The cost of the war amounted to approximately $11 billion in the 1991 budget. Despite the Bush administration's claims of the success of the war on drugs through the use of polls, the war to drugs and the resulting policy of repression have been a failure. These surveys in which people volunteered information about drug use were not an ideal way to gather accurate information.12 Indeed, the emergence of contrary information clashed with these claims. Based on objective data in 1990, Senor Joseph Biden's Judiciary Committee found that cocaine-related deaths had increased 10% since 1988; even occasional cocaine use by “hardcore drug users” increased by 15%.13 According to the National Household Survey, the population of daily cocaine users rose from 292,000 in 1988 to 336,000 just two years later. Drug-positive urine samples, according to Washington D.C. police, went from 10 percent in October 1990 to 26 percent in July 1991. In just a few months between March and July, the heroin prison population increased from 7 to 17