NCJ Number
122263
Journal
U.S. News & World Report (March 5, 1990) Pages: 24-26
Date Published
1990
Length
3 pages
Annotation
Government surveys of drug use in the United States are misleading because they do not adequately count population groups most likely to use cocaine regularly (homeless, heroin addicts, school dropouts, and prisoners).
Abstract
According to research conducted by a visiting fellow at the National Institute of Justice, there may be twice as many frequent cocaine users in the United States as national surveys indicate. He projects from urinalysis tests of arrestees that as many as 1.3 million Americans arrested in the nation's 61 largest cities use crack or cocaine on a weekly basis, well above the official 862,000 weekly figure projected by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) for all U.S. households. In contrast to the NIDA polling approach, the research fellow's numbers are drawn from a 21-city Justice Department pilot program know as the Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) system. DUF tests of more than 10,000 male arrestees show that, while cocaine consumption may have decreased in middle and working class households, crack use has exploded in the inner city criminal class. Moreover, as crack and cocaine have lost some of their luster as a glamour drug, some criminologists contend that people are less willing to acknowledge use. In addition, while many employees and job applicants face drug testing in the workplace, only a small proportion of arrestees, prisoners, parolees, or those out on bail are required to submit to urinalyses as a condition of release. The consequence is that Federal and local officials need to concentrate more on testing and treating criminal cocaine users.