Losing The War On Drugs, Introduction

WHY THE WAR ON DRUGS HAS FAILED: UNCLE SAM'S WAR

Uncle Sam's global campaign to end drug abuse has empowered criminals,
corrupted governments and eroded liberty, but still there are more addicts
than ever before.

On June 6, 1998, a surprising letter was delivered to Kofi Annan, secretary
general of the United Nations. "We believe," the letter declared, "that the
global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself."

The letter was signed by statesmen, politicians, academics and other public
figures. Former UN secretary general Javier Perez de Cuellar signed. So did
George Shultz, the former American secretary of state, and Joycelyn Elders,
the former American surgeon general. Nobel laureates such as Milton
Friedman and Argentina's Adolfo Perez Esquivel added their names. Four
former presidents and seven former cabinet ministers from Latin American
countries signed. And several eminent Canadians were among the signatories.

The drug policies the world has been following for decades are a
destructive failure, they said. Trying to stamp out drug abuse by banning
drugs has only created an illegal industry worth $400 billion U.S. "or
roughly eight per cent of international trade." The letter continued: "This
industry has empowered organized criminals, corrupted governments at all
levels, eroded internal security, stimulated violence, and distorted both
economic markets and moral values." And it concluded that these were the
consequences "not of drug use per se, but of decades of failed and futile
drug war policies."

This powerful statement landed on Mr. Annan's desk just as the United
Nations was holding a special assembly on global drug problems. Going into
that meeting, the governments of the world appeared all but unanimous in
the belief that the best way to combat drug abuse was to ban the
production, sale or possession of certain drugs. Drug prohibition, most
governments feel, makes harmful substances less available to people and far
more expensive than they would otherwise be. Combined with the threat of
punishment for using or selling drugs, prohibition significantly cuts the
number of people using these substances, thus saving them from the torment
of addiction and reducing the personal and social harms drugs can inflict.
For these governments -- and probably for most people in most countries --
drug prohibition is just common sense.

Still, the letter to Mr. Annan showed that this view is far from unanimous.
In fact, a large and growing number of world leaders and experts think the
war on drugs is nothing less than a humanitarian disaster.

Yet, governments are all but unanimous in supporting drug prohibition.
There is little debate at the official level. It's not easy to imagine
alternatives to a policy that has been in place for decades, especially
when few people remember how the policy came into being in the first place,
or why. "War on drugs" is a compelling sound bite, whereas the damage drug
prohibition may do is complex and impossible to summarize on a bumper sticker.

But the core reason the "war on drugs" completely dominates the official
policies of so many nations, including our own, is simple: The United
States insists on it.

The "international" war on drugs is a policy conceived, created and
enforced by the government of the United States of America. Originally,
nations were cajoled, prodded or bullied into joining it. Then it became
international orthodoxy, and today most national governments, including
Canada's, are enthusiastic supporters of prohibition. To the extent that
they debate drug policy at all, it is only to question how strictly or
harshly prohibition should be enforced, not whether the basic idea is sound.

The few officials and governments that do stray, even slightly, outside the
prohibition orthodoxy are cajoled, manipulated, or bullied to get back in.
The U.S. government does everything it can to prevent the views of
conscientious objectors being heard.

Drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and opium are linked in modern minds to
organized crime, street violence and junkies wasting away in crack dens.
But they weren't always thought of this way. These drugs were used for
centuries, even millennia, before they were criminalized in the 20th
century. Like alcohol today, they were produced, sold and purchased
legally. And like alcohol, the producers and sellers of these drugs were
usually ordinary merchants and companies that conducted their business
according to the laws of the day. They fought for market share with
advertisements and settled disputes with lawsuits, like any other business.

These legal markets for drugs clearly had their harms. As in every age and
every society, a small minority of the people who used what are now illegal
drugs became addicted and suffered. But the legal availability of what are
now illegal drugs did not create burgeoning plagues of drug addiction any
more than the legal availability of alcohol today has spawned an epidemic
of alcoholism.

For many well-intentioned activists of the late-19th and early-20th
centuries, that wasn't good enough. Agitation for bans on various drugs
grew in several countries, including Canada, where anti-Chinese racism in
British Columbia was expressed in wild myths about the Chinese practice of
opium-smoking, leading to a ban on opium in 1911.

But it was in the U.S., where the Puritan dream of building a morally
righteous "City on the Hill" has always been a potent social force, that
anti-drug activism took its strongest hold. The first goal was banning
alcohol, but many in the American temperance movement had even grander
designs. William Jennings Bryan, a former secretary of state and a pioneer
in the push to ban alcohol and other drugs, insisted in 1919, when alcohol
was about to be made illegal, that the U.S. must "export the gift of
Prohibition to other countries, turning the whole world dry." In 1900,
Reverend W.S. Crafts, an official in the Roosevelt administration, had
called for an even broader "international civilizing crusade against
alcohol and drugs."

Most of the early crusaders who wanted alcohol, opium, cocaine and other
drugs banned genuinely believed this would end drug problems: Simply make
drugs illegal and no one would sell, buy or use them. There would be no
more addiction, crime would fall, and drugs would be an unhappy memory. As
the American preacher Billy Sunday joyously proclaimed when the U.S. banned
alcohol in 1920, "The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be a
memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into
storehouses and corncribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and
children will laugh."

To the surprise of the pioneers of prohibition, people didn't stop using
drugs just because the law told them to. Banning drugs only succeeded in
stopping legitimate companies from supplying these substances. That left
the business of meeting people's drug demands to criminals.

In 1920, when alcohol was banned in the U.S., a rich and powerful criminal
class was spawned. And with it came a stupendous rise in violence and
corruption. Gangsters protected themselves from the law by buying off
officials at every level. They fought for market share not with
advertisements but guns. They settled disagreements not with lawsuits but
murders. And since they couldn't be sued or supervised by government
regulators, gangsters and smugglers often provided alcohol that was
adulterated or even poisonous, killing tens of thousands and leaving more
blind or paralysed.

These developments shocked Americans. Just 13 years after the U.S.
Constitution had been amended to create Prohibition, it was changed again
to legalize alcohol.

But other drugs, which had been banned only gradually with few apparent
repercussions due to the vastly lower demand for them, were not legalized.
Instead, the energy of the American anti-alcohol campaign turned on them.
Under the leadership of Harry Anslinger, Prohibition agent turned
anti-narcotics chief, the American government expanded its bans on drugs at
home and took up the "international civilizing crusade" with zeal.

(continued in Part 1b):