The Drug Czar's Legacy of Failure, by the Numbers

Two new reports by public policy expert Jon Gettman, a senior fellow at George Mason University, highlight the ineptitude of U.S. marijuana policy during the Bush Administration.

The reports – one analyzing marijuana use rate statistics and the other examining the explosion in court-ordered marijuana treatment admissions – directly contradict the White House drug czar's office's frequent claims of success in reducing marijuana use rates.

There's little question that this administration's Office of National Drug Control Policy has spent its tenure consumed with a singular obsession with marijuana and marijuana users, but the breadth of their failure to make any meaningful impact in this area is stunning.

The drug czar, John Walters, likes to claim that teen marijuana use rates have declined 25 percent under his watch – which, lo and behold, is exactly the benchmark his office set in 2002 – but it simply doesn't hold up, as Gettman's analysis shows.

If you look at overall marijuana use rates, you see that the number of monthly marijuana users barely even budged from 14.6 million users in 2002 to 14.5 million users in 2007. In other words, Walters created 127 separate anti-marijuana TV, radio and print ads, 34 marijuana-focused press releases, 50 reports detailing the dangers of marijuana – while marijuana arrests ratcheted from 697,000 in 2002 to 872,000 in 2007 – and all us taxpayers have to show for it is a tiny decline in frequent marijuana users.

Gettman's second report examines the startling rise in marijuana treatment admissions – a trend the drug czar frequently points to as evidence that contemporary marijuana is dramatically different and magnitudes more dangerous than the comparatively harmless stuff baby boomers enjoyed in their youths.

Again, Gettman's analysis proves what most of us suspected – the drug czar's claim is nonsense. There has been a marked jump in marijuana treatment admissions over the past 15 years or so, but it has been fueled almost entirely by referrals from the criminal justice system. In fact, only 45 percent of these admissions even met the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) criteria for marijuana dependence. Marijuana users, presented with a choice between jail or treatment, logically choose treatment, and then the drug czar turns around and uses that as evidence that marijuana is prohibitively dangerous. But these folks never had a problem with marijuana. They had a problem with getting arrested for marijuana.

For those who follow marijuana policy reform closely, Gettman's conclusions may not be so earth shattering – there's already a general consensus among experts that the Office of National Drug Control Policy operates in a realm divorced from reality. The significance of Gettman's contribution here is in quantifying the failures of this administration's marijuana policies. Thanks to a heated culture war and an inattentive press, this drug czar got away with a lot of this nonsense, but his replacement should take note: Americans are sick of this war on marijuana users, and they're sick of the tortured logic, manipulated statistics and bald-faced lies used to justify it.

The next drug czar will be held accountable for her actions; Gettman's work offers a blueprint for how we should judge her success.