The Drug Wars and their Victims (c. 1997)

The Drug Wars and their Victims
by Paul Stephens  (c. 1997)

I mentioned this to some friends, and found a copy to post...  Among other things, I compare the human and financial costs of the War on Drugs to the Vietnam War...   And now, the post 1990 Middle East "Wars on Terror" or Oil Wars....

Part I: The Drug Wars and their Victims

The more one reads about the illicit drug trade, the more it appears to be a detailed and accurate parody of the corporate behavior of the larger "licit" drug firms. The international illicit drug trade may amount to more than a hundred billion dollars a year, but the licit one is larger and enjoys the full legal protection of governments. Its CEO's are among the highest paid; its advertising among the most lucrative. As much as the legal drug companies spend on research and development (much of it in universities with public money), they spend much more on advertising and distribution at monopoly prices. 
Enormous costs are imposed on the consumers of pharmaceuticals due to unnecessary regulation and the monopoly protection of patents on "products" - many of them native plants or other living organisms - which should be free for anyone to use. Drugs which cost pennies to make may sell for hundreds of dollars, just as a handful of marijuana or cocaine, which cost no more to grow or refine than broccoli or sugar, costs thousands of dollars from the (illegal) drug cartels.
Thus, we might well conclude that the greatest single drug threat to the health and the well-being of the American people is from the large pharmaceutical companies which mine the nation's suffering, extorting huge monopoly profits from the public by "restraining trade" in valuable, lifesaving medicines. The medical "drug culture" can be just as perverse and exploitative as the criminal one. A large part of medical costs and incomes derives from prescribing and selling drugs, and there is every incentive to over-prescribe and overcharge the consumers. 
This is an area where the War on Drugs could have been fought and won long ago, and where international free trade should have created an efficient market-serving attitude on the part of the drug companies instead of a politicized, exploitative one. It is because drugs are so expensive and addictive, or otherwise "necessary," that people are willing to kill for them, or to imprison and otherwise coerce their competitors to control a market or "territory." If they were cheap and readily available, no one would have an interest in forcing children and the poor to buy and sell them. Then, our educational, treatment, and counseling programs could be effective in the absence of coercion and huge monopoly profits. 
The "War on Drugs" goes back to the early decades of this century. The "coca" in Coca Cola was originally cocaine. Marijuana (hemp) was grown and smoked by several of the American Founding Fathers as well as many famous writers, scholars, artists, and musicians throughout our history. China traders like Delano (FDR's grandfather) and Forbes were major opium merchants, leading to the colonial impositions (led by the British) which left China suspicious and hostile towards the United States right up to the present time. 
Heroin was developed as a cure for morphine and other opium addiction. Hashish use is common in Islamic countries which prohibit alcohol absolutely. The original rationale for prohibiting cannabis, cocaine, and opiates had more to do with racism against Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, and Chinese and the subjugation of those cultures who commonly used these drugs. White drug users were stereotyped as shiftless, low-life "addicts" who needed to be locked up to protect them from their vices. In fact, most functioned normally and with little noticeable harm. A little education would have gone a long way toward preventing what little drug abuse existed early in this century.
The evil consequences of using many of these drugs (especially the "natural" ones - i.e., those which can be cultivated or directly derived from plants) are mainly the result of prohibition and the resulting criminalization of the economy and culture surrounding their use. Spending $20 billion a year directly "fighting" the use of drugs, and $100s of billions more locking up, punishing, and destroying the lives of those who use them, is a cost we cannot afford. The police, the legal system, and the Federal government itself (the CIA, DEA, ATF, and Customs, among others) are heavily implicated in a vast conspiracy to extort and control the drug cartels. Network news specials have exposed government conspiracies to actually facilitate the importation of drugs so that other agencies can make more arrests and thus demonstrate their "effectiveness." Cash, houses, vehicles, boats and airplanes are confiscated without due process of law, and the arresting agencies are now allowed to keep the profits - an abuse of constitutional government with few if any precedents. No doubt, President Clinton's recent initiative to spend billions more on network television advertising will discourage such critical stories in the future. ABC is getting more of this money than any other network, and it has been the most critical of drug policies in the past.  
It is not the use of "recreational drugs" like marijuana which provides the "gateway" to heavier drugs and a life of crime. Rather, it is being arrested for such minor use which provides a one-way ticket to the life of a convicted felon, who will probably require public assistance, be unemployable, and otherwise a burden on society for the rest of his or her life. What other options does a convicted felon have but to get back into the drug business or some other criminal enterprise? There is no general assistance, and few jobs which pay a living wage - especially for convicted felons. Since it is often the most intelligent and independent thinking young people who voluntarily "experiment" with drugs, or who ambitiously get into the drug business in order to "pursue the American dream," we are depriving ourselves of our best human resources by locking them up and turning them against society, government, and education. 
There are more anarchists, Freemen, urban gangsters, militia members, and other violent revolutionaries and terrorists now than ever before in this country, and most of them were created by the War on Drugs. According to Barbara Ehrenreich, a leading advocate for children and the poor, the Clinton Administration has the worst record for protecting civil rights and liberties in our nation's history.
We now spend more on law enforcement and prisons (most of which is now attributable to the "War on Drugs") than we do on education in many states and communities, and the predictable result is a collapse in educational standards and outcomes. This effect is worsened as the War on Drugs co-opts educators to prosecute the Drug War with local education dollars.  
To paraphrase that great defender of the Constitution, the NRA: "When drugs are outlawed, only outlaws will have drugs." That is the status quo, today, and one which will finally bring down our government and our Constitution, if we allow it to do so. 


