DRUG WAR IS A TOTAL FAILURE IN TERMS OF ITS OWN OBJECTIVES!
After 36 years of drug war:
ARE DRUGS LESS AVAILABLE? No, most studies report that young people can obtain illegal drugs more quickly than beer or cigarettes.
ARE DRUGS LESS HARMFUL? No, the Drug War has made the “drug scene” far more dangerous. Large scale addiction to hard drugs was caused by the Drug War. When it began in the early 70’s there were few hard drugs on the street. Most substance users consumed relatively harmless cannabis products (marijuana). Pot, however, is bulky and smelly, so heavy enforcement pressure made many dealers switch to selling white powders such as cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. Most consumers would have preferred to stick with pot, but the Drug War caused an avalanche of white powders to enter the marketplace – as the price of cannabis increased over 2000%. Every year cocaine and heroin become more pure and the price dropped (see graph “Heroin Price and Purity”). In 1970 heroin was less than 2% pure and the wholesale price of a dose was $6. Heroin is now 70% pure, at a wholesale cost of 80 cents per dose. Cannabis, a non lethal herb, can now cost $400 per ounce. Still, all illegal drugs kill only about one percent as many people as legal drugs (alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceuticals).
ARE WE PROTECTING OUR CHILDREN? No, precisely the opposite. The Drug War glamorizes drugs. Nothing could attract teenagers more than “forbidden fruit”. No advertising could be as powerful as making something illegal. Many adolescents have a rebellious phase, so we teach them that the way to be a rebel is to use drugs. We lie about marijuana being harmful so many teens think that they will be able to manage hard drugs as easily as pot.
Teens in the Netherlands don’t use much marijuana. Dutch officials explain this by saying that they have succeeded in “making pot boring”. Teens in the Netherlands constantly pass by “coffeeshops” selling pot, yet 28% of tenth graders have used cannabis. American teens are told that pot is the devil’s weed and that we will use police power to destroy their lives if they use it, even take their drivers licenses away, yet 41% of American tenth graders have tried pot. Levels of hard drug addiction are much lower in countries that decline to make drug use into a sensational “war”. Also, young people may get over an addiction, but a conviction will ruin the rest of their life. American Drug policy is aimed at creating as many addictions and convictions as possible to maintain the jobs and benefits of the drug warriors.
Supporters of the Drug War hypocritically ask critics, “What kind of message does this send the children?” But the Drug War itself increases the number of kids who become addicts, prisoners, criminals and fatalities.
In the USA children are used as drug runners or lookouts, since it is harder to prosecute them. Dozens of kids are killed in “turf wars” between drug dealers, and others are burned by explosions of methamphetamine “cookers”. We train school children to inform on their parents; when the parents land in jail the children often pass into foster care. Loans for college are lost when a student is “busted” for pot. Drug war damages children’s lives!
IS CANNABIS (MARIJUANA) HARMFUL?
If you are trying to study for an exam it is stupid to smoke marijuana. Otherwise, cannabis is one of the least harmful substances known to humans; used for well over 5000 years. Americans, including grannies and infants, widely used tincture of cannabis as a medicine during the later 1800’s. Nobody noticed a problem. You can die from consuming peanut butter, seafood, or pure water, but not from cannabis – no matter how hard you try. Every major national commission between 1896 and 1972 found the same thing – cannabis is pretty much harmless. The British Indian Hemp Drug Commission (1896) foretold what happened in the USA when it concluded that cannabis should not be banned, since that would “drive the consumers to have recourse to other stimulants or narcotics which may be more deleterious”. All longitudinal studies of long term consumers of huge amounts of cannabis have shown no physical or mental problems. No significant scientific evidence can be found that shows problems with health, motivation, productivity, pregnancy, driving, addiction, brain health, sanity, crime, sexual function, lung disease or the immune system. Pot use can hurt performance on tasks that require rapid and complex reasoning, but deficits stemming from pot use dissolve quickly when use is discontinued.
