DRUG WARRIORS - Government Officials

MATHEA FALCO

What changed you from basically being an "enforcement person" to a
"treatment person?"

It's very hard not to change your vision if you stay in the field long enough.

If you look over the sweep of time, what changed for me from 1980 until
about 1990, and continuing today, is that the price of drugs has just
plummeted in this country. Worldwide production of opium has more than
tripled, and cocaine has geometrically expanded. Both the quality, the
purity of the drug, is much higher, and is so much more dangerous now to
people who use it in this country. And it's so cheap that even a high
school kid could buy a hit of heroin for his weekend enjoyment.

So that's got to be a failure. The measure of success for a supply control
strategy has always been whether what we're doing overseas or on the high
seas actually increases the price on the streets of this country and
reduces the purity. By both of those measures, this program has failed
miserably.

It's also a flawed strategy. Many people argue that it just hasn't been
implemented enough, that, "If you just put ten times as much money into it,
it would change everything." But, in fact, it's a flawed strategy at its
very core. First, because drugs can be produced almost anywhere. We've
proved that in the United States with marijuana. As pressures grow up in
one area against production, it just moves down the street, so to speak.

Isn't the fact that we're spending more money on treatment a form of progress?

It's true that more is being spent on treatment. But there was always such
a small amount being spent on treatment--it's very easy to claim an
expansion of treatment money. America's drug problem can only be resolved
by attacking demand right here at home, and not be looking to other
countries to solve our problem. If, in fact, we're going to reduce demand
in this country, we need to change our priorities--fundamentally--and make
treatment and prevention the number one priority; not only in theory, but
also in terms of how much money is spent. Right now in the federal drug
budget, treatment gets less than 15 percent of the entire amount. And if
you look at the state level, states are putting even less of their own drug
budgets into treatment and prevention. So law enforcement overseas
interdiction consumes more than the lion's share.

Today, fewer than a third of the nation's addicts can get treatment unless
they can afford to pay for it, and most addicts can't pay for it. The
result is that many of the people who have this chronic addiction problem
are cycled in and out of the criminal justice system because, ironically,
in many places, that's the only way you can get treatment.

There's always been this debate about whether we're having a drug epidemic
or not. It's always cast as "Are we winning? Are we losing?" In fact, we
have a very large drug problem in this country, probably one of the largest
in the world. A lot of it seems to be intractable, because we continue to
do the wrong things. We don't provide intensive sustained treatment for
people who need it. We don't have effective prevention programs in most
schools. So we have a huge number of Americans whose lives are, in fact,
completely destroyed by these problems, and who also incur huge costs for
everybody in this society. It's not just about lost human lives. It's also
about economics. The drug problem in this country costs us hundreds of
billions of dollars a year.

Americans aren't rational about the drug problem, and we never have been.
We continue to attach enormous stigma to people who get involved with
drugs. And we tend to think of this as a moral issue, so it generates a
huge amount of blame and denial, in the sense that we don't want people to
know if our family has drug problems. And we certainly might not want to
know about it ourselves.

To stand up and advocate treatment as the major approach takes a whole new
vision of how to address the drug problem--to think about it in medical
terms, in public health terms--instead of as primarily a criminal problem.
And that's the kind of conceptual leap that we haven't made yet in this
country. That vision of the drug problem has governed our policy for more
than 100 years. It might take us another 100 years to get out the other side.

Is treatment cost-effective?

Treatment is vastly more cost-effective than incarceration and enforcement.
Studies have been done repeatedly over the last ten years, and it's been
demonstrated very clearly that if an addict is retained in treatment for a
year or longer the success rate is very good--very good. Other studies
show, for example, that one dollar invested in treatment saves seven
dollars in social costs, primarily by reducing prison costs. That study was
done in California, which has one of the largest prison populations in the
country.

In America we still define our drug problem as primarily criminal in
nature. We have not yet made the leap into understanding that addiction
really is a chronic relapsing disease, and that there are a lot of things
we can do, both to prevent the disease from happening, and to treat it once
it happens. So, as long as we think about the drug problem in terms of
being tough on drugs, thinking of it as a crime, or being soft on drugs and
dangerously liberal or touchy-feely, we are going to continue to allocate
our money in these really skewed ways that don't make sense in terms of
what the research has shown us. In some sense, supporting law enforcement
in this field is a litmus test for legitimacy of concern about the drug
problem.

