Nation IN BRIEF : MASSACHUSETTS : Arrests Up, Drug Use Falls, ABA Told

More people are being jailed for drug offenses at a time when drug use is decreasing and other violent crimes are on the rise, and the “criminal justice system in this country is on a fast track to collapse,” a meeting of the American Bar Assn. was told. Neal Sonnett, chairman of the ABA’s criminal justice section, told the Boston meeting it would be wrong to attribute the decline in drug use to increasing arrests and imprisonment. Instead, he said, public education has made drug use less socially acceptable. Alfred Blumstein, dean of public policy and management at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, said in an interview earlier in the weekend that statistics have shown that cocaine use peaked in 1982 and has since been dropping.