DRUG WAR GOING WELL

'Situation Has Stabilized'

Availability of Major Illegal Drugs Down, Except Afghan
Heroin

WASHINGTON -- One war appears to be going well for the U.S. and its
allies: 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 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 U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, based in
Vienna, Austria, wrote in an analysis of world drug trends that was
released last week. Some experts chide Costa as reading too much into
small fluctuations in short-term supply and ignoring grimmer long-term
forecasts. But U.S. drug czar John Walters shares his optimism.

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

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

Walters and U.N. drug-trend analyst Thomas Pietschmann, a co-author 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.

Pietschmann, who has been analyzing world drug trends since 1993, said
he'd 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. This year's crop
probably will exceed it, he predicted, bringing new waves of addiction
to the country's neighbors and to Europe, a leading customer for
Afghan heroin. Moreover, cocaine use, while down in the United States,
is up in Europe, South America and Africa, and 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."