Why are current law enforcement officials in Washington reluctant to make a
public statement in favor of treatment and education?

There is a pervasive fear in Washington that you will immediately be
labeled as soft on drugs if you stand up and say, "We really need to change
priorities. We need to focus on treatment and prevention." And if you're a
federal official, you're afraid that somehow that will affect your job. You
might not get promoted as fast. If you're an elected official, they really
believe, I think, that the voters will throw them out. But the interesting
irony is that many national surveys, including several conducted recently
by Peter Hart Research Associates, have found that the American people
strongly support increased spending for prevention and treatment. So
there's this huge disconnect between what's felt in the communities and
what's going on in Washington.

Is racism a factor in the war on drugs?

If you look at the numbers and racial composition of people who end up in
prison because of the mandatory minimum drug laws, it's hard not to
conclude that there is a distinct racial bias here. The vast majority of
people behind bars in this country for major drug offenses are African
American or Hispanic. It's hard to say whether the laws were originally
intended to achieve that result. But the reality is that we are locking up
millions of people who come from these very specific groups.

How effectively is the United States' drug war waged overseas?

I do think it's part of that larger delusion that Americans still have,
about being able to solve the drug problem by going to other countries.
From my perspective, the most dangerous part about it is that it continues
to have Americans thinking that if we could just get the Colombians to do
the right thing, things would be better in this country. We really need to
understand that the answers are right here at home. The answers are not in
very sophisticated Blackhawk helicopters flying over remote parts of a
country--that is really something for a civil war.

What lessons can we learn from our involvement with Panama and Colombia?

The invasion of Panama was really justified in terms of taking Noriega, who
was then defined as the major drug trafficker in the region and had to go.
In reality, the US had a wide range of other interests in Panama. And it
was very convenient to say that we were doing this on behalf of the drug
war. In fact, within six months of Noriega's extraction, drug trafficking
from Panama more than doubled. So there was never any doubt that that
activity really was meant to do anything about the drug war.

In terms of Colombia, if we look at the nature of the assistance package,
we understand right away that it cannot have a lasting kind of impact on
the drug traffic. Eighty-five percent of the assistance package is for very
sophisticated helicopters and a little bit of military assistance, and tiny
amounts of economic development and judicial reform.

If we really wanted to do something about the drug problem in Colombia, we
would provide assistance to strengthen the central government and the
institutions of civil society--the judiciary, the police, and to
professionalize the police, and, even more important, to develop real
economic alternatives in these regions.

Most people don't understand that these vast regions in southern Colombia
really are very poor, with very little other source of income. And until
you begin to provide alternative means of income to farmers, who are
essentially drug farmers, they're going to continue growing their crops.

We need to focus on how you bring these groups into a much broader
definition of Colombian society. There are profound economic and class
divisions within the society that have never been addressed. It's part of
the ongoing problem in Colombia that's been true for well over 50 years.
Helicopters are not going to make any difference, either to solving the
insurgency problem or to reducing the drug problem.

Is there anything wrong with having many different federal agencies
involved in the drug war?

The drug budget is the one big growth item every year. Whether we're
contracting or expanding federal spending, the drug budget always goes up.
We're now at $20 billion a year. Agencies are very eager, of course, to get
part of that, particularly since responsibility for various aspects of the
drug war are spread among so many enforcement agencies. There has been a
long history of interagency rivalry, and sometimes real struggles on the
ground over which agency is going to get credit. If they get the credit,
they then have a much stronger case to make for increased budget authority.
I think it's really a chronic problem with the way we think about the drug
war. Since we define the drug war primarily in enforcement terms, something
like 20 law enforcement agencies have some part to play in this. This
problem will continue, because it is a growth industry. It's something that
gives them a mission.

PBS Frontline Series Follow Up by Tom O'Connell, Kevin Zeese, Doug McVay,
and Eric Sterling:
http://www.drugsense.org/dsw/2000/ds00.n170.html#sec1

Campaign for the Restoration & Regulation of Hemp's HempTV website has the
full, two part, total of almost 4 hours of video of the PBS Frontline "Drug
Wars" available on the web for free video streaming using the Real Player 8.

To watch Part one of Drug Wars, go here:

http://www.crrh.org/hemptv/docs_drugwars1.html

To see part 2, go here:

http://www.crrh.org/hemptv/docs_drugwars2.html

Click this link for an index to this series:
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00.n1551.a01.html