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CNN’s Lou Dobbs is out to revitalize the war on drugs, claiming in a recent commentary that we’ve “been in retreat” for three decades, and promising ongoing coverage of “a war that is inflicting even greater casualties than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan” on his show in the following week. Drug reporting often brings out the worst in the media – partial reporting, dodgy, context-free statistics, and moral posturing. So how did the “Dobberman” do?

Treatment over Getting Tough
In his introductory commentary, Dobbs berated the lack of effort put into treatment, which is astonishing given the cost-benefit ratio compiled by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which estimates “that for every dollar spent on addiction treatment programs, there is a $4 to $7 reduction in the cost of drug-related crimes. With some outpatient programs, total savings can exceed costs by a ratio of 12:1." But this is one of the few positive aspects in a series of segments titled “the war within” which seems composed of random statistics and hand-wringing. Here’s where we think Dobbs could have done better:

Overdose Deaths
Dobbs notes that the drug czar’s office has been claiming success due to recent declines in teenage marijuana use, but he claims that the real problem is an increase in overall overdose deaths, which nearly doubled between 1999 and 2004, going from 11,155 to 19,838.

Dobbs fails to mention that “drug war” efforts are focused not on reducing drug-related harm, such as overdose deaths, but on reducing drug use. Drug warriors actively oppose efforts that would make drugs less deadly, such as providing clean needles to fight the spread of AIDS and handing out antidotes to opioid overdoses, because they believe that doing so would encourage more kids to use drugs, despite a complete lack of scientific evidence to support that position.

Alcohol
Dobbs also went on the attack against teen drinking, citing a report by Columbia’s Center for the Study of Addiction and Substance Abuse which claimed that underage drinkers consume 20% of all alcohol sold in the U.S.  STATS (and many others) critiqued this report earlier (CASA originally claimed the figure was 25% and had to back down because of an embarrassing statistical miscalculation). Dobbs casts aspersions on the more accurate figure from the government (12.3%) by reporting that the beer industry provided it to them.

Marijuana
On another segment, the CNN host socked it to marijuana, claiming that it causes cancer and brain damage. Though he interviewed a researcher who has seen changes on brain scans of long-term heavy users, the show failed to point out that these scans cannot show causality: pre-existing brain damage could have caused the subjects to become heavy marijuana smokers rather than heavy marijuana smoking causing brain damage.  A recent study on children of alcoholics , for example, found that they had reduced brain growth before they ever touched a drop.

Also, it is very hard to determine what changes seen on brain scans mean. Learning can produce changes on brain scans, as can drugs or therapies that lift depression. “Change” on a brain scan does not always mean “damage,” and many types of changes linked with harm have been found to be reversible (such as shrinkage associated with depression). Research on marijuana and cognitive impairment produces a mixed picture, unlike that on sustained heavy alcohol use, which consistently finds lingering impairment.

And, contra Dobbs, the data on marijuana and lung cancer does not appear to support a connection. The kinds of studies which found a massive link between tobacco and lung cancer do not show the same connection with marijuana, probably because the amount of marijuana consumed by the average, or even heavy user, is far less than the amount of tobacco smoked by cigarette smokers.

Methadone
On his February 26 show, Dobbs covered methadone. He said it “is being called the largest growing drug problem in the country,” but he gave no source to back this claim up. (In fact, the 2005 Monitoring the Future survey found that just .8% of high school seniors reported having taken methadone in the last year, while 4.5% reported use of the prescription opioid, Vicodin during that period.)

He noted that methadone is being prescribed more frequently for pain, and that more people are dying of overdoses because doctors aren’t educated about proper dosing.

But he failed to mention why methadone use is rising in pain management, which is because doctors fear prescribing the last drug-warrior-targeted pain treatment:  Oxycontin. Oxycontin is actually a safer medication than methadone for most pain patients; but heightened federal scrutiny of Oxycontin prescription – and high profile prosecutions of pain doctors – has driven a switch to methadone, which is both cheaper and more difficult to prescribe safely for pain.

Dobbs also neglected to note that methadone treatment for addicts has not been linked to the rise in deaths; in fact, studies repeatedly find that among addicts, methadone prescription reduces death rates and also cuts crime. A drug isn’t simply “deadly” or “safe;” it’s deadly or safe in a particular context, just as water can both drown people and safe the lives of those dying of thirst.

Random Drug Testing for Schools
Another segment focused on a school that is reportedly having success reducing drug use by randomly testing students. Dobbs quoted critics of the policy, but he omitted mentioning that the most comprehensive study of the issue did not find that random drug testing was associated with reduced drug use.

 “We must commit ourselves as members of this great society to only one option in the War on Drugs, victory,” writes Dobbs in his commentary.

But this is a lousy metaphor, one that contains the seeds of defeat in its very formulation. By assuming that all drug use is necessarily problematic, it targets the wrong enemy: a powder or plant that only becomes harmful (or helpful) in the context in which it is used.

If we're to have a drug war, it needs to be a fight against drug-related harm-- one that rationally examines the evidence and seeks to save lives and protect people, rather than measuring success in amounts of substances seized and numbers of people incarcerated. Otherwise, the drug war will continue to be just as much of a money pit as the Iraq war: where faulty evidence and poor planning leads to disastrous and misguided strategies that harm those they were meant to help.