In 2002, the Bush administration’s National Drug Control Strategy set a goal of reducing illegal drug use by 25 percent in five years. This was followed by an unprecedented campaign of persuasion (more than 100 different anti-drug advertisements and commercials) and law enforcement as the number of annual arrests for marijuana possession climbed above 700,000 — higher than ever before, and greater than the combined total for all violent crimes.

Now that the first five years’ results are available, the campaign can officially be called a failure, according to an analysis of federal drug-use surveys by Jon Gettman, a senior fellow at the George Mason University School of Public Policy. The prevalence of marijuana use (as measured by the portion of the population that reported using it in the previous month) declined by 6 percent, far short of the 25-percent goal, and that decline was partially offset by a slight increase in the use of other illicit drugs. As a result, the overall decline in drug use was less than 4 percent.

Dr. Gettman’s report was sponsored by the Marijuana Policy Project Foundation, a group opposed to current drug laws, but it draws on the same five years of federal drug-survey data used by John P. Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. When the data became available this year, the White House’s press release hailed the numbers as evidence of “tremendous progress” after five years, but the press release failed to mention the original goal of a 25-percent reduction in overall drug use. Instead, the White House highlighted reductions for specific drugs (like cocaine) and among specific groups (like teenagers).

Such selective press releases, Dr. Gettman told me, have been the norm for two decades because there’s been so little overall progress in the federal war on drugs. In 1991, he noted, the official National Drug Control Strategy’s goal was to reduce number of illicit drug users in America to 7.25 million within a decade. But a decade later, in 2002, the number was actually 19.5 million, and by last year it had risen to 19.9 million, Dr. Gettman said.

“If you look at the National Drug Control Strategy for any particular year,” he told me, “you’ll see it is written to convey the notion that we’re close enough, we’re getting acceptable results. Compare reports over five or six years, you get a different impression. Compare them over ten to fifteen years, and it is crystal clear the results are in no way acceptable.”

The latest results come after a five-year campaign that, by the count of the Marijuana Policy Project, involved at least 127 separate anti-marijuana TV, radio and print ads and 34 press releases focused mainly on marijuana, in addition to 50 reports from the White House drug office and other federal agencies on marijuana or anti-marijuana campaigns. The number of marijuana arrests set a record every year after 2003, exceeding 775,000 last year, and federal authorities also cracked down on clinics dispensing marijuana for medical purposes.

In its press release, the White House hailed the results of its anti-marijuana campaign by pointing to a trend among young people aged 12 to 17: “Current marijuana use among this age group declined from 8.2 percent in 2002 to 6.7 percent in 2007.” But how meaningful or permanent is that reduction, and how much it does have to do with the anti-marijuana campaign? As Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project notes, there was an even larger reduction in the rate of cigarette smoking — from 13 percent to 9.8 percent — among those same youths over the same five-year period, and there weren’t hundreds of thousands of people being arrested for tobacco possession every year.

Dr. Gettman said that the best long-term data on drug use by teenagers, from the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future Survey, gives little reason for encouragement. In 2007, the survey found that 14.2 percent of 10th-graders reported using marijuana in the previous month. That looks like an improvement when compared to the 18.7-percent rate in 1998, but not by comparison with the 8.7-percent rate in 1991.

“The dominant trend over the last 35 years,” Dr. Gettman said, “is that marijuana remains easy for teenagers to acquire, and this means the risk, from the perspective of concerned parents and educators, has remained unchanged for over a generation. Government has failed for over 35 years to prevent teenagers from having access to marijuana, and it consistently deflects responsibility for that failure through public relations campaigns that, at their core, attribute the problem to bad parenting.”