Part II  Towards a Lasting Peace: Ending the War on Drugs

The War on Drugs is potentially the greatest single threat (next to nuclear weapons) facing us as a society. Like any war, this one has two sides, organized to impoverish, enslave, and destroy one another. It is fought in the schools, on the playgrounds, in the media, in the courts, in Congress, on the streets, and internationally by well-armed combat troops. Our government has already taken more than a million "enemy prisoners", and the cost of this war to the American taxpayers is equivalent to the Vietnam war - both in dollars and in lives and human suffering. Yet, the escalation continues. 
No peace talks are in sight. As this is being written, a new initiative to spend $2 billion in Newspeak propaganda directed towards young people has been announced. Eggs sizzling in a frying pan were not an effective image to discourage children from allowing themselves to be victimized by the drug cartels. Now, the eggs (and the rest of the kitchen) are being smashed with the frying pan. The example of DARE, which numerous studies have shown to be ineffective or counterproductive, was no deterrent to spending billions more on the same concept, while remaining oblivious to the real causes and consequences of the War on Drugs. 
The first step towards ending a war is recognizing the common humanity of one's adversaries and a common interest in peace. The next one is to establish a set of protocols for the peace discussions - the Paris peace talks, the Atlantic Charter, or Wilson's Fourteen Points. The third step is to actually carry out these protocols, instead of relapsing into cycles of punishment and blame and denying the humanity of one's adversaries.
We can end this vicious War on Drugs. It has been a vast hypocrisy from the start; a clever ruse by would-be dictators to enslave the American people. We must pacify not only of the drug producers, dealers and the international cartels, but those government officials who have created and sustained them by giving them a criminal monopoly no different from Al Capone's monopoly on booze in the 1920's. We reduced the harm of that mistaken policy by repealing prohibition. We can carry out a similar harm reduction policy, today, without legalizing or legitimizing the use of harmful drugs. All we need to do is break the criminal monopolies by de-criminalizing voluntary, personal behavior for adults. Freedom and respect for the individual is the traditional American solution, not punishment, repression, and the creation of a police state.  
Like many other issues, the "drug problem" is largely a matter of semantics, or how we think and talk about the problem. There have always been public leaders who understood this, and they have always been marginalized and denounced for their policies and views. Not surprisingly, they include both liberal and conservative thinkers and statesmen, many with impressive credentials and long experience with the problem. 
Some drug use is a medical problem. It therefore requires medical solutions. Much of it is educational or cultural. We live in a drug culture in which all sorts of drugs are promoted for every imaginable purpose, from weight loss to curing baldness and the common cold. We need to present the facts of drug use, addiction, and the sociology of the drug culture to young people in such a way that it makes sense to them. Images of busting up a kitchen with a frying pan or flooding their bedrooms will only make them laugh. 
It is now easier for teen-agers to buy marijuana or cocaine than it is to buy alcohol. It is no accident that 9/10ths of the harm done to teenagers from illegal substances is attributable to alcohol and tobacco, not the drugs which are being targeted in this War. Tobacco and alcohol are the real "gateway drugs." If we tell young people, as we do in a thousand ways, that alcohol and tobacco use are legitimate and even "good for them", but that marijuana and psychedelics are prohibited, we can hardly expect them to believe their teachers and follow these dictates with patriotic fervor. Because of this war, respect for law and order and the rights of our fellow citizens is at a low ebb. Our legal system has become corrupted to the point where few believe that it is just, and fewer still who have had any direct dealings with it. It is a "criminal justice system" in the sense that it is controlled by the criminal element - a semantic slip which becomes obvious when we are arrested by people who profit from our arrest and are paid to harm us. We probably spend another $20 billion or so to "protect" ourselves from our own government, including legal fees, court costs, and the judicial system dedicated to this purpose. 
Thus, the "drug problem" which exists, today, is ultimately a political problem - the consequence of bad public policy. Like Prohibition in the 1920's, some people's moral views have been allowed to create a problem which didn't previously exist - namely, the rule of gangsters and their violent methods to control the distribution of products which, because of criminal monopolies, have become exceedingly lucrative. We needn't "legalize" (or legitimize) drug use, with advertising and corporate organizations controlling its production and distribution as we do with tobacco or alcohol. Obviously, that was the wrong solution in those cases, too. Instead, we need to decriminalize all personal and interpersonal consensual behavior, and closely regulate multi-national corporate business in harmful substances. 
We could easily put drug use under the control of non-profit groups who supply their own people with whatever they believe is good for them. Imagine if you could only obtain drugs under medical supervision (without advertising or other promotion for profit), or in religious or cultural contexts (the Native American Church, Islam, or various psychedelic cults). It is ludicrous to make a natural plant "illegal", so anyone should be allowed to grow and use such plants in the privacy of one's own home. It is even more absurd to prohibit doctors from prescribing what they know their patients need and will benefit from. Drug testing should be encouraged for those employers who believe that the use of certain drugs could effect public safety or other job performance. The free market can address these issues without criminal sanctions or prohibition. Any commercial sale or corporate promotion of potentially harmful drugs could still be illegal, and probably should be, just as the commercial distribution of pharmaceuticals, alcohol, tobacco, and other regulated substances should be controlled or prohibited to minimize cost and harmful effects. Successful drug policies must emphasize "harm reduction" instead of punishing and waging war against those we disagree with. 
These solutions would work today with marijuana, cocaine, and the opiates, as well as psychedelic plants, which have been used shamanistically in virtually every culture and tradition. All have recognized medical and spiritual uses, and the abuse of these substances and their users would be negligible if no one could financially profit from it.