April 20, 1997, Sunday
Section: Week in Review Desk
Phantom Numbers Haunt the War
on Drugs
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
POLITICIANS are said to use statistics
the way drunks use lampposts: for support rather than illumination.
The aphorism seems more apt for the war on drugs, which
abounds with statistical lampposts that shed little light on the
nation's preoccupation with illegal substances.
America's drug problem seems impossible to grasp without
some sense of its size and scope. But elected officials, and their
constituents, want concrete evidence of what is essentially a shadowy
illegal activity. And when sensibly vague estimates based on the
little that is known won't suffice, law enforcement officials oblige
them with numbers that one police officer characterized as
''P.F.A.,'' or ''pulled from the air.''
Wild Guesses
Left unchallenged, even the wildest guesses take on the certitude
of fact. In his 1971 study, ''The Vitality of Mythical Numbers,''
published in the journal The Public Interest, Max Singer, a public
policy analyst who is now president of the Potomac Organization in
Chevy Chase, Md., once crunched the figures for thefts attributed to
New York City's heroin addicts: they were responsible for 1,200
percent of the reported thefts.
In 1978, Congress created the National
Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee as a repository for
drug statistics. The committee led to what Mark A. R. Kleiman,
a drug policy expert at the University of California at Los
Angeles, calls ''estimation by negotiation,'' as intelligence
officials sat down to debate what the official numbers should be.
Such numbers are irrelevant anyway, says Peter Reuter, a drug
policy specialist at the University of Maryland, because they play
virtually no role in shaping the nation's drug policies.
Wild figures distract attention from the true nature of the
problem. Last December alarms went off about rampant drug use
among American youth after an annual survey by the University of
Michigan reported that half of high school seniors said they had
tried drugs, up 20 percent from 1992. The survey indicated the
experimenting mostly involved marijuana. Less than 2 percent of
seniors said they had used cocaine in the previous month; 0.6 percent
had used heroin. In other words, most teen-agers are not abusing hard
drugs. The latest estimate of 12.8 million drug users in this
country is little more than half of the 25 million users reported in
1979. But what worries researchers like Lloyd D. Johnston, the author
of the survey, is that more kids are trying marijuana at a younger
age, which may put them at risk for harder drugs.
Statistics on drugs are understandably subject to manipulation by
people who hold emotional views. But as Eric D. Wish, director of the
Center for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland,
wrote recently, ''What is not so obvious is that the Federal agencies
that produce these statistics are also agents of the administration
in power, and are not immune from pressures to interpret national
drug statistics consistent with the ruling administration's
views.''
Consider these widely accepted findings:
Statistic: Colombia's cultivation of coca, the raw ingredient for
cocaine, jumped 32 percent from 1995 to 1996. Administration
officials brandished these numbers to defend President Clinton's
decision on Feb. 28 to decertify Colombia, while declaring Mexico an
ally in fighting drugs despite its role as a conduit for the bulk of
cocaine crossing the border.
Background: The State Department's annual report shows that
Colombia's fields of potentially harvestable coca indeed increased
from 125,774 acres in 1995 to 166,051 acres in 1996. But it omitted
mentioning how many acres of coca crops were destroyed by the
Colombian police, a figure included in previous years. Colombia
reported fumigating 55,715 acres last year, which, if successful,
would mean that harvestable coca slightly decreased. Despite
reporting an increase in fields, the State Department estimated
Colombia's potentially harvestable coca leaf last year to be 40,800
metric tons, which is unchanged from 1995.
A State Department official said Colombia's crop eradication was
omitted because the Department did not yet have available figures.
The same report credits the Colombians with spraying 40,000 acres but
contends that they used an inferior herbicide.
Statistic: Children who smoke marijuana are 85 times more likely
to use cocaine than those who don't. This finding in 1994 by the
National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia
University is often cited as proof that marijuana leads to harder
drugs.
Background: The survey reported that 17 percent of the marijuana
users interviewed said they had tried cocaine. Only 0.2 percent of
those who had not used marijuana said they had tried cocaine. Put
another way, though, 83 percent of the pot smokers, or nearly five
out of six, said they hadn't tried cocaine, which may undercut
marijuana's threat as a ''gateway drug.''
Statistic: Law enforcement authorities interdict only 10 to 20
percent of the drugs entering into this country.
Background: ''There's no way of telling,'' said a Government
official, who asked for anonymity. ''One year you might be seizing 50
percent. The next year you might seize 5 percent. It's a matter of
your best guess.'' The 10 percent figure, by one account, came about
a decade ago from a law enforcement official who was pressed for a
precise number at a Congressional hearing.
Statistic: Marijuana has quietly become one of the largest cash
crops in the United States.
Background: Nobody knows how much marijuana is grown in this
country because much of it is cultivated indoors or concealed among
other crops. Professor Kleiman said he believed that the notion of
marijuana as a vast crop came from an exasperated agriculture
official filling out a Government questionnaire about his neglected
county in northern California.
A Joint a Day
The search for credible figures is apparent in the State
Department's annual survey, called the International Narcotics
Control Strategy Report. It listed Mexico's marijuana production as
5,655 metric tons in 1988, 30,200 tons in 1989, 19,715 tons in 1990,
and 7,775 tons in 1991. Improved satellite and area surveillance has
brought the estimate down to 3,650 tons in 1995 and a mere 3,400 tons
last year.
Mr. Reuter attributed the swings to changes in Washington's
methodology and not Mexico's crop, perhaps half of which winds up in
the United States. To consume 1989's reported herbaceous output,
''half the population between 15 and 40 in this country would have
had to smoke a joint a day,'' he said.
As for the actual tonnage for Mexican pot? That's anybody's guess.
Related Terms:
Drug Abuse and Traffic
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