Cannabis prohibition is based on prejudice. It’s a cultural and racial war within our society, based on fear of minorities and fear of pleasure. “If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the monster marijuana he would drop dead of fright”, said the old Bureau of Narcotics. Scientific study was not tolerated, and still is generally conducted outside of the USA. Cannabis actually is an ancient medicine, extraordinarily helpful for both physical and mental malaise (not that everyone uses it that way). It can help people through drug withdrawal symptoms and provide a substitute for addiction.
IS DRUG WAR REALLY RACIST? President Nixon’s aide H.R. Haldemann recalled in a 1969 diary entry that the president emphasized “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this all while not appearing to”. They succeeded perfectly!
From opium through cannabis, each “drug” that has become illegal was first stigmatized through sensational appeals to racist fears. Through drug war we can now institutionalize the racism we claim to reject. We have found a way to destroy and control black communities in the name of helping them. The Drug War is expensive, but it cheaper (in the short term) than good schools, health care, or social services. We prefer to spend money on drug war and prisons.
Racism is accomplished through drug war by selective surveillance, arrest, prosecution, conviction, and sentencing. African-American people make up about 13 percent of the US population and about 13% of drug users. However, about 37% of those arrested for drug violations are Black, as are 42% of those in federal prison for drug violations, and almost sixty percent of those in state prisons for drug felonies.
Slavery, discrimination, and segregation have become illegal but raw racism and authoritarian control of Black communities is legitimatized by the Drug War. The Drug War invalidates even the Voting Rights Act, since many states do not allow felons to vote after they are released. Fourteen percent of Black men in the USA have lost their right to vote, and prisons are still growing. In Texas, 31% of black males have lost their voting rights. (U.S. Dept. of Justice statistics, 1999). More black men are now in jail than were slaves before the Civil War. Support for drug war is racist.
ARE WE SPENDING MONEY WISELY?
Parts of government that help people are cut back again and again but our drug warriors have huge budgets. According to Jack Cole, director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), about 69 billion dollars each year is spent on drug prohibition and we have blown about a trillion dollars on the Drug War. For this cost in tax dollars we have higher rates of drug related death, disease, crime, and addiction than any other advanced nation. Countries that don’t sensationalize drugs and treat drug abuse as basically a medical and public health problem have far less difficulty. Beyond this, the Drug War has given us a militarized police system, a wrecked Bill of Rights, dangerous and desolate inner cities, the earth’s biggest prison system, compromised the integrity of our police forces, and funded terrorism and large scale crime. Has this been a good deal?
DO WE NEED THE WORLDS LARGEST PRISON SYSTEM?
The USA puts 686 people per 100,000 behind bars, Canada imprisons 103 and France 85. With only 4.6 % of the world’s population, we hold nearly a quarter of the world’s prisoners. Something is drastically wrong. Are Americans just worse people, 7 times more criminally inclined than citizens of other advanced nations?
You may wonder why we have five times as many incarcerated Americans as we did in 1970. It has to do with riots and hippies. In the late 1960’s the American power structure felt threatened by urban unrest of black people and by a quickly growing youth “counterculture” that used “drugs”. It seemed to many young people that our society might be able to move away from war and materialism – but traditionalists saw a threat to their cultural dominance and struck back without mercy. Opportunistic politicians whipped up fear, competing with each other to be tougher on “drugs” (meaning blacks, “hippies”, and poor people). They damned any talk of “root causes”. During three decades of drug war we built prisons instead of colleges, militarized our local police forces, and demolished the movement of political black people and “countercultural” youth. Machiavelli would approve.
Drug war arrests total 1.6 million per year. We now hold more than 2.2 million people in lockups in America, “the land of the free”. We seldom speak of them, during this “American Inquisition”. When will we find a politician with a spine to call for an end to the anti-American travesty that is The Drug War?
WHAT DOES DRUG WAR DO TO OUR LIBERTY, OUR BILL OF RIGHTS?
