Illegal Drugs

COLLATERAL DAMAGE

The Drugs War Has Many Casualties

THE most conspicuous victim of the war on drugs has been justice,
especially in America, where law enforcement and the legal system have
taken the brunt of the harm. But all over the world there are human victims
too: the drug users jailed to punish them for the equivalent of binge
drinking or smoking two packs a day--except that their habit is illegal.
Many emerge from prison more harmed, and more harmful, than when they go in.

The attack on drugs has led to an erosion of civil liberties and an
encroachment of the state that alarms liberals on America's right as well
as the old hippies of the left. At the Cato Institute, a right-wing
think-tank in Washington, DC, Timothy Lynch is dismayed by the way the war
on drugs seems to be corrupting police forces.

Not only does it breed what some might see as excusable dishonesty:
"testalying", or lying on the witness stand in order to put a gang behind
bars. It also breeds police officers who, says Mr Lynch, "use the powers of
policing to put a rival gang out of action".

The drugs war perverts policing in other ways too. For example, the police
can keep property seized from a drugs offender, which may be giving the
wrong incentives. Another undesirable effect has been the militarisation of
America's police forces.

Some 90% of police departments in cities with populations over 50,000, and
70% of departments in smaller cities, now have paramilitary units.

These Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT, teams are sometimes equipped
with tanks and grenade launchers.

In Fresno, California, the SWAT team has two helicopters complete with
night-vision goggles; in Boone County, Indiana, an amphibious armoured
personnel carrier.

Set up initially to deal with emergencies such as hostage crises, such
teams increasingly undertake drugs raids.

Inevitably, from time to time they raid the wrong premises or shoot the
wrong suspects.

Civil liberties also suffer because there is usually no complaining witness
in a drugs case: both buyer and seller want the transaction to take place.
The police, says Mr Lynch, therefore need to rely on informants, wire-taps
and undercover tactics that are not normally used in other crimes.

The result is "a cancer in our courtrooms", as he puts it, that proponents
of America's drugs war rarely acknowledge as one of the costs of prohibition.

To these intrusions should be added many smaller ones. All manner of
benefits have become conditional on a clean drugs record.

Employers routinely test staff for drugs: in the mid-1990s, 14% of
employees said their bosses tested people when they hired, and a further
18% said they subsequently conducted random tests.

Access to student loans, driving licences and public housing are all now
jeopardised by taking drugs.

Since traces of cannabis stay in the urine longer than those of more
dangerous drugs, the greatest threat to such privileges comes from the
mildest offence.

Out Of Sight

But by far the worst consequence of the war on drugs is the imprisonment of
thousands of young blacks and Hispanics. Of the $35 billion or so that the
American authorities spend each year on tackling drugs, at least
three-quarters goes not on prevention or treatment but on catching and
punishing drug dealers and users.

More than one in ten of all arrests--1.5m in 1999--is for drug offences.

Some 40% of those drug arrests were for possessing marijuana.

Fewer than 20% were for the sale or manufacture of drugs, whether heroin,
cocaine or anything else. The arrests also sweep up a distressingly large
number of teenagers: 220,000 juveniles were picked up for drug offences in
1997, 82% more than in 1993.

Many of those arrested receive mandatory minimum sentences of five or ten
years for possession of a few grams of drugs, a dire punishment rushed
through Congress in 1986 amid hysteria about crack cocaine.

Eric Sterling, now head of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a
campaigning group, worked in Congress on drugs policy at the time. He
recalls that Congress set small quantities for no better reason than
ignorance, politicking and "a lack of fluency in the metric system".

Because congressmen did not know their grams from their kilos back in 1986,
America's prisons are crammed with drug offenders, who now account for
roughly one in four of those in custody, and more than half of all federal
prisoners. Most of these drug offenders are locked up for non-violent
crimes: in only 12% of cases was any weapon involved.

Almost all are from the broad bottom end of the drug-dealing pyramid.

America's imprisonment rate for drug offences alone now exceeds the rate of
imprisonment in most West European countries for crimes of all kinds.

Disturbingly, even though drug use is spread fairly evenly across different
racial groups, three-quarters of those locked up are non-white (see chart).
For example, most users of crack cocaine are white, but 90% of crack
defendants in federal courts are black or Hispanic. White people, being
generally richer, do their deals behind closed doors, whereas blacks and
Hispanics tend to trade on the streets, where they can be caught more
easily. A report by The Sentencing Project, a group lobbying for
criminal-justice reform, notes that black people account for 13% of monthly
drug users; 35% of those arrested for possessing drugs; 55% of those
convicted; and 74% of those sentenced to prison.

Thanks to the war on drugs, says JoAnne Page, head of the Fortune Society,
which campaigns on behalf of ex-prisoners, there are now more young black
men in prison than in college. "The consequences are devastating," she
says. "We are taking a whole generation of young black and Latino kids and
teaching them a set of survival skills that allow them to live in prison
but get them fired from any job." A recent study by Human Rights Watch
reports that 20% of men in prison are victims of forcible sex. "The rage
that these people come out with affects their relations with their
families," says Ms Page.

If they go to prison without a drugs habit, they may soon acquire one.
"I've seen heroin, marijuana, cocaine in prison," reports Julio Pagan, a
former convict who is now a counsellor. "I've seen people injecting drugs."
Those who inject in prison are at extreme risk of contracting HIV, because
they are far more likely than users outside to share needles.

Dr Alex Wodak, director of an alcohol and drugs unit at St Vincent's
Hospital, in Sydney, Australia, calculates that at least half the inmates
in Australia's prisons are injecting drug users, half of whom continue
injecting in jail, where they might typically share needles with 100 people
in a year.

This risk is unique neither to Australia nor to the rich world.

Dr Wodak cites disturbing evidence that the sharing of needles by injecting
drug users in prisons in Thailand has been the origin of that country's
terrifying AIDS epidemic.

Locking up drug injectors and failing to provide them with clean needles
may thus be one of the biggest threats to global public health.

These immense costs to society must, of course, be set against the benefits
gained from banning drugs.

But there is another, more mundane cost that should be taken into account:
the loss of potential revenue.

One of the main reasons Prohibition eventually came to an end in America
was that it yielded no tax revenues.

Likewise, prohibition of drugs hands over to criminals and rogue states a
vast amount of revenue--say $80 billion-100 billion a year, based on the
gap between rich-world import prices and retail prices--that governments
could otherwise tax away and spend for the common good.

Next article: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01.n1359.a02.html