Snow Job : The demonization of cocaine

National Review, Sept 27, 1999 by Jacob Sullum

It's hard to say what percentage of current cocaine users are addicts, because surveys do not usually ask detailed enough questions, and they may exclude groups (such as the homeless) that are especially prone to abuse. But in a 1993 government-sponsored survey of young adults, only 7 percent of past-month cocaine users were daily users. By comparison, about 10 percent of past-month drinkers report heavy alcohol use (defined as five or more drinks in one session on five or more of the previous 30 days), and 5 to 10 percent of drinkers are said to be alcoholics.

Heavy use of cocaine can lead to paranoia, depression, social isolation, family disruption, financial difficulties, and problems at work. But heavy use is not the usual pattern, and the hazards of occasional use--in particular, the risk of sudden death--have been greatly exaggerated. "Both powder and crack cocaine can increase the workload of the heart and cause irregular heartbeats," note Andrew Weil and Winifred Rosen in their 1993 book From Chocolate to Morphine, "but deaths from cocaine are rare, and the body has a great capacity to metabolize and eliminate the drug from the system." In a 1989 Cato Institute paper, James Ostrowski put the annual death toll from cocaine at 4 per 100,000 users. The death rate for alcohol, based on an estimate by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is roughly 25 times as high.

So the one drug that George W. Bush has admitted to using is arguably quite a bit more "serious" than cocaine. Bush says he had such difficulty controlling his drinking that he has not touched a drop since his 40th birthday. If people thought rationally about drugs, they would be more troubled by that admission than by the possibility that he experimented with cocaine in his 20s. But that's a big "if."

Mr. Sullum, a syndicated columnist and a senior editor at Reason, is the author of For Your Own Good: The Anti-Smoking Crusade and the Tyranny of Public Health.