NORML's Paul Armentano, writing today at LewRockwell.com, parses the recent SAMHSA drug-data report and finds -- shocker! -- that a government that thinks it can teach us math needs to go back to school itself. Not surprisingly, Armentano focuses the bulk of his analysis on the government's campaign against marijuana.

Interestingly, the lone figured touted by SAMHSA that appears to be based somewhat in reality is that 97 million Americans -- "more than 40 percent of the US population age 12 or older" -- have used marijuana during their lifetimes. (SAMHSA estimates the number of current marijuana users to be 14.6 million -- a figure that appears low, but not absurdly low when checked against annual marijuana arrest data and interdiction data.) Perhaps this is because most respondents, like many politicians, have fewer misgivings about admitting to past transgressions than they do divulging recent or current behavior. Or perhaps it's because marijuana consumption -- particularly past use of the drug -- carries far less of a social stigma than the use of other illicit substances.

Whatever the case, it is apparent that Americans clearly delineate between the use of marijuana and the use of more dangerous substances like cocaine and heroin, with roughly one out of every two Americans self-identifying as having used the former (so much for any "deterrent effect" of prohibition) versus only a fraction of the population -- though hardly as small a percentage as SAMHSA estimates -- ever likely having used the latter.

Read the whole article here. Also -- something that never occured to me until I saw Armentano's photo accompanying the article -- is that he has a doppelganger.