Not Winning the War on Drugs

[Metomni]

Not Winning the War on Drugs


Published: July 2, 2008

According to the White House, this country is scoring big wins in the war on drugs, especially against the cocaine cartels. Officials celebrate that cocaine seizures are up — leading to higher prices on American streets. Cocaine use by teenagers is down, and, officials say, workplace tests suggest adult use is falling.

John Walters, the White House drug czar, declared earlier this year that “courageous and effective” counternarcotics efforts in Colombia and Mexico “are disrupting the production and flow of cocaine.”

This enthusiasm rests on a very selective reading of the data. Another look suggests that despite the billions of dollars the United States has spent battling the cartels, it has hardly made a dent in the cocaine trade.

While seizures are up, so are shipments. According to United States government figures, 1,421 metric tons of cocaine were shipped through Latin America to the United States and Europe last year — 39 percent more than in 2006. And despite massive efforts at eradication, the United Nations estimates that the area devoted to growing coca leaf in the Andes expanded 16 percent last year. The administration disputes that number.

The drug cartels are not running for cover.

Mexico and parts of Central America are being swept up in drug-related violence. Latin Americans are becoming heavy consumers of cocaine, and traffickers are opening new routes to Europe through fragile West African countries. Some experts argue that the rising price of cocaine on American streets is mostly the result of a strong euro and fast-growing demand in Europe.

Workplace drug tests notwithstanding, cocaine use in the United States is not falling. About 2.5 percent of Americans used cocaine at least once in 2006, the same percentage as in 2002, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

While cocaine use has fallen among younger teenagers, 12th graders are using more: 5.2 percent used cocaine last year — up from 4.8 percent in 2001 and 3.1 percent at the low point in 1992, says a Monitoring the Future survey done by the University of Michigan.

All this suggests serious problems with a strategy that focuses overwhelmingly on disrupting the supply of drugs while doing far too little to curb domestic demand.

Washington spent $1.4 billion on drug-related foreign assistance last year — mostly to equip Colombia’s security forces and spray coca crops in the Andes. It spent another $7 billion on drug-related law enforcement and interdiction efforts at home and abroad. It spent less than $5 billion on education, prevention and treatment programs at home to curtail substance abuse.

The counternarcotics effort has produced some successes. Marijuana use in the United States has declined since 2002, the earliest year for which the government has comparable data. Teenage use of other drugs, like methamphetamine, has fallen sharply. With American aid, Colombia’s armed forces have severely weakened the FARC guerrillas, a major player in the drug trade.

The next administration should continue to help Latin American governments take on the traffickers. But it must learn from the current strategy’s shortcomings.

Eradication efforts are most likely to have more success if more money is spent on programs to wean coca growers from the business and improve the lives of their families and communities. Mexico, in particular, is in deep trouble, and the next American president should build on the Bush administration’s plans to provide counternarcotics aid. There needs to be a different mix: less money for equipment for security forces and more for economic development and programs to reform and strengthen Mexico’s judicial system.

Above all, the next administration must put much more effort into curbing demand — spending more on treating drug addicts and less on putting them in jail. Drug courts, which sentence users to treatment, still deal only with a small minority of drug cases and should be vastly expanded. Drug-treatment programs for imprisoned drug abusers, especially juvenile offenders, must also be expanded.

Over all, drug abuse must be seen more as a public health concern and not primarily a law enforcement problem. Until demand is curbed at home, there is no chance of winning the war on drugs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/op...=1&oref=slogin



So not only are they reporting misleading information, they're putting much more effort into the stoppage of much more harmless drugs.

[satinhide]

the gov't is the biggest pusher of cocaine that exists! We will see a rise in abuse because the US is pushing more coke to combat the "meth epidemic". The politicians of the US are the biggest drug pushers around, they are responsible for the networks for trafficking, and the existence of production systems. Yeah, they spray a few plants now and again, but how many do they let grow???

