The drug czar's high math: how phony statistics about cocaine prices hide the truth about the war on drugs.

• Author: Grim, Ryan
• Position: John Walters

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JOHN WALTERS HAD some data he wanted to make public, but he also had a credibility problem. Just two years earlier, in 2005, Walters, the country's drug czar, had cited a hike in the price of cocaine as a battlefield victory in the war on drugs--only to see the price fall just as he was touting the increase. He was ridiculed in some quarters of the press; others decided to stop listening to him.

This time around, in the summer of 2007, Walters went looking for the most receptive audience he could find. So he zipped down New York Avenue to the headquarters of The Washington Times, the conservative daily based in the outskirts of Washington, D.C. Walters, according to a staffer present at the briefing, came with a small staff and a stack of glossy pages making the case that the United States had turned a corner in the war on drugs. Prices for cocaine, he said, were rising fast. And that, he explained, can only mean a decline in supply.

The Times wouldn't bite. The data were suspiciously thin. Waiters' numbers showing the increased price of cocaine began in 2007. The best comparison data, which he didn't have with him but could be found online, dated back to the first half of 2003, when the RAND Corporation gathered information for a comprehensive report. The drug czar had sat on the RAND report for a full year after it was completed in 2004 because it showed prices trending downward. The RAND study was also transparent about its methodology, whereas the new numbers Waiters was touting, covering the period afterward, came with no explanation of how they were concocted.

Walters finally found a platform one month later in USA Today. Soon the story The Washington Times wouldn't touch was all over the news. Thanks to the drug czar's cherry-picked statistics, newspapers were crowing that America was winning the war on cocaine, particularly the effort to suppress production in Latin America.

While Walters was shopping his numbers around, I was in the middle of researching my book on the history of drug trends, This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America. So I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get whatever data Walters had left out of his presentation. I also asked for information on the methodology and analysis. My request was rejected, even though some of what I was asking for had already been given to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who had repeatedly asked for the data. The Department of Justice, where the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is located, explained in denying my request that there was no "public benefit" to disclosing what I had asked for.

Fortunately, the Obama administration disagreed. When Edward Jurith became acting director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) in January, he quietly released the report that Walters had been keeping to himself, posting it on the ONDCP's website. John Walsh of the left-leaning Washington Office on Latin America first wrote about the new...