Thank you, Madam.
With respect to effectiveness, your first goal should be to save lives. The drug policy and the laws that carry out the drug policy should be about saving lives. In the United States, since 1980, the death rate from the use of illegal drugs has more than tripled. All of our efforts have been ineffective at saving lives.
The second goal should be to prevent injuries, to prevent people from going to hospital. Hospital emergency room admissions went up by 50% since the mid-1990s.
The third goal should be to keep drugs out of the hands of children. We do a survey every year called Monitoring the Future. We ask high school seniors, tenth graders and eighth graders, to tell us how easy they believe it would be for them to get various illegal drugs. We've been asking these questions since the 1970s, and unfortunately there's very little change. The changes are marginal. In some cases there is absolutely no change at all. The drugs remain widely available to young people, in their perception, year after year.
The fourth measure of effectiveness is in the marketplace. The goal of enforcement is to raise the price and lower the purity. In the United States, the price has gone down steadily and the purity has gone up. So the hard and fast marketplace test shows that we have not succeeded, that these policies have not succeeded in hurting the ability of drug traffickers to bring their product to market.
With respect to the first question and costs, I did a little bit of research about what the costs are for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. When the legislation was developed in 1986, our Congressional Budget Office estimated increased costs of $1.2 million in the first year, going up to $27 million within five years. The actual expenditures for the Bureau of Prisons have skyrocketed. Now, these are not adjusted for inflation. In 1986, when we enacted the mandatory minimums, the Federal Bureau of Prisons' expenditure was $862 million. It went up to $994 million the next year. Two years later, it was $1.2 billion; 1989, $1.4 billion; 1990, $1.7 billion; 1991, $2.1 billion. The President's request for fiscal 2010 is over $6 billion, and a large part of this has been driven by the mandatory minimums and how long they are in the United States.
I could not give you estimates about what the costs have been to the States, but as you take people out of the community and put them in prison, they're unable to support their families. One out of nine American men has a felony conviction, which means their ability to buy cars made in North America is reduced, their ability to buy houses made of lumber harvested in North America is reduced, their ability to buy furniture made from wood harvested in North America is reduced. They are a drag on our economy and they're a drag on the global economy, because they can't work, they can't get jobs, they can't support their families, they can't participate in the economy.
This is a cost that no other society in the world endures, by penalizing so many people.