Heroin is the next thing US gov't will be pushing, they're letting poppies grow in Afganistan now. Stupid drug czar.

[Lunar Loops]

Not at all sure that this one should not be in the Drug Policy forum, but no matter. Here we have the official response from the ONDCP website:

Setting the Record Straight: Losing the War on Drugs?

Today's New York Times has published an editorial that willfully cherry picks data in order to conform to their tired, 1970's editorial viewpoint that we're "losing the war on drugs."

Despite our numerous efforts to provide the Times with the facts, their editorial staff has chosen to ignore irrefutable data regarding the progress that has been made in making our nation's drug problem smaller.

The bottom line? America's drug problem is now half as big as it used to be.

Overall drug use America has been cut by about fifty percent since the peak year of illegal use in 1979. In that year, about 14% of Americans had used an illegal drug sometime in the past month. This compares to about 7 percent today. Declines in cocaine use are even more dramatic, with a two-thirds reduction in use since the mid-80’s. Moreover, since 2001 there has been a 24 percent decline in youth drug use (860,000 fewer youth using drugs today than in 2001) and is mirrored by record declines in positive workplace drug tests among the U.S. adult workforce.

Remember the meth epidemic that constantly made headlines a few years ago? That's dramatically smaller too. Youth meth use is down by 64 percent and meth workplace positives are down by half as well.

Would a fifty percent drop in crime be called a “failed war on crime?” Would a 24 percent drop in cancer mortality rates be called a “failed war on cancer” and merit ending efforts to reduce the harms of the disease?

The Times also lays out another common and fraudulent caricature of the Administration’s drug control policies – that we have excessively relied on punitive law enforcement remedies over prevention and treatment efforts and a public health understanding of drug addiction.



Actually, we have a balanced strategy that takes very seriously a public health understanding of the disease of addiction, and that integrates that public health comprehension with effective use of the law. In fact, we've repeatedly asked Congress to dramatically increase funding for prevention and treatment initiatives. Unfortunately, Congress has failed to meet the Administration's request for critical demand reduction programs. Here are just a couple of examples:

• The Administration asked Congress to fully fund the National Youth Anti-drug Media Campaign. Most recently we asked for $130 million - we received $60 million

• We requested $200 million for the Access to Recovery drug treatment initiative – we received half that amount.

• Our effort to expand Drug Courts, which successfully save lives and diverts non-violent offenders into treatment, has not been sufficiently resourced. (Thankfully, the number of drug courts in the U.S. has still continued to rise drastically over the past several years. We hope this continues.)

Finally, The Times argues that there needs to be a change in Latin American anti-drug policies, claiming that we need less money for equipment and more money for economic development. Before economic development can successfully take root, you must first achieve a secure environment and project national and local governance.

The Merida Initiative, which the President signed on Monday, has the right balance of assistance for Mexico. Mexico’s national security is at risk because of immensely wealthy drug trafficking gangs that have purchased, intimidated, or murdered elements of state control that we in the United States take for granted. Development money is useless when it is applied without state control, without a reasonably functioning police and judicial system, and without a mechanism to guide the funding as decided by democratic principles. We have seen too many failures of well-intentioned development in Latin America to re-learn the lesson that security and control need to be achieved first.

The New York Times ignores historic progress made in Colombia, would have us abandon our neighbor Mexico during a time of extreme need, and denigrates drug use reductions here at home.

[Evil GIR]

They can never win the war on drugs, there attempt is nothing but an epic fail.
Well unless they all go Nazi and start marching all drug users off to the gas chambers, with no trial.

[stoneinfocus]

Facts and figures only reflect a system, which they've been related to.

A system more complex than the part reflected by those facts and figuers fails to adapt to the "sucess" those statistics proclaim.

Is it a sucess, when a so-called disease is violently surpressed at cost of liberty, poetry, philosophy, knowledge, a humanly lifestyle, different cultures and at cost of (the lifes of) those, desperatly needing and relying on the such supressed and slandered system?

