New York Times Still Not Seeing the Elephant...

New York Times Still Not Seeing the Elephant...
New York Times Still Not Seeing the Elephant...First off, I would like to thank the New York Times for continually calling out the failure of drug prohibition policies, most recently in the July 2nd Late Edition Editorial.However, one particular section of it I found troubling: "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." However, let's look at The National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), which states, "Meanwhile, for the 18 to 25 age group, the current use of marijuana dropped from 17.3 percent to 16.3 percent while at the same time prescription drug abuse increased overall from 5.4 percent to 6.4 percent."Further, from earlier in the same editorial, "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."Translation: marijuana use has fallen, by the same percentage that prescription drug abuse has increased. Methamphetamine has fallen, but cocaine usage has gone up.The troubling section continues with further evidence of alleged counter-narcotics success: "With American aid, Colombia's armed forces have severely weakened the FARC guerrillas, a major player in the drug trade.""While FARC might be on the run (which brings about dangerous political implications as to what U.S. anti-drug aid is really about), cocaine production is, by anyone living in reality and not ONDCP's psychotic world where only "20,000" people are in prison only for drugs (That is a direct quote from David Murray, incidentally), only running higher.Translation: FARC's being replaced by other opportunists. Coca is still being grown, and still finding its way into the United States. The routes into the United States certainly have changed, but I would argue this hasn't helped anyone, in fact, it would appear to have made things worse.Taken together, counter-narcotics efforts have only "shifted" drug distribution and use. I would hardly call those successes. The drug cartels on the Mexican border currently handling distribution to the United States make FARC look like pleasant neighbors in comparison (FARC's death counts would be in the tens and hundreds, since last year, thousands have died as a result of Mexican Drug Cartel related violence). Due to the safe track record of cannabis (not one recorded overdose, ever), if we are shifting teenagers from marijuana to prescription drug abuse (several thousand overdose deaths last year including Anna Nicole Smith, and most recently Heath Ledger in 2008), we are doing them a disservice. In fact, I dare say that counter-narcotic efforts have been colossal failures, leading to more harm, rather than less.The eye must be kept on the ball: drug prohibition was supposed to be about PROTECTING the public, not making things worse for them. Evidently, the drug warriors have lost their way - their markers are arrests, crop destruction, and shifts away from relatively benign plant usage - even though these markers have never gotten them closer to the goal of protecting the public from the harms of drug abuse.Shouldn't we be using markers that actually mean something in terms of protecting the public? How about measuring by overdoses prevented? I mean, that is actual LIVES SAVED. What about reduced HIV/Hep-C transmission rates? I think reduced emergency room visits (and not from fear-measures, which makes Good Samaritan Laws that much more important) would make a good marker as well.Or, we can just change the terms, and suddenly ONDCP and DEA markers make sense: counter-narcotics efforts ARE successful, if you're trying to punish people for what they put in their bodies, trying to punish people who supply those desires, and don't care at all about the public except as a source of funding.This is the elephant that the New York Times Editorial misses. Thanks for pointing out that drug prohibition isn't working. Now let's talk about why we're still even considering law enforcement approaches to a medical problem.