re we re winning the war on drugs not kennejs a cs okstate edu kennedy james scot writes the chart that follows was taken from the wednesday april issue of usa today drug use up among u s eigth graders by mike snider p d adolescents choices drugs used by eighth graders in the last month estimated per students pct chg alcohol cigarettes marijuana amphetamines lsd cocaine crack source university of michigan institute for social research report we are not winning the war on drugs i think you can see that one of the tactics that the dea employs to give people the impression that the war on drugs is being won is to selectively quote statistics only statistics that support their contention that drug use has gone down the excerpt from time magazine that i included in this post is an excellent example of how organizations like the dea attempt to deceive the public unfortunately there s not much we can learn from the statistics presented here either due to rounding the est for lsd could be anywhere from to and the est could be anywhere from to this means that the actual change if you believe these statistics in the first place was anywhere from to similarly the increase in cocaine use could be anywhere from to and the increase of crack use could be anywhere from to this doesn t even take into account the margin of error which isn t provided here this does not mean that the rest of the argument you present is unfounded but it does mean that usa today has not surprisingly provided us with virtually no information
