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Drug czar reports drop in drug use
02.09.07|USA Today

Illegal drug use in the United States has dropped sharply since 2001 but abuse of prescription drugs remains a problem, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy said Friday. John Walters said that President Bush's anti-drug plan for 2007-08 is to reduce prescription drug abuse by 15% over three years. The administration ranks the problem second only to marijuana.
The plan singled out the pain reliever OxyContin as one of the prescription drugs most abused. It calls for more states to adopt prescription drug monitoring programs to prevent "doctor-shopping" to get prescriptions for more drugs.
Walters said overall use of illegal drugs among young people is down 23% from 2001, with 840,000 fewer teenagers using drugs now. He credited drug testing for much of the decline and urged its expansion in schools. He also said abuse among older people declined.
About 1,000 school districts carry out drug tests, which can trigger an intervention that keeps a young drug abuser from carrying the habit into adulthood, Walters said. Despite some concerns for invasion of privacy, he said, the United States will "look stupid in five or ten years if we don't do this."
Walters said the data came from a survey done at the University of Michigan for the National Institute For Substance Abuse. The report says about 19.7 million Americans reported using at least one illegal substance in the previous month.
In Washington, D.C, Bill Piper, director of affairs for the Drug Policy Alliance, called the strategy a "spin on the failure of the War on Drugs."
He said in a statement that despite incarcerating millions of Americans, drugs are as available as ever and the related harms of addiction, overdose, and the spread of disease continue to mount.
Piper said drug use rates are less important than whether the death, disease, crime and other suffering associated with abuse go up or down.