This is hilarious. Front page of ABCNews.com:

Study Finds Drug Abuse by 10 Percent of U.S. Adults

The researchers based their findings on interviews with 43,093 people in 2001 and 2002. They estimated 10.3 percent of U.S. adults abused drugs during their lifetimes, including 2.6 percent who become addicted.

Ten percent? Really?? I could have sworn the incidence of drug use in high school was waaay higher. And everybody knows that use = abuse. ^[1]

So I headed over to the Google.

Hm. Something isn't right. According to the CDC, 40% of teens have tried marijuana alone.

Now ...call me crazy but if we make the assumption that 100% of adults were once teens and factoring in the official government "drug use is abuse" party line then ...at least four out of every ten adults are or were drug abusers "during their lifetime."

Right?

See, our government can't be consistent and say 40% of Americans have abused drugs in their lifetime because it would become instantaneously and blindingly obvious that (a) drug use must not be so terrible (since society hasn't burned to the ground) or (b) "abuse" is immediately proven to be a meaningless fucking term.

Think about this for a moment; forty percent of the population. Two out of every five. More than one in three. If you've got two neighbors and they're not pill-snorting meth junkies, guess what?

YOU'RE IT.

So they just say "10% of adults." Sounds plausible. Sounds epidemic-ish. And most importantly, keeps the middle class worried enough to keep funneling $20,000,000,000 (that's "billion" if you lose count) into the anti-drug law enforcement cartel.

Besides, nobody has a fucking memory in this country. Dick Cheney, to this very day, continues to claim that Saddam Hussein had WMD and something to do with 9/11.

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^[1] To cite just a single example, The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA, a government organization and a branch of the National Institutes of Health), publishes a "research report" on "marijuana abuse." The word "abuse" appears 22 times (excluding domain names, citations, etc.) over a whopping eight pages. Use is never distinguished from "abuse" and despite having a glossary, "abuse" is never defined.

^[2] From the U.S. Department of Agriculture website (no, seriously): For the government, any use at all of an illegal drug or misuse of a legal drug is drug abuse.