THE STRAIGHT DOPE

In The War On Drugs, America's Soul Is The Casualty

The drug warriors among us mock even the concept of drug law "reform." They
dismiss it as the far-out whimsy of subscribers to Mother Jones magazine
and billionaire oddballs like George Soros. The genuine conservatives
calling out for reform -- the likes of William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman
and former Secretary of State George Shultz -- are just ignored.

But after 28 years of fighting Richard Nixon's war, the drug warriors have
a lot to answer for.

The pathology of the illegal drug industry this war has created doesn't
stop at glassy-eyed addicts or strutting, anarchic hoodlums. It seeps into
everything.

It sat with a Los Angeles jury that in 1995 refused to find O.J. Simpson
guilty of his wife's murder. The TV legal analysts hung
a Jeffersonian-sounding term on the jury's rebellion -- "jury
nullification," they called it.

But in effect it was a verdict rendered by a jury majority of Black men and
women who could not countenance sending a high-profile man of color into the
"system" that they'd seen eat up a quarter of all American Black men,
largely via their involvement in the drug trade. The war on drugs set O.J. free.

Counting what Americans spend annually on illegal drugs and what the cops
spend to fight drug trafficking, over $100 billion changes hands each year
in the United States as a consequence of the drug war. But dollars are the
least of the costs.

The highest tariff of the war on drugs is its charge against the nation's soul.

Those charges include a vast underground marketing campaign that infuses
its very young set of consumers -- of all classes and races -- with the
ethos of a criminal culture. It has made gang clothes, gang talk, gang
mannerisms, gang "tats" and gang mores an essential part of growing up
American. The charges include sweeping restrictions on civil liberties far
afield from issues that even are related to drugs. They are charges that
affect nearly every American, whether rich or poor, White or Black, young
or old.

Far more Whites than minorities use illicit drugs. In raw numbers, some 10
million White, non-Hispanic Americans had used illegal drugs within a month
of the 1998 national Household Survey on Drug Abuse, as opposed to 1.3
million Hispanics and 2 million African-Americans.

The percentage of Whites who had used drugs, in fact, was higher than
nearly any other racial group -- over 38 percent. But it is more the
sellers than the buyers who go to jail, and the swelling number of
minorities in prison on drug-industry convictions is exacting a terrible
social charge.

Consider "jury nullification." Consciously or otherwise, minority jurists
across the country are performing just such a measuring test.
In predominately Black Detroit, the felony acquittal rate for Black
defendants exceeds 30 percent, almost twice as high as the national average.

On one scale, such juries weigh the concept of justice as defined by a set
of laws. On the other, they are weighing the consequence of banishing yet
another young Black male into a prison system they believe is rigged
against minorities, especially those accused of committing the "crime" of
conducting the "business" of drugs. Increasingly, the fundamental glue of
the nation -- a system of laws, universally applied -- is being dissolved
by such attitudes. It is being dissolved by the war on drugs.

The drug culture infuses pop music, the youth-centric marketing campaigns
that sell that music, and, ultimately, the audience it targets.

The worst of pop -- "gangsta" rap -- as defined by its artists is an
evocation of life on the streets, a foul-mouthed romanticizing of the drug
trade and all that accompanies it: hyper-violence, throwaway sexuality and
an overt contempt for women, authority and traditional values of nearly
every stripe. Most of it is utterly nihilistic, more cynical than Lord of
the Flies author William Golding ever could have imagined. But, ironically,
the social ill that rap celebrates least is drug use. It is the industry
that matters -- the business that buys the cars, guns and clothes.

Virtually every television ad aimed at the pockets of teens mimics the
cultural accouterments of the drug life in some way. TV ads for potato
chips feature sanitized, energetic youth with knit caps down around their
ears doing "gang signal" things with their hands. As scrubbed by Madison
Avenue, it's all very cute. But how cute can a youth culture inspired by the
business of drugs really be? How deep into our pores has it sunk?

When Gov. Jane Hull and Attorney General Janet Napolitano released in May
their new policy guidelines to ensure Arizona's police officers wouldn't
employ "racial profiling" in making highway stops, they in effect were
tiptoeing through a racial minefield sowed by American anti-drug policy.

At street level, the drug industry is the business of urban minorities. In
purely rational terms, a state trooper cannot reasonably help but include
race as a factor in deciding to make a stop. If troopers suddenly began
stopping a racially balanced number of drivers on "suspicion" of drug
possession, they would be utterly wasting their time and our tax dollars.
Yet that rational, reasonable choice has evolved into one of the most
polarizing race-relations issues of our times. The reality of law-abiding
Black men and women being stopped by police at a greater rate than
law-abiding Whites is a foul and untenable consequence not of police
"racism," but of this nearly 30-year struggle with our appetites.

