Source: Independent on Sunday Contact: http://www.independent.co.uk/ Pubdate: Sun, 19 Apr 1998 Author: John Carlin AMERICANS PREFER SMACK TO CRACK THE PRECISE figures for drug use in the United States are notoriously unreliable but the overall trend during the Nineties indicates convincingly that cocaine use, especially in the form of crack cocaine, is down and heroin use is up. The statistical difficulties emerge from the fact that data on drug use is collected by more than 50 government bodies, many of them employing different criteria to evaluate their findings, and often to extrapolate them. Some base their conclusions on questionnaires, some on arrest figures, some on hospital admissions, some on urine samples taken from jail inmates. All figures vary depending on geographical region. Taking this ample proviso into account, all findings indicate that the number of drug users in America has declined by half since the late Seventies, down from about 25 million to 13 million. According to figures compiled by the Department of Health and Human services the number of people who use cocaine, which includes crack, fell from a 1985 peak of 5.7 million to 1.4 million in 1994. The figures since have remained stable, although regional breakdowns show decreases in big north-eastern urban centres like New York and increases in smaller Southern cities like Birmingham, Alabama. Heroin, by contrast, has increased significantly in popularity during the Nineties at a rate comparable to what government officials call the epidemic of the late Sixties. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration's figures, which tend to tally in general terms with those of other government bodies, heroin use has more than doubled in America since 1990. The DEA's conclusion is based on hospital emergency room admissions for heroin users, which rose from 33,052 in 1990 to 74,714 in 1995 and appears to be continuing to climb. Donna Shalala, the Health and Human Services secretary, said last August that heroin use had been climbing steadily for three successive years, the biggest increases being noted among those who smoked or snorted the drug rather than those who favour the traditional method of intravenous injection. She said a growing number of teenagers were trying heroin for the first time. The actual number of people who use cocaine remains significantly higher than the number who use heroin, possibly by a factor of five judging from hospital and police figures. But the trend away from cocaine and towards heroin remains clear. Why? If the statistics are elusive, assessing the complex combination of factors that make up the shadowy drug market - from cultivation in South America to consumption in America's inner cities and middle-class suburbs - remains a matter of informed speculation. Barry McCaffrey, the White House drugs tsar, patted himself on the back after coming up with figures last year suggesting a 6 per cent decline from 1995 to 1996 in overall drug use. "The reasons for this apparent turn-around involve everyone in America - parents, teachers, coaches, religious leaders and community coalitions," General McCaffrey said. He might have noted that the US has quadrupled its spending on combating drugs in the past decade and that where the effect has been most noted, possibly due in part to some measure of collaboration with the governments of Colombia and Bolivia where previously there was none, has been with cocaine. Which, in turn, could suggest that the drug mafias have chosen to diversify to some degree, turning their energies more to the heroin market. One significant statistic provided by the DEA shows that whereas five years ago 65 per cent of the heroin used in the United States came from the traditional Latin American cocaine exporters, today the figure stands at 95 per cent. Right now the biggest cause of concern for the US government, however, is the spectacular increase in marijuana use, in particular among young people. In the 12 to 17 age group marijuana use has more than doubled since 1991.