Drugs can’t ruin our nation, but drug war can destroy our “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness”. Is there any constitutional power that could possibly be used to tell Americans what they are allowed to put into their bodies? We have “unalienable rights”; how could that not include the right to use natural plants? Isn’t freedom the American way, followed up by personal responsibility? Were our founding fathers trying to set up a “big brother” or “nanny” state so omnipotent that it controlled what we put into our bodies, even natural plants? Would they have put doctors in jail for dispensing pain pills?
The War on Drugs was the first major trick used to deal a body blow to our fragile Bill of Rights. Now the puffed up and self-serving “war on terror” is finishing off what is left. During drug war, (even before the PATRIOT ACT), here is what remains of your liberty.
Americans have the Fourth Amendment right to refuse a search, but if you do, you may be held for hours until a warrant brings permission for dogs and officers to rip your car or home apart. Drugs may be planted in your house or car if someone doesn’t like you, or you could be raided on an unsubstantiated tip from a secret informer who is a criminal. Your home, vehicles, accounts and all assets may be taken through “civil forfeiture” before you are even charged with a crime, not when you are convicted. (Even rapists and murderers don’t have their homes and drivers licenses taken away.) Then you can be put in jail for a 5 or 10 year mandatory minimum without any defense or jury trial, since the prosecutor can threaten you with 20 or 30 years of mandatory minimums if you don’t sign your plea bargain.
Maybe you could skip all this fuss and be one of the Americans gunned down in “wrong address” raids. Most of us do not realize that our Bill of Rights was destroyed by drug war, long before the PATRIOT Act.
WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT DRUGS? All drugs were legal until 1914 in the USA, and caused much less of a problem than they do now. We must be mature enough to recognize that no society ever has or ever will “solve” the drug problem. Our goal should be to minimize harm – not to wreck lives and communities with brutal, sanctimonious pseudo-morality that increases harm. Drugs can be harmful, but drug war causes more harm than drugs, increasing death, disease, crime, and addiction.
First, we have to ensure that any drug is available for medical use. Then we should tax and regulate cannabis products like we do alcohol. Many hard drug and alcohol users will be satisfied with pot; since its antidepressant qualities tend to produce “a definite feeling of adequacy” with “no mental or physical deterioration” (LaGuardia Report, 1944).
We must fundamentally change our outlook towards drugs. All drug use is not abuse, and most users of any illegal drug don’t get addicted. Drug abuse and addiction are not criminal problems that should involve police, courts, and jails, but no excuses whatsoever must be accepted for behavior that hurts people. Our citizens deserve law and order and peace and quiet; people who hurt others must be arrested and kept off the streets. It is hard to change attitudes, since propaganda not only tells lies; it eventually makes people angry at the truth.
Someday, if we remain a democracy, we will tax and regulate all drugs. Do we really want to hand $500 Billion every year to criminals and terrorists for providing drugs of unknown quality to Americans? Wouldn’t it be better to have doctors or the government selling the “difficult” drugs, stripped of their “taboo” allure, with a known potency and purity, with a warning label describing the addiction and possible harm they can cause, with drug taxes providing lots of revenue to deal with drug abuse and repair schools or roads?
Terrorists and criminals of all kinds will be fully funded until we end the drug war. It is a perverted charade to pretend to have a “war on terror” and then provide terrorists with sources of ample permanent funding. Why do we refuse to strike a deadly blow against organized crime and terrorists by taking $500 Billion per year away from them? Why not shrink our prisons and restore our Bill of Rights? The USA must be the land of freedom (with full personal responsibility for behavior), so we can focus on the very serious problems of our nation and the world.
THE DRUG WAR IS A WAR ON PEOPLE THAT DEEPLY DAMAGES OUR COUNTRY! WE MUST END IT!
(Humor)
Question: How many narcs does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Answer: Just tell us where you got this joke and we’ll go easy on you (of course, if it is a colored bulb, you are really going to get screwed).
E-mail me at chuckreamforcongress@yahoo.com
