The Bush administration continues to cite successes in cutting overseas drug production and intercepting shipments bound for the U.S., but experts say illicit drugs are as available as ever on American streets, Reuters reported March 7.

The latest reports from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) and the State Department point to record seizures of cocaine and crop eradication in Colombia as signs of progress. "Overseas counterdrug efforts have slowly constricted the pipeline that brings cocaine to the United States," the ONDCP stated in the National Drug Control Strategy.

Similar pronouncements about progress in the drug war have been issued by U.S. governments since the Nixon administration, which in 1973 declared that the nation had "turned the corner" on addiction and drug use. In 1990, then drug czar William Bennett said that the U.S. was "on the road to victory" over drug abuse. This year, ONDCP pointed to a short-term increase in cocaine prices as evidence of success.

But Americans -- just 4.5 percent of the world population -- consume up to 60 percent of the world's illicit drugs. Drugs are more available than they were in at the height of the drug war, and cheaper, too. "The price decline began in 1979 and the downward trend has been steady," said Mark Kleiman, director of the drug policy program at UCLA. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in cities like Los Angeles and Miami said they have not noticed any major shifts in cocaine prices.

"In the drug war, numbers are routinely used to justify policy. Healthy skepticism is in order," said John Walsh of the Washington Office on Latin America. Criticism of drug-war statistics has also come from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

Anne Patterson, the head of the State Department's Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, recently defended interdiction and crop-spraying programs despite the easy availability of drugs on U.S. streets. "If we weren't doing these programs, the situation would be very dramatically worse," she told Congress.