The War at Home

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http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15896

 

The War at Home

 

Sanho Tree, AlterNet

May 13, 2003Viewed on May 13, 2003

 

In 1965, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy tried to promote an enlightened drug policy

before our country declared war on its own citizens. He told Congress, " Now,

more than at any other time in our history, the addict is a product of a society

which has moved faster and further than it has allowed him to go -- a society

which in its complexity and its increasing material comfort has left him behind.

In taking up the use of drugs, the addict is merely exhibiting the outermost

aspects of a deep-seated alienation from this society, of a combination of

personal problems having both psychological and sociological aspects. "

 

Kennedy continued, " The fact that addiction is bound up with the hard core of

the worst problems confronting us socially makes it discouraging at the outset

to talk about 'solving' it. 'Solving' it really means solving poverty and broken

homes, racial discrimination and inadequate education, slums and

unemployment.... " Thirty-eight years later, the preconditions contributing to

drug addiction have changed little, but our response to the problem has become

overwhelmingly punitive.

 

When confronted with illegal behavior, legislators have traditionally responded

by escalating law enforcement. Yet countries such as Iran and China that

routinely use the death penalty for drug offenses still have serious drug

problems. Clearly there are limits to what can be achieved through coercion. By

treating this as a criminal justice problem, our range of solutions has been

sharply limited: How much coercion do we need to make this problem go away? No

country has yet found that level of repression, and it is unlikely many

Americans would want to live in a society that did.

 

As the drug war escalated in the 1980s, mandatory minimum sentencing and other

draconian penalties boosted our prison population to unprecedented levels. With

more than 2 million people behind bars (there are only 8 million prisoners in

the entire world), the United States--with one-twenty-second of the world's

population -- has one-quarter of the planet's prisoners. We operate the largest

penal system in the world, and approximately one-quarter of all our prisoners

(nearly half a million people) are there for nonviolent drug offenses -- that's

more drug prisoners than the entire European Union incarcerates for all offenses

combined, and the European Union has over 90 million more citizens than the

United States. Put another way, the United States now has more nonviolent drug

prisoners alone than we had in our entire prison population in 1980.

 

If the drug war were evaluated like most other government programs, we would

have tried different strategies long ago. But our current policy seems to follow

its own unique budgetary logic. A slight decline in drug use is used as evidence

that our drug war is finally starting to work and therefore we should ramp up

the funding. But a rise in drug use becomes proof that we are not doing enough

to fight drugs and must therefore redouble our efforts and really ramp up the

funding. Under this unsustainable dynamic, funding and incarceration rates can

only ratchet upward. When Nixon won re-election in 1972, the annual federal drug

war budget was approximately $100 million. Now it is approaching $20 billion.

Our legislators have been paralyzed by the doctrine of " if at first you don't

succeed, escalate. "

 

Internationally, our drug war has done little more than push drug cultivation

from one region to the next while drugs on our streets have become cheaper,

purer and more plentiful than ever. Meanwhile, the so-called collateral damage

from our international drug war has caused incalculable suffering to peasant

farmers caught between the crossfire of our eradication policies and the

absolute lack of economic alternatives that force them to grow illicit drug

crops to feed their families. Unable to control our own domestic demand, our

politicians have lashed out at other peoples for daring to feed our seemingly

insatiable craving for these substances. We have exported our failures and

scapegoated others.

 

" It's the Economy, Stupid "

 

Many legislators approve increased drug war funding because they are true

believers that cracking down is the only way to deal with unlawful conduct.

Others support it out of ignorance that alternative paradigms exist. But perhaps

most go along with the drug war for fear of being depicted as " soft on drugs " in

negative campaign ads at election time.

 

In recent years, there has been an increasingly lively debate on whether

nonviolent drug offenders should receive treatment or incarceration. As

legislators gradually drift toward funding more badly-needed treatment slots, an

important dynamic of the drug economy is still left out of the national debate:

the economics of prohibition. Elected officials and much of the media have been

loathe to discuss this phenomenon at the risk of being discredited as a

" legalizer, " but until a solution is found concerning this central issue, many

of the societal problems concerning illicit drugs will continue to plague us.

Trying to find a sustainable solution to manage the drug problem without

discussing the consequences of prohibition is like taking one's car to the

mechanic for repair but not allowing the hood to be opened. The time has come to

take a look under the hood of our unwinnable drug war.

 

Under a prohibition economy where there is high demand, escalating law

enforcement often produces the opposite of the intended result. By attempting to

constrict supply while demand remains high, our policies have made these

relatively worthless commodities into substances of tremendous value. The

alchemists of the Middle Ages tried in vain for centuries to find a formula to

turn lead into gold, but it took our drug warriors to perfect the new alchemy of

turning worthless weeds into virtual gold. Some varieties of the most widely

used illicit drug, marijuana, are now worth their weight in solid gold (around

$350 per ounce). Cocaine and heroin are worth many, many times their equivalent

weight in gold. In a world filled with tremendous poverty, greed and desire, we

cannot make these substances disappear by making them more valuable.

 

Another factor we have failed to take into account is the virtually

inexhaustible reservoir of impoverished peasants who will risk growing these

crops in the vast regions of the world where these plants can flourish.

