LOSING THE WAR ON DRUGS: UNCLE SAM'S WAR, Part 1b

Billions Spent, But Drugs Still Sold, Used

Every society in history that could grow plants had drugs. These drugs
weren't just for stanching wounds and healing the sick. They were also
psychoactive drugs for altering sensation and consciousness. Few things can
be said to be practically universal among human societies. Psychoactive
drug use is one of them.

The Incans chewed the leaves of Erythroxylin coca, the coca bush, to
release the cocaine within. Ancient Egyptians, Romans, and many others grew
the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, which oozes the sap that becomes
opium, morphine and heroin. Buddhist Indians celebrated what we call
marijuana. Some North American aboriginals had peyote; others had
tobacco. Europeans had alcohol.

These drugs were fixtures in their respective cultures, and it was the
rules of the cultures that regulated their use. Only in the 20th century
did the idea of states issuing sweeping bans, backed by police and prison,
become the standard method of controlling drug use. Only in the 20th
century did governments feel they could engineer societies without drugs.

Today, the "war on drugs" is, after wars on humans, the most sustained,
co-ordinated and well-financed international effort in history. Tens of
billions of dollars are spent every year by rich nations. Billions more are
spent by desperately poor countries.

Armies carry out assaults to control the fields where the plants grow.
Airplanes and helicopters spray poison on them, platoons of workers dig
them up by hand. Farmers are paid not to grow them. And still the plants
are harvested.

Police forces, air forces and armies mobilize against those who turn the
plants into drugs and ship them out. In this struggle, thousands upon
thousands of law enforcers are killed. And still the plants are turned into
drugs and shipped.

Satellites and advanced radar watch for the drugs in transit. Armies stand
ready to intercept. At borders, behind steel walls, entire police forces
stand guard to keep the drugs out. And still the drugs cross thousands of
miles of ocean and land and get in.

To keep the drugs from being sold and used, police forces dedicate tens of
thousands of officers to hunt down sellers and buyers, a job so difficult
they are sometimes forced to bend the law and lie in court. Legislators
constantly expand police powers, eroding civil liberties. Millions are
charged and jailed, creating a vast, profitable industry that lobbies to
have even more people imprisoned. Hiding from the police and buying
unregulated drugs, users are killed by overdose, by tainted drugs, and by
diseases like AIDS contracted by sharing dirty needles.

Still the drugs are sold, and still the drugs are used.

And throughout this whole, disastrous effort, international organized crime
fattens itself on the immense profits of the illegal drug trade. It grows
richer and more powerful than ever before in history. The traffickers'
bribes corrupt whole societies. Their fights over market share kill
thousands of young toughs with nothing to lose, turning streets into urban
battlefields and taking the lives of innocents.

And it goes on year after year, decade after decade. It goes on so long,
people forget why and how it started in the first place.

In 1930, Fiorello La Guardia, a New York congressman who would become the
legendary mayor of New York City, spoke out against the criminal
prohibition of alcohol in the United States. Ten years of the "noble
experiment" had produced only misery, he concluded. "People are being
poisoned, bootleggers are being enriched, and government officials are
being corrupted." Worst of all, La Guardia said, the ban had created
"contempt and disregard for the law all over the country," as he had
predicted a year before Prohibition came into force.

La Guardia despaired. The failure of Prohibition was obvious to anyone who
cared to look, but still "politicians are ducking, candidates are hedging,
the Anti-Saloon League prospering." It seemed to him that the madness would
never end.

Yet, when La Guardia spoke, Prohibition had only three more years left to
it. Americans in 1930 remembered the very real harms done by alcohol before
it was banned in 1920. But they also saw that bad as those harms were, they
weren't nearly as terrible as the damage done by Prohibition itself. Being
able to contrast the two situations, Americans decided to legalize alcohol
in 1933.

Today, the historical memory that saved the United States from Prohibition
is lost. In North America, it has been seven, eight or nine decades since
drugs such as cocaine and opium were criminalized by a handful of activists
informed mainly by bad science and racist myths. We have had drug
prohibition so long, we've forgotten where it came from. We've had it for
so long, we can't imagine anything else. We have been fighting the war on
drugs so long that the terrible damage the war causes seems unfortunate but
unavoidable -- if it is acknowledged at all.

We aren't asking ourselves what Americans asked in 1933: Does the criminal
prohibition of a drug do more harm than good?

Beginning today and in the following days, this series will look at the
ways governments try to stop the flow of illegal drugs, the results and the
unintended consequences of these efforts. While we may not be able to rely
on personal memory to decide if prohibition does more harm than good, we
can look at the evidence.

Perhaps then we will also ask if there isn't some better way to deal with
the drugs that human societies have lived with for millennia.