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Hard-Core Cocaine Addicts: Measuring -- and Fighting -- The Epidemic

NCJ Number
126069
Date Published
1990
Length
44 pages
Annotation
This staff report of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary estimates that there are approximately 2.2 million hard-core cocaine addicts in this country and proposes a revision of current "War on Drugs" policies.
Abstract
To date, U.S. drug control strategies have been based on the assumption that there are only approximately 850,000 hard-core cocaine addicts. This figure was derived from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Household Survey. However, the NIDA survey is a self-report instrument. The Senate committee reviewed data from a wide range of sources including drug treatment admissions data in each State; FBI and National Institute of Justice information on arrests and arrestees; reports on drug abuse among the homeless from Federal, State, and local officials; and the research of several academic, private, and Government researchers. The 2.2 million figure derived from this research is nearly triple the estimate of NIDA. As a result, the Senate committee believes that many of the nation's current drug policies will not be effective. The committee proposes a 5-part national plan for fighting hard-core cocaine addiction. The plan derived from an earlier report includes: (1) providing emergency aid to hard-hit cities; (2) building new drug offender prisons; (3) opening more drug treatment centers; (4) boosting street-level law enforcement; and (5) researching medicines to treat drug addiction. 29 footnotes, 41 references, 7 tables, and 1 appendix.