NCJ Number
126069
Date Published
1990
Length
44 pages
Annotation
This staff report of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary estimates that there are approximately 2.2 million hard-core cocaine addicts in this country and proposes a revision of current "War on Drugs" policies.
Abstract
To date, U.S. drug control strategies have been based on the assumption that there are only approximately 850,000 hard-core cocaine addicts. This figure was derived from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Household Survey. However, the NIDA survey is a self-report instrument. The Senate committee reviewed data from a wide range of sources including drug treatment admissions data in each State; FBI and National Institute of Justice information on arrests and arrestees; reports on drug abuse among the homeless from Federal, State, and local officials; and the research of several academic, private, and Government researchers. The 2.2 million figure derived from this research is nearly triple the estimate of NIDA. As a result, the Senate committee believes that many of the nation's current drug policies will not be effective. The committee proposes a 5-part national plan for fighting hard-core cocaine addiction. The plan derived from an earlier report includes: (1) providing emergency aid to hard-hit cities; (2) building new drug offender prisons; (3) opening more drug treatment centers; (4) boosting street-level law enforcement; and (5) researching medicines to treat drug addiction. 29 footnotes, 41 references, 7 tables, and 1 appendix.