According to the U.N Development Program and the World Bank, there are 1.2

billion people in the world who live on less than $1 a day. Imagine paying for

housing, food, clothing, education, transportation, fertilizer and medicine on

less than $1 a day. Now imagine the temptation of putting a worthless seed into

the soil and coming up with an illicit crop that can mean the difference between

simple poverty or slow starvation for you and your family. We cannot escalate

the value of such commodities through prohibition and not expect desperately

poor farmers to plant any crop necessary to ensure their survival.

 

A " Harm Reduction " Approach

 

Of all the laws that Congress can pass or repeal, the law of supply and demand

is not one of them. Neither is the law of evolution nor the law of unintended

consequences. The drug trade evolves under Darwinian principles -- survival of

the fittest. Our response of increasing law enforcement ensures that the clumsy

and inefficient traffickers are weeded out while the smarter and more adaptable

ones tend to escape. We cannot hope to win a war on drugs when our policies see

to it that only the most efficient drug operations survive. Indeed, these

survivors are richly rewarded because we have constricted just enough supply to

increase prices and profits while " thinning out the herd " by eliminating their

competition for them. Through this process of artificial selection, we have been

unintentionally breeding " super traffickers " for decades. Our policy of

attacking the weakest links has caused tremendous human suffering, wasted

countless lives and resources and produced highly-evolved criminal operations.

 

Our policy of applying a " war " paradigm to fight drug abuse and addiction

betrays a gross ignorance of the dimensions of this medical problem and its

far-reaching social and economic consequences. Wars employ brute force to

extract political concessions from rational state actors. Drugs are articles of

commerce that do not respond to fear, pain or congressional dictates. However,

around these crops revolve hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of

individuals responding to the artificially inflated value of these essentially

worthless agricultural products. For every trafficker that our " war " manages to

stop, a dozen others take his or her place because individuals -- whether acting

out of poverty, greed or addiction -- enter the drug economy on the assumption

they won't get caught, and most never are. No " war " can elicit a unified

political capitulation from actors in such diverse places as Southeast Asia, the

Andes, suburbia and the local street corner. Such a war can never be won, but a

" harm reduction " approach offers ways to contain and manage the problem.

 

Guns and helicopters cannot solve the problems of poverty in the Andes or

addiction in the United States. Moreover, our policies of employing more police,

prosecutors, and prisons to deal with the drug problem is like digging more

graves to solve the global AIDS pandemic -- it solves nothing. As sociologist

Craig Reinarman notes, our policies attack the symptoms but do little to address

the underlying problems. " Drugs are richly functional scapegoats, " Reinarman

writes. " They provide elites with fig leafs to place over the unsightly social

ills that are endemic to the social system over which they preside. They provide

the public with a restricted aperture of attribution in which only the chemical

bogey man or lone deviant come into view and the social causes of a cornucopia

of complex problems are out of the picture. "

 

Until we provide adequate resources for drug treatment, rehabilitation and

prevention, the United States will continue to consume billions of dollars worth

of drugs and impoverished peasants around the world will continue to grow them.

The enemy is not an illicit agricultural product that can be grown all over the

world; rather, our policies should be directed against poverty, despair and

alienation. At home and abroad, these factors drive the demand for illicit drugs

which is satisfied by an inexhaustible reservoir of impoverished peasant farmers

who have few other economic options with which to sustain themselves and their

families.

 

Some day, there will be a just peace in Colombia and a humane drug control

policy in the United States. Until then, we are mortgaging the future, and the

most powerless among us must pay most of the interest. That interest can be seen

in the faces of the campesinos and indigenous peoples caught in the crossfire of

our Andean drug war, it can be seen in the millions of addicts in the United

States who cannot get treatment they need, it can be seen in the prisons filled

with nonviolent drug offenders, and it can be seen in the poverty, despair and

alienation around the world because we choose to squander our resources on

harmful programs while ignoring the real needs of the dispossessed.

 

Because we have witnessed the damage illicit drugs can cause, we have allowed

ourselves to fall prey to one of the great myths of the drug warriors: Keeping

drugs illegal will protect us. But drug prohibition doesn't mean we control

drugs, it means we give up the right to control them. Under prohibition, the

people who control drugs are by definition criminals -- and, very often,

organized crime. We have made a deliberate choice not to regulate these drugs

and have been paying the price for the anarchy that followed. These are lessons

we failed to learn from our disastrous attempt at alcohol prohibition in the

1920s.

 

On the other hand, the philosophy of " harm reduction " offers us a way to manage

the problem. Briefly put, this means we accept the premise that mind altering

substances have always been part of human society and will not disappear, but we

must find ways to minimize the harm caused by these substances while

simultaneously minimizing the harm caused by the drug war itself. We have

reached the point where the drug war causes more harm than the drugs themselves

-- which is the definition of a bankrupt policy. Drug abuse and addiction are

medical problems -- not criminal justice problems -- and we should act

accordingly.

 

Some examples of harm reduction include comprehensive and holistic drug

treatment for addicts who ask for it, overdose prevention education, clean

needle exchange to reduce the spread of HIV and hepatitis, methadone maintenance

for heroin addicts and honest prevention and education programs instead of the

ineffective DARE program.

 

We already know what doesn't work -- the current system doesn't work -- but we

are not allowed to discover what eventually will work. Our current policy of

doing more of the same is doomed to failure because escalating a failed paradigm

will not produce a different result. However, by approaching the problem as

managers rather than moralizers, we can learn from our mistakes and make real

progress. It is our current system of the drug war that is the obstacle to

finding an eventual workable system of drug control.

 

This article first appeared in Sojourners magazine.

 

 

 

© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

 

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