Over at reason.com, Mike Riggs details an exchange he had with the communications director for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy about this report correlating drugs and crime.

In short, the ONDCP released the study—which particularly highlighted how many arrestees had a history of marijuana use—but seems to have omitted data it collected about alcohol use. When Riggs pointed that out and asked for the data, the ONDCP demurred and then fell silent.

From the post:

As for why it matters: Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske argued in a Thursday speech at the Urban Institute that the ADAM II findings demonstrate why Americans must "come to grips with the link between crime and substance use," and "abandon simplistic bumper-sticker approaches, such as boiling the issue down to a ‘war on drugs’ or outright legalization.” Kerlikowske also singled out pot for criticism because a majority of arrestees tested positive for, or admitted to, using marijuana.

I have no idea why the ONDCP withheld alcohol data from its report, but the obvious answer is that alcohol has a higher criminal cost and is probably more prevalent among arrestees than illicit drugs. Yet admitting as much in the ADAM II report would have precluded Kerlikowske and the ONDCP from making its bogus "link" argument about marijuana and other illegal drugs.

Regardless of why the ONDCP admitted alcohol data, for transparency's sake they need to release it.

I suspect it would surprise exactly zero people to see a correlation between alcohol and crime, but eliminating an inconvenient dataset—if that's indeed what happened—is never a strong way to make the case for prohibition. Or anything else.