Sep 03, 2008
drug war, law enforcement, ONDCP
As summer winds toward an end, it's time for the government's annual drug surveys to start coming out. The first, being released Sept. 4, is the biggest federally-sponsored drug use survey, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.
Typically this is followed a few weeks later by the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports -- not a drug survey per se, but the definitive annual accounting of marijuana arrests (which set yet another new record in the UCR report released last fall). Then, typically in December, comes Monitoring the Future, which focuses on use by adolescents.
With release of each report, federal officials miraculously find in the results evidence that their policies are working just fine, even when an honest look at the data shows they aren't. And the media often fail to be sufficiently skeptical of the official spin.
Will that happen this year? Watch this space for updates.