Speaking Out Against Drug Legalization, Fact 1

Fact 1: We have made significant progress in fighting drug use and drug trafficking in America. Now is not the time to abandon our efforts.

Demand Reduction

Legalization advocates claim that the fight against drugs has not been won and is, in fact, unconquerable. They frequently state that people still take drugs, drugs are widely available, and that efforts to change this are futile. They contend that legalization is the only workable alternative.
The facts are to the contrary to such pessimism. On the demand side, the U.S. has reduced casual use, chronic use and addiction, and prevented others from even starting using drugs. Overall drug use in the United States is down by more than a third since the late 1970s. That’s 9.5 million people fewer using illegal drugs. We’ve reduced cocaine use by an astounding 70% during the last 15 years. That’s 4.1 million fewer people using cocaine.
Almost two-thirds of teens say their schools are drugfree, according to a new survey of teen drug use conducted by The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University. This is the first time in the seven-year history of the study that a majority of public school students report drug-free schools.
The good news continues. According to the 2001-2002 PRIDE survey, student drug use has reached the lowest level in nine years. According to the author of the study, “following 9/11, Americans seemed to refocus on family, community, spirituality, and nation.” These statistics show that U.S. efforts to educate kids about the dangers of drugs is making an impact. Like smoking cigarettes, drug use is gaining a stigma which is the best cure for this problem, as it was in the 1980s, when government, business, the media and other national institutions came together to do something about the growing problem of drugs and drug-related violence. This is a trend we should encourage — not send the opposite message of greater acceptance of drug use.
The crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and early 1990s has diminished greatly in scope. And we’ve reduced the number of chronic heroin users over the last decade. In addition, the number of new marijuana users and cocaine users continues to steadily decrease.
The number of new heroin users dropped from 156,000 in 1976 to 104,000 in 1999, a reduction of 33 percent.
Of course, drug policy also has an impact on general crime. In a 2001 study, the British Home Office found violent crime and property crime increased in the late 1990s in every wealthy country except the United States. Our murder rate is too high, and we have much to learn from those with greater success—but this reduction is due in part to a reduction in drug use.
There is still much progress to make. There are still far too many people using cocaine, heroin and other illegal drugs. In addition, there are emerging drug threats like Ecstasy and methamphetamine. But the fact is that our current policies balancing prevention, enforcement, and treatment have kept drug usage outside the scope of acceptable behavior in the U.S.
To put things in perspective, less than 5 percent of the population uses illegal drugs of any kind. Think about that: More than 95 percent of Americans do not use drugs. How could anyone but the most hardened pessimist call this a losing struggle?

Supply Reduction

There have been many successes on the supply side of the drug fight, as well. For example, Customs officials have made major seizures along the U.S.-Mexico border during a six-month period after September 11th, seizing almost twice as much as the same period in 2001. At one port in Texas, seizures of methamphetamine are up 425% and heroin by 172%. Enforcement makes a difference—traffickers’ costs go up with these kinds of seizures.
Purity levels of Colombian cocaine are declining too, according to an analysis of samples seized from traffickers and bought from street dealers in the United States. The purity has declined by nine percent, from 86 percent in 1998, to 78 percent in 2001. There are a number of possible reasons for this decline in purity, including DEA supply reduction efforts in South America.
One DEA program, Operation Purple, involves 28 countries and targets the illegal diversion of chemicals used in processing cocaine and other illicit drugs. DEA’s labs have discovered that the oxidation levels for cocaine have been greatly reduced, suggesting that Operation Purple is having a detrimental impact on the production of cocaine.
Another likely cause is that traffickers are diluting their cocaine to offset the higher costs associated with payoffs to insurgent and paramilitary groups in Colombia. The third possible cause is that cocaine traffickers simply don’t have the product to simultaneously satisfy their market in the United States and their rapidly growing market in Europe. As a result, they are cutting the product to try to satisfy both.
Whatever the final reasons for the decline in drug purity, it is good news for the American public. It means less potent and deadly drugs are hitting the streets, and dealers are making less profits — that is, unless they raise their own prices, which helps price more and more Americans out of the market.
Purity levels have also been reduced on methamphetamine by controls on chemicals necessary for its manufacture. The average purity of seized methamphetamine samples dropped from 72 percent in 1994 to 40 percent in 2001.
The trafficking organizations that sell drugs are finding that their profession has become a lot more costly. In the mid-1990s, the DEA helped dismantle Burma’s Shan United Army, at the time the world’s largest heroin trafficking organization, which in two years helped reduce the amount of Southeast Asian heroin in the United States from 63 percent of the market to 17 percent of the market. In the mid-1990s, the DEA helped disrupt the Cali cartel, which had been responsible for much of the world’s cocaine.
Progress does not come overnight. America has had a long, dark struggle with drugs. It’s not a war we’ve been fighting for 20 years. We’ve been fighting it for 120 years. In 1880, many drugs, including opium and cocaine, were legal. We didn’t know their harms, but we soon learned. We saw the highest level of drug use ever in our nation, per capita. There were over 400,000 opium addicts in our nation. That’s twice as many per capita as there are today. And like today, we saw rising crime with that drug abuse. But we fought those problems by passing and enforcing tough laws and by educating the public about the dangers of these drugs. And this vigilance worked—by World War II, drug use was reduced to the very margins of society. And that’s just where we want to keep it. With a 95 percent success rate — bolstered by an effective, three-pronged strategy combining education/prevention, enforcement, and treatment — we shouldn’t give up now.