Informing America's Policy on Illegal Drugs What We Don't Know Keeps Hurting Us (2001) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-12
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It is little wonder, then, that Americans have turned to public officials at all levels local, state, and federal to reduce illegal drug use and mitigate its effects. The most recent figures available from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP)
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Office of National Drug Control Policy, the National Research Council established the Committee on Data and Research for Policy on Illegal Drugs. The committee was given the charge to: 1.
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It may seem that the accuracy of estimates of the prices of illegal drugs is a technical concern of importance only to a small community of researchers. But accurate drug price data are critical for measuring the success of enforcement policy, a primary aim of which is to increase the retail price
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Until accurate price data are constructed, the nation will be poorly informed about long-term trends and short-term fluctuations in prices of illegal drugs, about the magnitude of expenditures on illegal drugs, and about the efficacy of interventions. In the committee's view, planning activities for better data and research on drug consumption and drug prices could be begun immediately and implemented as soon as a suitable infrastructure and level of funding is in place.
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While answers to these questions will not come easily, it is the committee's judgment that systems research has potential to inform supply-reduction policy and should therefore be fortified with research support. The committee recommends that the Office of National Drug Control Policy should encourage research agencies to develop a sustained program of information gathering and empirical research aiming to discover how drug production, transport, and distribution respond to interdiction and domestic enforcement activities.
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Therefore, in order to facilitate collection of better drug enforcement data and the implementation of a strong research program, the committee recommends that the National Institute of Justice, the National Science Foundation, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics should be assigned joint responsibility and given the necessary funding to build the scientific infrastructure for research on illegal drug markets and the effects of drug control interventions. The suggested organization takes advantage of the specific expertise of the National Institute of Justice in law enforcement research, the statistical expertise of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and of the specific expertise of the National Science Foundation in economic research.
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, are national surveys based on probability samples of known populations, respectively: people who live in households and people who attend schools. The two other data systems sample events rather than people: arrests in the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring program (ADAM)
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In the committee's judgment, these data must be made available to the broader research and policy community. The committee recommends that the Office of National Drug Control Policy and the granting agency (currently the National Institute on Drug Abuse)
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effects of the entire spectrum of plausible approaches to prevention proposed or in use, rather than those that are most easily evaluated; (2) effects of drug prevention programs implemented under conditions of normal practice, outside the boundaries of the initial tightly controlled experimental tests of program efficacy under optimal conditions; (3)
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Upgrading collection efforts in existing agencies and consolidation of data collection are essential tasks for improving the scope and quality of data on illegal drugs. Unless these organizational goals are achieved, the
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Our final recommendation therefore concerns the need for leadership in organizational improvements and reorganization. The committee recommends that the Office of National Drug Control Policy place organizational improvements for data high on its agenda in the immediate future.
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