U.S. Drug Policy in the 1990s: Insights from New Data from Arrestees

Abstract

What has been overlooked in recent years, and what the new findings presented in this paper indicate, is that even as there has been a welcome and dramatic drop in middle-class and casual drug use in the United States, revealed by the National Household Survey and the High School Senior Survey, there remains a stubborn hard core of drug use in criminals. Data from the newly established Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) program suggest that the arrestee population contains many of the frequent users of cocaine in the United States. These arrestees are part of a deviant segment of the population having multiple behavioral, vocational, and educational deficits. The danger exists that as drug use declines in the middle class, this residual group of dysfunctional drug users will become a national scapegoat subject to extremely harsh societal reactions, or alternatively, be neglected and “written off” by the larger society. A more humane alternative is to take advantage of the access to these persons that the criminal justice system affords to address their drug use and associated problems. [Translations are provided; see International Abstracts at the end of this issue.]