DRUG ABUSEcrops and related programs have been encour-
aged in Peru and Columbia.
Since 1930, the U.S. Treasury Department has
had responsibility for drug regulation in the Unit-
ed States. In 1973, the Drug Enforcement Admin-
istration of the Justice Department assumed the
police and control function under federal law.
Each state has laws that generally parallel the
federal laws on possession and distribution of
controlled substances and all states have a single
state agency that coordinates other programs re-
lated to drug abuse.
Regular or frequent drug users, without out-
side income, are likely to engage in a range of
criminal activities in order to buy controlled sub-
stances. They typically engage in six times more
criminal activity when using than when they are
not using drugs. Urine testing of arrestees, under
the federal Arrestees Drug Abuse Monitoring pro-
gram, indicates that some two-thirds of those ar-
rested in urban communities had used an illicit
substance prior to arrest. It is, thus, not surprising
that the rates of street crimes tend to be positively
correlated with the number of illegal drug users in
a community.
During the last fifteen years, both state and
federal prison populations have experienced a
massive increase due to the number of people
convicted and jailed for selling or using drugs.
Other developments contributing to the surge in
the prison population include aggressive enforce-
ment, longer sentences, the decline of parole, and
mandatory sentencing procedures that provide
less latitude for judges. Thus, for example, federal
penalties for possession of crack, a rock-like form
of cocaine that became popular in the 1980s and
sells for a low price on the street, are 100 times
greater than for powdered cocaine. Sellers targeting
crack to urban minorities represent one of several
factors that have led to a disproportionate number
of young blacks in federal and state prisons, for
violation of possession laws. Ninety percent of
prisoners in federal prisons for crack violations
are black, although twice as many whites as
blacks use it.
Survey and other data consistently report that
the use of mood-modifying drugs is distributed
among all the socioeconomic and ethnic groups in
the United States; nevertheless, arrests, convic-
tions, deaths, and other negative outcomes of
drug use are disproportionately concentrated in
specific geographic areas and population sub-
groups. In state prisons, blacks make up some 60
percent of the drug-law violators although they
represent 12 percent of the country’s population
and 15 percent of regular drug users. Selective
enforcement of the laws might reasonably be con-
sidered a possible contributor to such statistics.American attitudes toward drug use have his-
torically reflected ethnic and class-related preju-
dices. Thus, earlier in the twentieth century, nega-
tive attitudes toward cocaine were associated with
the hostility that Southern blacks, among whom
cocaine use was thought to be widespread, were
believed to harbor toward whites. The public’s
suspicion of Chinese immigrants was a reflection
of their use of opium. A number of stereotypes
about marijuana reflected beliefs about its use by
Mexican immigrants and some occupations that
had low status at the time, such as jazz musicians.For members of both majority and minority
groups sentenced to prison, recidivism rates are
high and represent one reason that the United
States has higher rates of incarceration (approach-
ing two million) than any industrialized nation.
Although treatment of former drug users in pris-
on settings has produced some promising results,
treatment opportunities in prison are scarce and
have not kept pace with the growth in the popula-
tion of incarcerated former users. Approximately
one in eight state inmates and one in ten federal
inmates have taken part in treatment since their
admission to prison. On a limited basis, treatment
is being offered in an effort to keep offenders
from returning to prison.TREATMENTThe treatment of substance abuse has consistently
been a lower priority than efforts to control drug
abuse through interdiction and criminal sanctions,
although cost-benefit studies have demonstrated
that every dollar invested in treatment saves seven
dollars in other costs. The federal government has
usually spent more than two-thirds of its substance
abuse budget (which now totals nearly $20 billion)
on such supply-reduction and criminal justice sys-
tem strategies. Only a small minority of drug
abusers have access to treatment, since health