DRUG HYSTERIA

Canadian filmmaker Ron Mann's excellent new documentary, Grass, traces
the absurd history of the national campaign to stamp out marijuana
use, a century-long exercise in official hysteria and futility. Using
reams of exhaustively researched period material, Mann recounts a
highly symbolic culture war that takes a slightly different form in
each generation. Among the film's highlights are its contrapuntal
anthologies of drug themed pop music and melodramatic anti-drug
propaganda of the Reefer Madness variety. Indeed, Reefer Madness is
among the more sophisticated examples of foolishness produced by the
drug warriors, led by the original Narco-Man, the Drug Enforcement
Agency's Harry Anslinger.

From the comfort of an Austin theater seat, drug war history can seem
largely comical, a retro melodrama in which everyone plays his
appointed role, and nobody gets hurt.

Would that it were so. As Nate Blakeslee's story in this issue
confirms, the drug war continues across the country, and leaving in
its wake thousands of real victims: mostly ordinary people whose drug
transgressions are punished with an official zeal entirely out of
proportion to any real public danger. In this instance, a tiny
African-American community in a small Panhandle town was targeted for
an undercover assault, which supposedly apprehended dozens of "drug
dealers" among people barely making ends meet. It was a campaign
against lawbreakers hardly constituting a public nuisance, let alone a
crime wave. Even more shameless was the nature of the operation:
dozens of cases were made solely on the basis of the uncorroborated
testimony of a single undercover officer, with a dubious history. That
the authorities focused their efforts on a minority community excluded
from the town's white society and economy compounds the official disgrace.

It is comforting to believe that the Tulia story is the is a rare
exception, and that abuses by enforcement agencies are uncommon. But
the Observer's reporting suggests the opposite. In his background
research, Nate discovered a largely unreported drug war fiasco from
ten years ago, involving a dishonest undercover officer in Sutton
County and a slew of dismissed indictments and overturned convictions.
Over the past year, Nate has covered other such stories:

- -In West Texas, a task force besotted by asset confiscation and
weaponry moving into paramilitary operations aimed at mythical
smugglers and real illegal immigrants.

- -In San Marcos, another task force engaging in paramilitary arrests
over a few ounces of pot killing a supposed "drug dealer" previously
entrapped by a disreputable informant.

It doesn't stop there. Three years ago we reported on the killing of
teenage goat-herd(sic) Ezekial Hernandez by U.S. Marines on a
counter-drug patrol near the Mexican border. That tragedy produced
only a temporary abatement in the desire of federal authorities to
militarize the border on behalf of the drug war. Such violent
flashpoints tend to obscure the war's more mundane, day-to-day
flouting of civil rights, which has become frighteningly commonplace.
A few weeks ago, yet another task force invaded Midwestern State
University dorms. with a flagrantly unconstitutional search justified
as a way to "protect" its victims. meanwhile the prisons fill with
"drug criminals" whose misfortune was to be caught (or entrapped) in
possession of the wrong intoxicant. Now we are told that another
round of prison construction will soon be necessary.

The lives ruined in the name of the drug war are just the domestic
aspect of a national madness that transcends our own borders. The
Congressional drumbeat for literal drug war in Colombia, with U.S.
helicopters, defoliant, and the ominous dispatching of "military
advisors," is yet another attempt to expand a hysterical and
counterproductive policy which cannot and will not work, except to
intensify a larger and more sinister militarization of the whole society.

One might think that a presidential campaign in which the current
incumbent, as well as his would-be successors from both major parties,
has each effectively confessed to youthful experimentation with drugs
might signal a cultural sea-change, and a reexamination of the failure
of prohibition. Instead, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and George W. Bush -
none of whom ran any serious risk of legal repercussions for his
youthful "crimes" - has each done his part, in the name of law and
order, to reinforce the hysteria of the law enforcement model of drug
control which strikes the hardest at those who can least defend
themselves.