The Drug War Is An Expensive Failure
I heard an interview on our Drug War with Michael Botticelli, the US Drug Commissioner at the time on 60 Minutes on December 13, 2015. Botticelli admitted that our war on drugs, started by Richard Nixon in 1962, has been a failure. This was the first time I had ever heard a government official admit the abject failure of the policy.
In an interview with Tom LoBianco, (CNN March 24, 2016), John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s Assistant for Public Policy, stated clearly,
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin… And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
I am afraid that this drug war will continue because there are too many people invested in it, both for political power and the money it brings. The only way we will stop this massive assault on our poor and minority communities is to expose what it has done and bring real data to the public. The War on Drugs spent one trillion dollars by 2018 (Americanprogress.org, June 27, 2018), money that could have been spent on other things like quality healthcare.
The war on drugs has completely trashed the fourth Amendment to the Constitution with its forfeiture laws. It keeps our poor and minorities in what I believe those in power think is their place by denying them jobs for felony convictions for minor drug offenses. We have more incarcerated people as a percentage of the population than any country in the world. This ruins families and entire communities. I believe that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has been lying to us.
Study after study has found that drug use as a percentage of the population is constant across all social, economic and racial groups (approximately 20%). Yet the authorities prosecute only the minority communities. This tells me that the drug war is a racist war on our minorities.
The history of drug laws in this country suggests that these laws have been used to control minorities and keep them in their places since the beginning. Racist rhetoric was behind the passage of all of our drug laws since 1914’s Harrison Act. Our media has not done their due diligence on this matter.
The chart below shows data on deaths in this country in 2016 (according to the Centers for Disease Control, not the DEA) from illegal drugs are less than 15,000 people annually. Deaths from alcohol poisoning: more than 70,000 annually; deaths from legal pain pills: more than 30,000 per year; deaths from smoking: over 150,000 per year. We lose 30,000 people every year to gun violence and yet all of our focus is on “illegal” drugs. The reason we have an “opioid epidemic” is that White people are dying from it. Heroin has always been a scourge in the Black community.
Our experiment with prohibition failed. It gave rise to the Mafia and organized crime. Our drug war has given rise to the South American cartels. I suspect that there are more lives lost annually in Mexico due to cartel violence than from illegal drugs.
The DEA claims that if drugs were decriminalized or legalized, crime would go up and many more people would begin using these drugs. What are the facts? Don’t try to tell me that the US is exceptional. The experiment on what to do with illegal drugs has already been run. Read the Global Commission Report on Drug Policy (June 2011). In it you will find the result of Portugal’s decriminalization of all drugs in 1999. Crime did not go up; it went down. HIV-Aids from needle sharing went down. Marijuana use among the young went down by over 30% because it was no longer prohibited, but the overall drug use as a percentage of the population remained constant at around 20%. These data are just the tip of the iceberg.
Marijuana has now been legalized for recreational use in 11 states. None of these states has been struck by lightning. Instead, we hear stories (not studies) of teenagers leaping from buildings, and traffic tickets going up for pot intoxication. What we haven’t heard is that traffic deaths went down in Colorado (probably because those intoxicated by pot tend to drive slowly). In fact, if you read a 2015 report on brain damage in teenagers by alcohol, you will be startled to find that alcohol is even more damaging to the teenage brain than marijuana. (New York Times: “Alcohol or Marijuana? A Pediatrician Faces the Question,” March 15, 2015) Again, our media are not doing their due diligence on this issue
Something that is not well known is that there are among the major sponsors of the anti-marijuana ads in this country some interesting organizations: drug companies, liquor companies, tobacco companies and prison-for-profit companies. Why is this not widely known?
Much anecdotal evidence suggests that marijuana may have powerful medicinal properties. Research is going on all over the world, particularly in Israel, showing very promising data, but it is very difficult to do research on the plant in the United States. We can’t even grow hemp for fibers and paper because of the provisions of the “Marihuana Tax Act” of 1937. Hemp itself has high levels of CBD, a cannabinoid that has medicinal properties without the intoxicating properties and very low levels of THC, the intoxicant. Hemp oil was part of the US Pharmacopeia until 1936.
One thing we should know is that it now appears that all mammals use intoxicants, mainly to relieve stress from their circumstances (see Johann Hari below). This is in contrast to what I have become to believe comes from certain branches of religion; that people shouldn’t be intoxicated, possibly because that makes them feel good, instead of religion. Why do teenagers get high? Being a teenager is very hard physically and emotionally. It may be the only thing some can do to relieve the pain and anxiety we have all experienced during that passage to adulthood. Of course, if the use of marijuana and other drugs to relieve stress worries you, our drug companies will be happy to supply you with drugs that in most cases do the same thing and have all kinds of unwanted side effects.
To help you on understanding the drug war and its failures, here are three references that you should not pass up. They are well researched and expose the government lies that have kept the fight against drugs going since the 1914 passage of the Harrison Act.
· Mass Incarceration in an Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
· Chasing the Scream: the First and Last Day of the Drug War by Johann Hari
· High Price by Carl Hart, Ph.D.
