Informing America's Policy on Illegal Drugs What We Don't Know Keeps Hurting Us (2001) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 13-36
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Part I Introduction and Background
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Until the ~ 970s, enforcement of this comprehensive array of drug prohibitions was the predominant instrument of the nation's antidrug policy. What was called the law enforcement approach was generally understood as a relatively complete policy: drugs are dangerous to the social order.
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On the normative side, people in America vary in their moral judgment of drug use and in their concern with the collateral consequences of drug control activities. On the empirical side, people vary in their assessment of the effectiveness of the drug abuse prevention, drug treatment, domestic law enforcement, and foreign interdiction activities that have formed the elements of U.S.
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The committee's evaluation of the two studies was transmitted to the Office of National Drug Control Policy in April 1999 as its Phase I report, Assessment of Two Cost-Effectiveness Studies of Cocaine Control Policing The Executive Summary of the Phase I report, which describes the committee's main findings, is included in this volume as Appendix C CHANGING PERSPECTIVES ON DRUG CONTROL POLICY As a prelude to discussion of the scope and themes of the report, we think it helpful to review how the prevailing perspectives on drug control Points of view different from that of the committee regarding its Phase I Report are expressed in comments received from some of the authors of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA)
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Until the 1970s, enforcement of this comprehensive array of drug prohibitions was the predominant instrument of the nation's antidrug policy. What was called the law enforcement approach was generally understood as a relatively complete policy: drugs are dangerous to the social order.
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Supply-reduction strategies looked like law enforcement, and demand-reduction strategies looked like drug treatment. However, there were important differences in thinking about drug policy in terms of supply and demand rather than in terms of enforcement and treatment.
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Third, a new demand-reduction strategy, drug abuse prevention, assumed a more important place in thinking about drug policy. Of course, law enforcement already aimed to prevent drug use.
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For example, law enforcement may help treatment by putting pressure on drug users to seek and remain in treatment, or by providing a direct referral source for drug users who have not yet decided to volunteer for treatment. Drug treatment may help law enforcement succeed by providing a lower cost, more effective response to drug-using offenders than jail or prison, and by softening the harsh consequences of drug law enforcement that would otherwise apply.
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Moreover, as society has learned to see drug use in epidemic as well as endemic terms, people have begun to realize that the value of a particular policy instrument in a broader portfolio of drug control instruments may vary with time. At the early stage of an epidemic, it may be wise to combine drug abuse prevention activities with law enforcement so as to minimize its spread.
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From a legal perspective, it is useful to keep in mind that the legal status of addictive substances is not immutable; drug laws are made by and can be changed by society. All of these considerations notwithstanding, the committee made a pragmatic decision to focus its attention on the illegal drugs that are the targets of present-day drug control policy.
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The committee views accurate description of trends and cross-sectional patterns in drug use, prices, and other relevant variables as essential to informed development of drug control policy. Hence the committee decided not only to scrutinize the various data collection systems now in place but also to consider principles for regular collection of drugrelated data in the federal statistical system.
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As the committee went about its work, it found very different modes of research in use to evaluate different instruments of drug control policy. At one extreme, establishment of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the 1970s has fostered the development of a considerable body of research on drug treatment that has sought to adhere to the model of medical research.
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The escalation in domestic enforcement is manifest in an inventory of criminal justice processing facts: in 1998, 1.6 million people were arrested for drug offenses, 3 times as many as in 1980, and 289,000 drug offenders were incarcerated in state prisons, 12 times as many as in 1980 (23,900~. The benefits and costs of current law enforcement policy and the possibility of alternative strategies continue to be the subject of heated public debate.
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By 1999, federal funds alone for enforcement had increased to $12.3 billion, reflecting a near doubling in spending on domestic enforcement over 1991 levels, yet enforcement research funding remained essentially stable at $113.2 million (Office of National Drug Control Policy, 2000~.
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Office of National Drug Control Policy 2000 National Drug Control Strategy: Budget Summary February 2000. Washington, DC: U.S.
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