in HIV/AIDs?"

Sterling sees only "marginal change" in the current trend, given that
"the fundamentals of the drug economy haven't changed."

Indeed, U.S. street prices for cocaine and heroin continue to be at or
near all-time lows. In the past, low prices lured new users and
started new and higher levels of abuse. Why not now?

Abuse researchers Peter Reuter and Jonathan Caulkins offered an
interesting theory last fall in the online edition of Issues in
Science and Technology, a policy journal.

Whatever the price of heroin or cocaine, they speculated, "once a drug
has acquired a bad reputation, it does not seem prone to a renewed
explosion or contagious spread in use."

Overall, they're optimistic. Drug abuse in the United States, they
wrote, "is slowly ebbing down to a steady state that, depending on the
measure one prefers, may be on the order of half its peak."