"Gen. McCaffrey sounds like a broken record. He insists that 'we are winning' our fight against drug abuse, but his scoreboard must be broken -- deaths are up, high school kids can get drugs more easily than ever, drug use by junior high kids has tripled, drug prices are at historic lows, drug purity is as high as ever, and we are still not treating most of the millions of addicts desperate for help. It is time for us to have the courage to do something different.

"The indices that Gen. McCaffrey are most proud of are the least important -- the declines in casual use of cocaine and marijuana. Casual drug users are not the cancer at the core of America's drug crisis.

"This week, Gen. McCaffrey will claim progress with declines in coca production in Peru and Bolivia, just as he did when he unveiled the 1999 strategy a year ago. But when he testified before a House subcommittee on August 6, 1999 he confessed, 'In Peru, the drug control situation is deteriorating . . . Peruvian coca prices have been rising since March 1998.' (Clifford Krauss, "Peru's Drug Successes Erode as Traffickers Adapt," The New York Times, Aug. 19, 1999).

"General McCaffrey is not being held accountable by the President, by the Congress, or by the news media.

"What are the important facts? Deaths from drugs have more than doubled since 1979, from 7,101 in 1979 to 15,973 in 1997 as reported in the latest strategy.

Why aren't we saving lives more effectively?

"Our policy is not keeping drugs out of the hands of kids. High school seniors report that heroin and marijuana are more available now than at almost any point since 1975. Marijuana was fairly easy or very easy to get for 90.4% of seniors in 1998, the highest point in history. Heroin was fairly easy or very easy to get for 35.6% of seniors, compared to 24.2% in 1975, and 18.9% in 1979, at the height of the modern drug epidemic. Availability of heroin to high school students has increased by 1/3 since the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 was passed, when it was 22.0%.

"Ecstasy availability has almost doubled since 1989 from 21.7%, to 38.2% in 1998. LSD availability is greater than at any point in the 1970s or 80s, and at 48.8%, is easily available to half our high school seniors. PCP availability is near record highs, at 30.7%.

"More kids in 8th grade -- junior high school -- report that they are using illegal drugs, according to the Monitoring the Future Survey. Use in the past 30 days of marijuana among 8th graders has tripled from 1991 to 1997, from 3.2% to 10.2%. Cocaine use almost tripled from 0.5% in 1991 to 1.4% in 1998. Use of LSD by 8th graders almost tripled from 0.6% in 1991 to 1.5% in 1997.

"In the streets, our policy is a failure. The street prices of heroin and cocaine are near historic lows. A pure gram of cocaine was $44 in 1998, down from $191 in 1981. Purity even for the smallest quantities has increased on average from 40% in 1981 to 71% in 1998. Heroin prices have fallen from $1200 per gram to $318 per gram, and heroin street purity has increased from 4.7% in 1981 to 24.5% in 1998. Traffickers are discounting the risks they face.

"High purity is sending more people to hospital emergency rooms -- the 1998 number of drug-related ER admissions was the greatest recorded.

"We are failing to help the people who are most hurt by drugs -- the addicts. The total number needing drug abuse treatment has grown from 8.9 million in 1991 to 9.3 million in 1996. The number of hard core addicts needing treatment has grown from 4.7 million in 1992 to 5.3 million in 1996. The are still 3 million untreated hard core addicts, more than in most of the 1990s.

"Gen. McCaffrey claims his strategy is based on hard data described in a 'Performance Measures of Effectiveness.' But his own documents reveal that there is no hard data there. Congress must look at the strategy in detail, not at the press releases.

"How long will we tolerate a strategy that openly concludes its policy is working because anti-drug spending is increasing? It is time for a completely different emphasis," concluded Sterling.

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Eric E. Sterling, an attorney, was counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee from 1979 to 1989, where he was principally responsible for anti-drug legislation and other anti-crime matters. Since 1989, he has been President of The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a non-profit center that promotes innovative solutions to criminal justice problems.