THE DRUG WAR: A WAR ON POOR, LOWER CLASSES

Historically, the drug wars have been a pretext for social and political
repression.

We believe the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse
itself." This was the banner on a double-page ad in the New York Times on
Monday, timed to coincide with the big United Nations' special session in
New York on drugs. Hundreds of prominent people from around the world signed
on to the view that the drug war has been a disaster and "the time has come
for a truly open and honest dialogue about future global drug control
policies."

The statements to which the signatories put their names are mostly
unimpeachable common sense: "Drug war politics impede public health efforts
to stem the spread of HIV, hepatitis and other infectious diseases. Human
rights are violated, environmental assaults perpetrated and prisons
inundated with hundreds of thousands of drug law violators."

All true, and every phrase repeated, proved and doubly proved year after
year.

So why does the drug war grind on, decade after decade, immune to reason,
often grotesque in its hypocrisy? How can one listen without laughing to the
solemn posturing of the U.S. government about the recent sting on Mexican
banks for their washing of drug money, without a word about corresponding
drug-money laundering by U.S. banks?

The answer is plain enough, particularly if one takes a look at the history
of drug wars over the past 150 years. These drug wars are either enterprises
that expand the drug trade or pretexts for social and political repression.
In either case, the aim of halting the production, shipment and consumption
of drugs is not on the agenda.

In the mid-19th century, the British fought two drug wars to force the
Chinese to accept imports of opium from India. Nearly a century and a half
later, as it contemplated intervention against the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan, the Carter administration initiated the spending of covert
billions on what was, if we view it realistically, another drug war, as one
of President Carter's own advisors predicted. As he later recalled, David
Musto, a White House member of the president's Council on Drug Abuse, told
his boss that "we were going into Afghanistan to support the opium growers
in their rebellion against the Soviets."

As covert U.S. military aid soared, so did Afghan opium production, tripling
between 1979 and 1982. By 1982, in U.N. and Drug Enforcement Administration
figures, the Afghan heroin producers--romanticized by U.S. politicians and
press as "freedom fighters"--had captured 60% of the heroin market in
Western Europe and the U.S. They had of course the all-important asset of
being anti-communist.

All the millions sent by the U.S. to Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico, allegedly
to battle drug lords, have never made a dent in the drug trade. But they
have helped Latin American armies and police crush peasant insurgencies and
murder labor organizers.

Domestically, the "drug war" has always been a pretext for social control,
going back to the racist application of drug laws against Chinese laborers
in the recession of the 1870s when these workers were viewed as competition
for the dwindling number of jobs available. The main users, middle-class
white men and women taking opium in liquid form as "tonics," weren't
harassed. But the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed Chinese opium addicts to be
arrested and deported.

In the 1930s, the racist head of the federal Bureau of Narcotics and
Dangerous Drugs, Harry Anslinger, was renaming hemp as "marijuana" to
associate it with Mexican laborers and claiming that marijuana could "arouse
in blacks and Hispanics a state of menacing fury or homicidal attack."

As he was so often, President Nixon was helpfully explicit in his private
remarks. H.R. Haldeman recorded in his diary a briefing by the president in
1969, prior to launching of the war on drugs: "Nixon emphasized that you
have to face the fact the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to
devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

So what was "the system" duly devised? The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, with
its 29 new minimum mandatory sentences, and the 100-to-1 sentencing ratio
between possession of crack and powder cocaine, became a system for locking
up a disproportionate number of black people.

So to call for a "truly open and honest dialogue" about drug policy, as all
those distinguished signatories in the advertisement requested, is about as
realistic as asking the U.S. government to nationalize the oil industry.
Essentially, the drug war is a war on the poor and the dangerous classes,
here and elsewhere. How many governments are going to give up on that?

Checked-by: "Rolf Ernst"