The war on drugs has helped render America an exponentially more violent
and dangerous place, recent crime downturns notwithstanding.

Lacking the "war," a case could be made that the polarizing American debate
over the proliferation of handguns would not exist.

The escalation of gun violence in America almost precisely tracks the
escalation of the war on drugs. In 1983, just 15 percent of New York City
teens who got into serious trouble were found to be packing guns. A decade
later, at the apex of New York's drug-industry-spawned murder epidemic,
that figure erupted to as high as 65 percent. It was in such an environment
that four undercover New York street cops in February 1999 chased street
peddler Amadou Diallo into the dark corridor of an apartment building and
fired 41 times at him. The cops who killed the unarmed African immigrant
had panicked, believing the wallet Diallo was extracting was a gun.

The unintended consequences of the war on drugs do not end with racial
schism or street violence. The 1970 federal Racketeer Influenced, Corrupt
Organizations Act -- or RICO -- is a law created to combat the increasing
influence of organized crime syndicates fueled by drug money. Today,
though, it has an ever-expanding list of applications.

RICO statutes have virtually militarized federal, state and local police
forces that often are self-financed with confiscated drug-industry loot,
creating an unholy, billion-dollar symbiosis with the industry they are
dedicated to taking down.

More insidiously, RICO's successes in the drug wars have prompted its
application in a host of other uses, alarming civil libertarians.

White-collar criminals, eco-terrorists, Wall Street insider traders,
video-store owners who rent X-rated tapes, anti-abortion protesters, and
even some local law enforcement agencies have been or are being threatened
with the heavy weight of instant property seizures and the prospect of
treble damages facing defendants who lose in court. If your cause is
politically unpopular, your liberty may be at risk, and you've got the drug
war to thank for it.

Internationally, the war on drugs often literally defines the relationship
of the United States and Latin America.

Mexico, which has struggled for decades with the corrupting influence of
drug-cartel billions, now chafes at U.S. trade deals that require Mexico to
measure up to U.S. drug-interdiction standards.

Mexican political turmoil over the years owes a lot to the American
appetite for illegal drugs. But no country suffers from American drug
policy more than does Colombia, the source of most of America's cocaine.

Locked in a virtual civil war for two decades with its enormously powerful
cartels -- a war exacerbated recently with an American commitment of $3.8
billion in "agricultural" aid that is to include the likes of Blackhawk
attack helicopters -- Colombia nevertheless must contend with its own
humiliating proof of bent-knee allegiance to America.

Under terms of the "Leahy Law" -- a congressional mandate that U.S.
military assistance be withheld from nations whose military has been
"credibly alleged" to have committed human-rights violations -- Colombia
annually must defend some of its top army officers from "credible
allegations" that many Colombians suspect are put-up jobs by the
cartel-financed Marxist guerrillas they are trying to defeat.

If the net result of all this social chaos were that America was cleansed
of drugs to some degree, the drug warriors could claim some victory. But
since Nixon declared war in 1973, drugs have become more prevalent, not
less. Regarding the drugs themselves, the war on drugs merely has managed
to make them more expensive and thus more lucrative to black marketeers.
And the driving force of the war -- keeping drugs from the hands of kids --
has proved to be the greatest failure of them all.

In a 1998 national availability study, 90.4 percent of high school seniors
reported obtaining marijuana to be "fairly easy" or "very easy," the
highest percentage ever reported. Over a third said obtaining heroin was
fairly or very easy -- up from 24 percent in 1975. Marijuana use within 30
days of the study by eighth-graders -- eighth-graders! -- tripled between
1991 and 1997 to over 10 percent. This is what the war to save the children
has wrought -- an efficient, indiscriminate black market that never asks a
customer for proof of age.

There are serious costs to be confronted by the legalization or
decriminalization of drugs. How does reform handle methamphetamines, for
example -- psychosis-inducing drugs, many of which would not exist were it
not for a drug war that rendered their production profitable?

But in 1914, the year an increasingly prohibitionist America first began
banning certain drugs, 1.3 percent of the population was addicted. In 1979,
just as the war on drugs was going into overdrive, 1.3 percent of us were
addicted.

Today, with 458,000 state and federal drug-war prisoners locked up -- most
of them minorities -- and with over $40 billion spent annually by local,
state and federal law enforcers to "interdict" the limitless supply, the
addicted among us still stand at 1.3 percent.

At what point do we say the drug war has done enough "for" the children? At
what point do we declare "victory" and move on?