Lack of pride.

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: Data - Illegal drug use - Brief Article

When last year's Monitoring the Future Study found that illegal drug use was down among teenagers, the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) trumpeted the results as evidence that "when we push back against the drug problem, it gets smaller."

This exuberance contrasted with the official silence that had accompanied the results released a few months earlier from the 2003 PRIDE Survey, which found a marked upturn in drug use among adolescents.

The PRIDE findings included substantial increases in past-month pot smoking (from 4.7 percent to 7.1 percent) and heroin use (from 1 percent to 1.6 percent) among junior high school students. As the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) points out, the ONDCP's failure to comment...