You're using 12th grade numbers. That's more than enough to account for any difference. >The reason for the discrepancy is that you're citing statistics from t

You're using 12th grade numbers. That's more than enough to account for any difference. >The reason for the discrepancy is that you're citing statistics from the BJS about drug users. That's quite different from usage rates of drugs within the general population. If the same percent of whites use drugs as blacks, then looking at how many drugs are used by each user (or how often each user uses them) matters. If each black user uses more than each white user, the total usage can be more. >Finally, you are quite literally begging the question[1] by citing the 1981 analysis (which is itself a rather contested one). Even if we take that data at face value, it concludes that black men understate the crimes they commit, and does so by comparing this to arrest records. The whole point is that arrest records provide a skewed perspective of drug usage for black men (and women), because they are far more likely to be arrested for the behaviors they do. I took that quote out of your jstor source. If you don't like it, use the one from SSC that I linked to: >Comparisons of several different surveys of drug use find that “nonreporting of drug use is twice as common among blacks and Hispanics as among whites” (Mensch and Kandel). (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2749113 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2749113) This can't be explained by bias in arrest records. Note that they're looking at how many people who admitted using drugs in 1980 denied ever using drugs in 1984.