More Fun With Numbers at ONDCP

ONDCP Director John Walters and his gang were busted by the recent publication of Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics which details, among other things, how the ONDCP deliberately and improperly juggles numbers to put a positive spin on its effectiveness as a government agency.

Now, even with Walters’ amateur-league fraud exposed, the ONDCP is at it again with its latest glowing report of victory on the drug war front. And once again, they justify an ephemeral success with a series of dubious claims that focus on insignificant background noise in their data.

The situation is bizarre and pathetic at the same time. It’s as if the ENRON crooks kept stealing after their arrest simply because they knew they were headed to jail, anyway.

We’re not just talking about incompetence, here. The actions of John Walters and his fellow clowns at the ONDCP make them appear to be suffering from some kind of latent personality disorder—the type of disorder that gets people sent to jail.

If truth means nothing to the ONDCP, then what does?

Giordano

Thank you, Giordano, for the opportunity to remind our readers that Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics is available as a gift for donating $32 or more to Stop the Drug War (DRCNet). Our donation page is here, and the Drug War Chronicle's review is here. - David

I just wanted the folks writing this article to know, on my own, I saw a quote in the news from some high up in ONDCP, something like "for every acre of marijuana grown, ten acres are damaged"

That quote sounded phony, for a number of reasons:

1, How can you define what is an acre of marijuana? I have never seen a growing site, but understand the plants are spread out. Unlike say a normal agricultural field, where corn would be planted as close as possible.

2. Except for possibly careless use of pesticides, herbicides, and maybe allowing erosion, why would the growers do anything to land around their site, ie, do more work than they have to?

3. Even if technically true that some surrounding land is effected, isn't it a deliberatey deceptive statistic, in the normal farmers, growing your food, cause erosion, and release pesticides, herbicides, and significant amounts of fertlizer into the environment?

So, I tried to get the stats from ONDCP. After a lot of back and forth, it turns out they just made it up.

They claimed it was an average from reports given by law enforcement people, raiding marijuana farms, like the big ones set up by organized crime, but when I tried to find out who had taken the reports from the various local cops, and DEA, and then come up with the report, there was no one at all.

Basically, it finally came down to an email (wish I had it now, it's on a hard drive which crashed) where they said, since they were just giving speeches, not doing anything more important than that, with the number, they could just take any wild guess they wanted.

They flat out made it up, but the top people used the figure in their propaganda pieces repeatedly.

I don't doubt the Mexican mafia don't give a crap about the environment, or for that matter their customers, (that is the real danger, of course, the people are smoking stuff loaded, not mostly with herbicides, but maybe fungicides, and certainly very large amounts of pesticides, that above all, and occassionally some large animal poisions, to kill rabbits, dear, mice)

So they are big liars, no doubt about it.

Remote areas of national parks are a good place to grow an illegal crop, so organized groups will do it, moving themselves and all this stuff in and out, trampling vegetation underfoot. One more thing to thank the war on drugs for.

The following commentary was published recently by AlterNet and is under consideration at at least one major newspaper:

http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/61842/
Spinning a Failed War on Drugs
By Bruce Mirken, AlterNet. Posted September 11, 2007.
It gets harder and harder for the government to try and convince people that we are winning the war on drugs, yet they keep trying.

Our government says we're winning the war on drugs. At a press conference to release results of the government's major annual drug use survey Sept. 6, both White House drug czar John Walters and Secretary of Health and Human Services Mike Leavitt said so, with Walters touting "fewer teens using drugs today."

Not quite. When you cut through the spin and look at the actual numbers, it's clear that Walters is again trying to fool the public -- much as Richard Nixon did back in 1972, when he first claimed we were "winning" the war on drugs.

While drug use rates reported in the just-released 2006 National Survey on Drug Use and Health are essentially unchanged from 2005, Walters and Leavitt touted declines in current teen use of illicit drugs since 2002, from 11.6 to 9.8 percent, and a parallel decline in current marijuana use from 8.2 to 6.7 percent.

That sounds impressive -- until you look at the long-term trends. If you go back another 10 years, to 1992, the rate of current teen use of illicit drugs was just 5.3 percent, and current marijuana use was at 3.4 percent. So while it edged down a bit in the last five years, teen drug use is actually nearly double what it was 15 years ago.

Walters and Co. have an explanation for this, of course. They say that the methodology of the survey was changed in 2002, so you can't compare earlier figures with recent ones. But that claim is shaky at best.

First, not all experts agree that the changes in the survey were enough to drastically alter the results. Second, another government-funded survey of teen drug use that hasn't changed its methodology, called Monitoring the Future, has documented strikingly similar trends.

In the 2006 Monitoring the Future survey, released last December, 16.8 percent of 10th-graders reported current use of at least one illicit drug -- a drop from 20.8 percent in 2002, but a substantial increase over the 11 percent rate in 1992. For marijuana, current use among 10th-graders soared from 8.1 percent in 1992 and 14.2 percent in 2006.

None of this stopped Leavitt from claiming, "The trends in general are very encouraging." Do these people not read their own data, or do they just think we're fools? The fact is that Walters and colleagues have squandered well over a billion of our tax dollars on a failed ad campaign, mostly aimed at demonizing marijuana, and are desperate to show some results. So they cherry-pick a few numbers that seem to make their case, and ignore the rest.

And before you buy Walters' frequent claim that "we took our eye off the ball" fighting drug abuse in the '90s, don't forget that between 1991 and 2000, marijuana arrests skyrocketed from 282,000 to 734,497.

But buried in the new NSDUH results are some fascinating and sometimes disturbing tidbits. The percentage of Americans who reported using illicit drugs in the past year or past month edged up slightly, and this increase was driven by jumps in use of some of the most dangerous drugs: cocaine, narcotic pain drugs, and stimulants (a category that includes methamphetamine).

While most of the changes were small and not statistically significant, those that were significant are alarming. For example, among 14- to 15-year-olds, past-month use of deadly inhalants rose significantly, as did past-month use of sedatives. This raises the disturbing possibility that scare campaigns focused on marijuana are driving kids to try drugs that are far more dangerous.

The drug czar will never admit it, but the long-term picture is clear: Our current drug policies don't work. The government's bizarre overemphasis on marijuana -- a drug that is beyond question safer than such legal drugs as alcohol and tobacco -- has had little effect on marijuana use, but may well be making our hard-drug problem worse.

It's long past time we had policy based on facts, not spin.

Bruce Mirken is communications director for the Marijuana Policy Project.