The NYT ran a terrific opinion piece this week about how the White House Drug Czar ignored an alarming spike in drug-induced fatalities last year, and instead gave himself a pat on the back for a marginal decline in teen drug use. Even worse, we’ve been addressing drug problems by focusing on the wrong people.

Few experts would have suspected that the biggest contributors to California’s drug abuse, death and injury toll are educated, middle-aged women living in the Central Valley and rural areas, while the fastest-declining, lowest-risk populations are urban black and Latino teenagers. Yet the index found exactly that. These are the sorts of trends we need to understand if we are to design effective policies.

The United States’ drug abuse crisis has exploded out of control. Scientifically designed strategies are urgently needed to target the manifest drug-caused damage that current policies are failing miserably to address.

And that was the end of the article. Without explaining what “effective policies” would look like, the conclusion falls somewhat flat.

If the government responds by spending more money only to locate the source of drug problems, it will simply add another line item to the budget of an already-overblown drug war that does little to mitigate drug abuse, but perpetuates repression of poor minorities.

Instead the government needs to fund programs that provide accurate drug-abuse information and treatment-on-demand in key communities (in this case, California’s rural and suburban women), and stop emphasizing the arrest, prosecution and incarceration young people-of-color in the inner city.