In all, there are an estimated 3.6 million hard-core users in the United States.

"For the first year or so, buyers were hard-core professional users like mountain climbers and people in law enforcement," he said.

He doesn't see much impetus for hard-core users to start paying for their music.

The hard-core users, who often feel no need to apologize, insist they need the phones for work.

Yet the number of hard-core users of cocaine has remained steady over the last decade at around 3.5 million.

It would not stop drugs from getting to hard-core users, he said, "but we want to make sure it isn't out at parties for casual use."

Now with so many hard-core users in jail, dealers are focusing on other customers, employed people who are eager for more security.

This has had the result of reducing access to monitoring public safety communications systems for all but the most hard-core users.

So we went up in there and the place was full of hard-core users.

This population of hard-core users, numbering about three million, constitute our nation's true drug problem.