Oh, snap, look at you go with that rapier wit...
I've never heard a twelve-fold increase referred to as small, that's more an order of magnitude. Or, you know, maybe it's just a rounding error…
But hey, before I go back to lurking, I'll take a few minutes to explain to you why your quotes do not help to support your point.
According to the quotes you posted, the rate of people trying coke for the first time has continued to go up, but the overall usage of coke has gone down drastically. That's counterintuitive. More people using Y would usually mean more Y is being, but according to your posted information, that's not remotely the case. Maybe we should explore that a little more.
If the war on drugs is working, why do more people keep trying coke? Clearly fear of prosecution has not kept more and more people trying coke.
And yet overall use of cocaine has reduced drastically over some random undefined period according to your DEA link. While the number of people consuming is going up, the rate of consumption must be going down, and drastically. Why is that? Are we locking up more experienced users, taking them out of the marketplace? If so, the newbies must not be picking up the slack. But again, why? You mentioned a 10% addiction rate. I would assume that is a relatively constant rate, so 3000 of the new users in 1975 would have gotten hooked and 35,000 of the new users in 2000 would have gotten hooked. Again, more adicts should lead to more consumption, so why would the opposite been true.
Has supply been limited, thereby leading to a reduction in end user consumption? That's possible, and the government certainly likes to trumpet their big busts, but if supply goes down and demand remains constant, prices should go up. You said yourself that is not the case, prices are about the same now as back in the 80s. If you account for inflation, that would mean the price has actually gone down.
It would seem to make sense that demand must be down as well, but why would that be with more new users all the time. And not just more new users, but an increasing rate of new users. Why are new coke heads doing less blow than old cokeheads? As I said above, it's probably not the legal ramifications since people have already gotten over that fear to try it in the first place.
I don't know the answer, but I have a couple of possible ideas. Maybe people are more informed of the actual physical risks of coke so they are making informed decisions. I know this is the reason I never did coke. I had a chemistry class that included a section on how various drugs affect you. With the information, I decided not to do coke. I've done other illegal drugs, so clearly I'm not overly concerned with the legal aspects. I just though coke seemed too risky. My second theory, which is probably closer to the root cause is that coke just isn't all that cool any more. I'm guessing that is why the DEA chose to bring out the stats on one particular drug rather than a far more relevant stat on illegal drug use overall. How much do you want to bet that hasn't declined by 70%?
Edit: Of course, all of the above is predicated on the assumption your two posted quotes are at least somewhat close to a true representation of the current (not that either quote was particularily current) cocaine culture and not just some bullshit self aggrandizing numbers game on a website with an obvious vested interest.