2 Studies Differ Sharply on Drug Abuse

Researchers working for the Bush Administration called thousands of Americans during the spring and asked: Would you be willing to talk about your use of illegal drugs?

Researchers employed by Senate Democrats tried to answer similar questions about drug use by zeroing in on persons who were arrested and tested for drugs in jail, and those being admitted to drug treatment centers.

Not surprisingly, the two sets of analysis portray two different pictures of drug abuse in America.

President Bush, reporting on his Administration’s latest survey, said Wednesday it contained “wonderful and welcome news.” Far fewer Americans are using drugs of any kind, concluded the report by the National Institute of Drug Abuse.

The Senate Judiciary Committee said its study painted a much bleaker picture, concluding there are about 2.4 million regular cocaine users--four times the estimate in the NIDA survey.

While Bush and his advisers portrayed the drug problem as bad but getting better, Democrats stressed the problem was bad and remains so. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, charged that the Administration’s estimate of the number of regular cocaine users was “wildly off the mark” because its household survey leaves out the homeless and those whose home is prison or a drug treatment center.

Still, both sides in this battle of drug studies agree on an overall conclusion: Casual drug use is waning in middle America, but cocaine and crack still have a grip on the inner-city.

“You may see declines in drug use in places like Scarsdale, but not in East Harlem,” said Mitchell S. Rosenthal, president of the New York-based Phoenix House, a private drug treatment center.

Every other year since 1972, the NIDA has asked a statistical sample about their drug use. Those surveyed are interviewed at home and asked to fill out a confidential report. Some 9,259 persons were interviewed this year.

The biennial household survey reported a rising tide of marijuana and cocaine use through 1979 and a steady decline since then. When the White House declared a “War on Drugs” in the late 1980s, drug abuse already was on the way down in much of the nation, according to the NIDA surveys.

The Health and Human Services press release that reported the latest survey results highlighted “a dramatic 45% drop in ‘current’ cocaine use.” This means, according to the data, that an estimated 15 of every 1,000 persons surveyed admitted in 1988 to having used cocaine within the last month, while only 8 of 1,000 said the same this year.

The Senate panel, which came up with higher numbers, drew much of its data from tests of arrested persons in the major cities, as well as tallies of those admitted to drug treatment centers.

The panel and many drug experts say they believe illegal drug use has declined, but not to the extent that the NIDA survey suggests.

“As society has become more intolerant of drug use, fewer people are going to talk about their drug use to a researcher who knocks on their door,” said Eric Wish, director of the Center for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland. “We just don’t know how much of this decline is really a decline in people’s willingness to report their drug use.”

Ronald Klain, counsel for the Judiciary Committee, said that the NIDA survey is “flawed and misleading. About one-fifth of the sample refused to talk, and they didn’t talk to the people who are most likely to be addicts.”

Charles R. Schuster, the NIDA’s director, acknowledged that the household survey does not count the homeless or those in prison and other institutions, including college dormitories. “But it does measure 98% of the population in the United States 12 years of age and older,” he said.

Schuster estimated that as many as half of the 1.5 million persons now in prison may be drug users and a significant proportion of those are crack users. “So the numbers that we are getting for crack cocaine use are obviously an underestimate . . . “ he conceded.

But Schuster and other HHS officials defended the household survey as an accurate measure of trends.

Staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.