Drug Czar Distorts Facts To Malign Dutch Drug Policies

July 16, 1998, Washington, D.C.:

Statistics flaunted by Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey regarding alleged Dutch homicide and marijuana usage rates are purposely misleading and inaccurate, NORML Foundation Executive Director Allen St. Pierre charged today.

"It is unacceptable for a high ranking U.S. official to stoop to using such tactics to malign the Netherlands’ drug policies," St. Pierre said.

Earlier this week, McCaffrey claimed that the Dutch murder rate is more than twice that of America’s. He further purported that three times as many Dutch youth admit trying marijuana than do their U.S. counterparts. McCaffrey said that liberal drug policies were to blame for the higher Dutch figures.

In fact, however, both Dutch homicide rates and prevalence of youth marijuana use are far lower than those in America.

"There is a very disturbing trend of blatant misinformation coming from Barry McCraffrey, which seems to indicate that he is woefully uninformed about key parts of the very policy he is paid to represent and enforce," said David Borden of the Drug Reform Coordination Network, an Interet-based information center on drug policy.

McCaffrey also alleged that Dutch youth experiment with marijuana in greater numbers than U.S teens. However, 1996 data recorded by the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future project determined that 45 percent of America’s high school seniors admit they have tried marijuana. By comparison, research compiled by the National Institute of Health and Addiction in the Netherlands found that less than 21 percent of Dutch adolescents have experimented with the drug. McCaffrey falsely stated that only 9.1 percent of American teens had ever tried marijuana.

"The Dutch overwhelmingly approve of their current marijuana policies," St. Pierre remarked. "Those policies seek to normalize rather than dramatize marijuana use, and separate marijuana users from the hard drug market. If McCaffrey believes that America’s marijuana policy of arresting and jailing more than 12 million users since 1965 is more effective than the Netherlands’, then he should find no need to distort the facts and lie to the American people."