Drugs - Drug Mountain, Drug Primer, Meth In America: Not In Our Town, Drug Arrests Do Not Deter Use

Much as the post-war Baby Boom has had an indelible impact on the demographics, economics, and mores of the 20th century, so also the War on Drugs has had, and continues to have, a significantly uneven influence on "crime and justice," the subject of this volume. Attempts at controlling the trade in illegal substances, and to prevent people from using drugs, is accounting for about a fifth of all correctional activities and a tenth of all non-traffic police activities if measured by arrests. Very substantial budgets are associated with this war. Victory appears at least as far away as the conquest of poverty — in large part because significant parts of the public are engaged in massive disobedience of law. In this chapter, we try to hit some of the highlights of this very complicated subject.

The first panel shows the rise of what we dub "drug mountain," meaning the pattern of rising arrest rates, measured over time, and indicating what an important part of the criminal justice system drugs have become since Nixon declared war on drugs.

We follow this with a drug primer in which we try to sort out the "big actors" without neglecting the significant bit players in this drama. The big actors are, of course, marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. We take a closer look at "meth" next. Those tracking the drug scene, the "critics," as it were, give these drugs the most reviews. Methamphetamine is a recent arrival and making a big run in rural America, while Miss Ecstasy is starring in clubs. Some of the main characters, however, have had a long run and will be around for decades to come.

The first panel, which showed rising drug arrests, tempted us to answer the question: "Has the energetic activity of the police caused use of drugs to drop?" We answer this question next using data from one of the institutes of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services which routinely surveys people on their drug-use/abuse habits.

Are drugs predominantly an African American phenomenon? Are blacks using drugs much more than whites and other racial groups? We try to answer these and other race-related questions in the next three panels. We look at users of drugs by race, arrests by race, and what happens to those arrested — again by race. In this context we go deeper into the distinctions between "possession" and "trafficking" as the two chief offenses for which people are led away.

In the following two panels, we look at the "market" from two points of view: the supply and the demand side of the picture. We note that tonnages of drugs shipped have remained level, but the kinds of drugs sold have been fluctuating. Prices have been coming down. Next, we look at users of the drugs, this time in the aggregate, and look at what they like to buy.

We spent $63 billion on illegal drugs in 2000. What did we spend to control of the drug trade and drug consumption? We answer this question next using a time series on federal expenditures and a single year of state-level expenditures; state data are not routinely collected.

Now, reaching the end, we present data on alcohol and tobacco, the "legal" drugs, and try to see which category produces the most harm — and the most activity on the part of the Justice System. In the last panel, we try to summarize the role that illegal drugs play in the context of the total crime-control system of the U.S.