'WAR ON DRUGS' CLOAKS OPPRESSION

In 2000, the leading cause of death in the United States was tobacco,
killing an estimated 435,000 people, according to the American
Medical Association. The No. 3 cause of death was alcohol, accounting
for 85,000 deaths. Much further down the list were illicit drugs --
including heroine, cocaine, etc. -- resulting in the deaths of 17,000
people. Marijuana was not responsible for a single fatality.

The term "war on drugs" is a misleading one, as the above should have
made clear. The battle against drug use applies to only a select
number of body-altering chemical substances, specifically the less
dangerous ones. More potent killers -- namely tobacco -- have been
annually lavished with tens of millions in subsidies from the federal
government, according to its own statistics.

And U.S. foreign policy has been, to say the least, less than helpful
in inhibiting the growth of an international drug market. During the
Vietnam War era, the CIA participated in the heroine trade in the
Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia to fund its anti-Communist military
operations in the region, as documented by UW professor Alfred W.
McCoy. He writes, "As an indirect consequence of American involvement
in the Golden Triangle until 1972, opium production steadily increased."

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration's support for the Contras
likely materialized in clandestine cocaine sales, much of which ended
up in the streets of inner city America. During the same decade, the
opium trade was again utilized by U.S.-backed Islamic fundamentalists
- -- the same types who are now the targets of the equally dubious "War
on Terror" -- in their mutual campaign against the Soviets.

More recently, U.S. neo-liberal policies in South America, especially
in Bolivia, have pushed many impoverished farmers into coca production.

Despite a long history of U.S. support for the international illicit
drug trade -- though only when it suits its purposes -- and a more
open tolerance for its far less dangerous counterparts, the official
rationale still goes something like the following: The war on
(certain) drugs is necessary to protect people from what they choose
to put into their own bodies. And about $50 billion annually in
taxpayer money is needed to carry out the policy, according to
government statistics.

Obviously, the invasion of Iraq isn't the only war in recent American
history based on faulty intelligence. The stated rationale for the
drug war, along with the war itself, is an utter farce. If the
government was truly interested in the health effects of illegal
drugs, it might pay heed to the reports of the Rand Corporation and
countless other studies: Education, prevention and treatment are far
more effective than police enforcement in both limiting the number of
users and curbing the most deleterious consequences of drug use.

But the real aims of the policy are something else entirely -- the
war on drugs serves as a method of social control. Hard drug use,
especially its trafficking, is most prevalent among the underclass.
This group is largely marginal to the U.S. economic system, so the
current drug laws do an effective job -- via aggressive police
enforcement -- in containing a superfluous yet potentially rebellious
population. They also effectively demonize the often poor and largely
minority cohorts associated with them, a necessary mechanism in
justifying the existence of millions of impoverished people in the
wealthiest country in the world. The results have been a massive
influx into the stupendously profitable prison-industrial complex --
more than one in 100 adults are now behind bars -- many of which are
nonviolent drug offenders.

For the rest of the population, the hysteria surrounding drug use
induces fear and, consequently, malleability. Similar in effect to
the bellowing about Islamic terrorism, the drug war forces people to
look to the paternalistic and ever-benign state for protection,
justifying the building up of the police state and military-industrial complex.

Drugs become illegal only when they come to be associated with the
poor. This allows for their demonization and accounts for the current
road toward the criminality of tobacco, a drug increasingly unpopular
among the educated and affluent. It also explains the wildly
disparate consequences for possession of crack cocaine and powdered cocaine.

No one can really predict the effects of complete drug
decriminalization. Illegal drugs are easy enough to obtain as it is,
and the only way to completely prevent their use is to alter the need
to experiment inherent in human nature. It is clear, however, that
the current policy is futile, wasteful and blatantly immoral. If
society is really interested in achieving the most humane and
rational solution to drug use, a good place to start would be an
honest discussion about the issue. For now, state policy and
propaganda serve as the biggest impediment to the beginning of such a dialogue.