Just the facts, fellas.

ERNEST VAN DEN HAAG seems to have some ideas about how to stop drug abuse. He wants to throw users of drugs into jail. If that represents the social ideas of an expert on social policy, I will stick with my approach.

1. I bring tobacco into the controversy simply to underline the duplicity and confusion that is everywhere on policy issues concerning drug abuse. In fact, tobacco is vastly more lethal than crack. Fifty million Americans smoke and four hundred thousand each year die tobacco-related deaths. Five hundred thousand use crack and a few hundred die crack-related deaths. (The crack-related figure is in fact overestimated because it is counted as a "related" death if cocaine was found in the blood. In most cases, it is another drug used in combination with crack that causes the death.) Thus, one out of every hundred or so smokers dies a tobacco-related death. One out of every 2,500 crack users dies. All of this is to put the crack problem in perspective and not to deny the seriousness of drug abuse in any way.

2. The crack-crime equation always elicits strong feelings. The simple facts are that the majority of criminals used to test positive for alcohol or heroin or marijuana when committing crimes. Now many of them have switched to cocaine. Yet, overall, crime statistics show rates of personal victimization haven't changed over the past ten years. 3. There are studies in the literature that report how casual cocaine users actively seek not to be exposed to crack because of their belief that crack use would put them on a slippery slope to addiction (e.g., British Journal of Addiction, 1989). 4. Mr. van den Haag misquotes me. I said there was a base rate of abuse, not a base rate of consumption. Consumption levels vary with age, socioeconomic status, and a variety of other factors. Being exposed to drugs and even using them irregularly is one thing. Abusing them is another. Consumption rates are hard to predict but abuse rates are fairly constant.

5. Again, Mr. van den Haag can't keep his concepts straight and can't seem to grasp the point of the Vietnam study. What Dr. Lee Robins showed in that study was that over 90 per cent of returning soldiers who had tested positive for drugs gave up drug use voluntarily. In several breakdowns of her data that took into account religion, ethnic origin, residency, and other variables, Dr. Robins demonstrates that none of these factors predicted whether or not soldiers would drop their Vietnam habit. If ease of acquiring drugs were an issue, as Mr. van den Haag suggests, data from blacks versus whites and large urban areas versus rural areas would predict different rates of continued use. Dr. Robins showed the rates were essentially identical. Additionally, those opposed to legalization simply refuse to consider data that suggest that legalization could coincide with consumption rates dropping. This has been shown to be the case in the Netherlands, where marijuana is now legal. It has also been shown that consumption rates for marijuana have dropped in the 11 U.S. states that have decriminalized its possession. As for Dr. Gold, his concern that crack is more addictive as the result of his experience on his 800-COCAINE line is moving but unrelated to my point. There are no scientific data that crack is more addictive. Dr. Shigla Murphy, who is carrying out a NIDA-sponsored research project in Oakland, maintains that the stereotype is incorrect. Just as many people walk away from crack as from other drugs, she finds. It is likely that self-reports from callers to a helping agency represent a distorted sample. Those who walked away from their crack experience are not calling 800-COCAINE. I am not quite sure what Dr Gold's third point might be. In general, those suggesting legalization are in no way condoning the consumption or misuse of drugs. All drugs from aspirin to morphine, from caffeine to crack, from valium to alcohol can cause serious damage to the body. Knowledge of these things finds most people using drugs of all kinds in moderation. Adult Americans are free to go down and buy alcohol in any quantity and to abuse this powerful drug. The vast majority of them do not. And that is a drug that is promoted through the national media.

Dr. Gold does reveal a nasty little secret: that there is no treatment for many if not most kinds of addictions. Observers of the drug scene have wondered what more money for treatment means. One answer has recently come from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It is lacing some of its $27 million in grants to cities with drug problems into creating jobs. It may be right. As I pointed out in my interview, drug use is three times as high among the unemployed as among the employed. Indeed, the steady drop in drug use over the last few years perfectly tracks the lowering rate of unemployment. This is a correlational observation, to be sure, the kind that runs rampant in social-policy discussions such as these. But it just may serve to remind all of us that we are all grasping at meager data. What is really needed is a serious national commission composed of trained scientists to examine this issue in full. If the government won't sponsor such an effort, perhaps the private sector should. Drugs use and abuse is too important an issue to be resolved with polemics.