I won't comment with deductive logic on drug issues anymore, nor will I be set-off for being a soldier for drugs, a drug-warrior.

It's unnecessary and annoying to me; drugs were (or weren't) otherwise just a mean for pursueing any other non-drug related part of my life and I wouldn't even mention them or their use, until it was of special interest or needed to improve my life -and not that of others.

Drugs really don't interest me in the sense of discussing their legal issues.There's more important things to fight for and when those are won, drug legality won't be of concerne, nor would anyone be judged for using them(or "failing" with/on them), when people begin to identify each other as a human beings again.


Do we hear something about drug use in the ancient time's high-cultures or issues with them, like it's the case today?

-No, because they were around as a given and commonly used without discussing their legal issues (until the late "christians" came-up, of course) and the effects were a modification of the human mind and body, an approach to culture, philosophy, wisdom, work and therapy; not that the drugs were that important, were ideologically judged or counted more than what humans could achieve with or without them.Just the people's achievements mattered, were described and a heritage and that was all there was to it. We don't need more rules, other than that we are free to achieve, what each of us wants to achieve and the just the success in it mattered.Free in deciding by which menas and how we adapt to the forthcoming of that success, as well as being free in making all of the mistakes related to outr life.There're no "wrong" mistakes or mistakes, that weren't allowed within a free society.

A drug might be a tool, a necessity for survival, like a hammer or a knife.
Who would mention, restrict the use of and rely solely on issues with, e.g. broken hammers, or i.e. Celtics, killing people with hammers, when one's just about making a house, an unique piece of art, or a major contribution to society as a live's achievement by the help of all different kinds of hammers (except for some hammer freaks, skilled in the art of making hammers or interested in the history of hammers)?

We might be consent about the fact, that in these cases of usage a discussion about a hammer and, that it might do harm, if used without proper advise, that you hit onto your thump yesterday, was dangerous when used by unskilled people, if used when damaged, should be restricted, or might be used by some idiots, is rather uninteresting/annoying/distracting and issues resulting from the latter problems selfexplaining and managable -or not, so be it! We all still need our tools without restrictions.

According to the nature of things and humans -there's no win without a loss, relative to anything in life. As such, win and loss are relative:

There might be solely winning, by losing any hardship & complications on applying certain means and strategies to a subject, or there must be a compromise.
It's mostly the latter and, unfortunately (this is today's hybris), we are not the ones to alter the laws of this set compromise, not even by man-made "laws". When we decided to have a compromise, or the compromise is inevitable, due to the laws of our enviroment, it'll have its own prerogatives, which cannot be changed and will rule out any man-made laws and wishful thinking.


A war can't be won, a war is full of lies and injustice and is abusing societies against other societies, at cost of the most precious aspects of human live.

A society, in which the individual is not free is doomed to fail, no matter, under which disguise a dictatorship (even a partial dictatorship is a dictatorship) or imperialism might be explained, as such, as if it were a necessity for freedom, or the efforts applied needed, as well as the damage done by these efforts to be beared -rather this is under rug-swept and any relation or approach to alternatives talked- and manipulated to death.

History will tell, as it has always told; no matter how long it takes or how big those oppressing efforts were, that they were wrong.

It's up to us to realize, learn and being humble, not judging and accepting the nature of each other, taking our nature as an unalterable given and freedom, as such, as a constitutional law, which can't be ruled out. May the resulting fatalities be the price to pay for freedom and be seen as a progress, which takes everyone and all people to a higher level, opposed to scarifising us for hollow constitutions and/or ideologies and their resulting war and hate-mongering.

We have to bear our cross, not the crosses intentionally made by and for other humans, but those, forced upon us by the laws of our selfchosen and in accordance with our human concious desperately needed liberty and -according to the latter, then resulting enviroment.