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"Time to rethink unsuccessful war of drugs" View the document (pdf) The New Haven Register, A5 America's war on drugs has been a spectacular failure. For 35 years, we have increased spending and passed increasingly tough-on-crime legislation waging this war. None of these efforts have been effective. The annual student drug use survey, Monitoring the Future, establishes this fact. In 1975, 88 percent of twelfth graders said that marijuana was "fairly easy" or "very easy" to obtain. In 2005, 86 percent of twelfth graders reported that it was still easy to obtain marijuana--basically no change. The numbers of high school seniors saying that cocaine is easy to get went from 37 percent in 1975 to 45 percent in 2005--an increase! What exactly has the more than three decades long war on drugs accomplished? It is easy to be misled by the popular culture and the news media into thinking that illicit drug use is primarily a problem of blacks and Hispanics. Survey data and health records paint a very different picture. Whites are a large and growing part of America's problem with illicit drugs. Recreational drug use is highest among white young adults. Twenty-three percent of white 18-to-25 year olds indicated regular illicit drugs use in 2005. Only 18 percent of blacks and 16 percent of Hispanics in this age group reported the same, according to the National Survey of Drug Use and Health. Another important source is the Drug Abuse Warning Network (DAWN). DAWN tracks illicit drug use among visitors to emergency rooms in major metropolitan areas. DAWN's numbers for substance abuse increased by nearly 50 percent between 1995 and 2002. A large part of this increase was due to white people. The number of whites visiting emergency rooms with cocaine in their system, for example, doubled from about 40,000 in 1995 to about 80,000 in 2002. There were no significant increases among blacks or Hispanics. Connecticut residents should be especially concerned about our failed drug policies. Since the late 1990s, the Connecticut death rate from drug abuse has exceeded the national average reports the Connecticut Department of Public Health. As with the national trends, this increase has been largely driven by drug overdoses among whites. Illicit drug use and drug-related crime in minority communities is a very serious issue. Minority communities are terrorized by shootings over drug-dealing territory. This violence causes these communities to suffer from loss of life, lower property values and negative stigma on residents who are not involved with drugs. Drug-related crime in minority communities is certainly newsworthy, but the absence of news reports on white drug use and drug overdoses certainly distorts our perception of the drug problem in America. In Connecticut in 2003, 91 percent of the deaths from drug overdoses were of whites. The population as a whole is only 81 percent white. We should also note that the number of deaths from drug overdoses were triple the number of deaths from homicides in 2003. If we include deaths directly or indirectly related to alcohol, the Connecticut and the larger American drug problem is even worse than we imagined. America's response to the problems caused by illicit drugs has been disproportionately focused on black and Hispanic communities, and it has emphasized policing and incarceration to reduce the supply of drugs. After 35 years, it is clear that these policies have failed. Illicit drug use is about as prevalent in white communities as it is in nonwhite communities. We cannot adequately address this problem without fully including America's white majority. Each decade since the 1970s has brought more policing and harsher drug penalties into the arsenal of the war on drugs, and yet all illicit drugs are as accessible to high school students today as they were in 1975. We need to invest more resources and more creative thinking into reducing the demand for drugs. After 35 years of trying, the weight of the evidence suggests that we cannot reduce the supply of drugs. It's time to make a more concerted effort to reduce the demand. We desperately need to rethink our anti-drug policies. As Alcoholics Anonymous teaches us, the first step will require that we admit that we have a problem. What we have been doing for the last 35 years simply hasn't worked' |