CASUALTTIES OF WAR

BY Craig Reinerman and Harry G. Levine

POLITICIANS are beating on the old drug-war drum again. President Clinton
recently proposed a record $17 billion National Drug Control Strategy. It
includes a five-year, billion-dollar anti-drug advertising campaign,
millions of dollars of grants to anti-drug organizations, ambitious new
long-term performance goals for the 50 federal agencies involved in drug
control, and still more money for police, prisons and border patrols.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich immediately blasted the strategy as ``a
hodgepodge of half-steps'' that is the ``definition of failure,'' and
charged the president with having a ``timid, defeatist attitude'' about
drug problems. As an alternative, Gingrich called for ``a World War
II-style victory campaign against illegal drugs.'' The president's drug
czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, shot back, denouncing Gingrich as
``irresponsible.''

Does any of this sound familiar? In the mid-1980s politicians of both
parties drug-baited each other for being ``soft on drugs'' while calling
for increasingly punitive and expensive drug war policies. Presidents
Reagan and Bush led the charge, having their own urine tested for evidence
of drug use. The media uncritically reported even the wildest
unsubstantiated claims about crack cocaine -- the latest chemical bogeyman
- -- and reporters competed to tell hair-raising drug horror stories, no
matter how atypical.

Then, members of Congress, citing all the media coverage they had helped to
create, passed the harshest drug laws in the Western world, requiring long
mandatory minimum sentences for possession of small amounts of crack. In
the course of the crack scare, politicians never met a drug-war weapon they
didn't like. As a result, annual drug-war spending has increased 16-fold
since 1980.

Some of this might be funny if it weren't so expensive, repressive and
ineffective. The drug war unleashed by the crack scare has had horrendous
consequences, especially for young inner-city men and women.

The wishfully named ``Drug-Free America Act'' of 1986, followed by a string
of even harsher drug laws, caused the most massive wave of imprisonment in
U.S. history. The Justice Department recently reported that nearly
1,750,000 Americans were locked up in jail or prison in 1997 -- double the
number of a decade earlier. In 1985, our incarceration rate was 313 per
100,000 population. Now it is 645 per 100,000, which is three to 10 times
higher than rates of the other modern democratic societies. The largest
single factor contributing to this imprisonment wave is an eight-fold rise
in drug arrests. In 1980, when illicit drug use was peaking, there were
about 50,000 men and women in prison for violating drug laws. Last year,
there were about 400,000. According to Dr. Alfred Blumstein, a professor at
Carnegie Mellon University and the former president of the American Society
of Criminology, the current incarceration rate for drug offenders alone is
higher than the incarceration rate for all crimes combined during the
half-century from the 1920s into the 1970s.

African-Americans have unfairly borne the brunt of this imprisonment
epidemic. National Institute on Drug Abuse surveys show that drug use is
more or less proportionately distributed across racial and class
categories. But because the drug war's weapons are aimed selectively at the
street, the people most often caught in the crosshairs are poor blacks and
Latinos. This deepens their distrust of the legal system and their rage at
the racism American society tolerates.

Laws passed during the crack scare worsened all this by mandating a minimum
five-year prison sentence for possessing a mere 5 grams of crack cocaine
(worth a few hundred dollars), while it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine
to trigger the same five-year mandatory minimum. This 100-to-1 sentencing
disparity has become profoundly racist because crack-cocaine users are
disproportionately black while powder-cocaine users are overwhelmingly
white. There is no pharmacological or other scientific justification for
this gaping disparity between the sentences meted out to those who ingest
cocaine one way and those who ingest cocaine another way. The non-partisan
U.S. Sentencing Commission has recommended that the disparity be
eliminated, and even drug czar McCaffrey agrees. Yet, neither political
party has moved to right this wrong for fear of being labeled ``soft on
drugs'' by the other.

All this imprisonment has had the paradoxical effect of increasing rather
than decreasing the number of inner-city youth in the drug trade. In many
poor communities, the illicit drug business is the only growth industry and
the only truly equal opportunity employer. As hundreds of thousands of
low-level drug workers were arrested and imprisoned, hundreds of thousands
more moved into the available jobs. The net result has been many more young
people involved with illicit drugs than would have been the case if arrests
had focused mainly on large-scale dealers.

And for all of this, the Drug Enforcement Administration's own reports show
that both cocaine and heroin are purer and cheaper than they were 10 years
ago. In other words, after tens of billions of dollars and a decade of drug
war, the targeted drugs are in greater supply than ever.

We think Clinton's and Gingrich's call for more drug war is wrong because
the ``War on Drugs'' has already: 1) dramatically increased the number of
low-level, non-violent criminals in prison for long periods of time
(especially African-Americans); 2) increased the number of young blacks and
Latinos selling, using, and often becoming addicted to drugs; and 3)
created an atmosphere of political intimidation in which leaders in neither
party can even speak of drug policy alternatives. Other Western countries,
with very similar patterns of drug use, are handling their drug problems
more effectively without drug wars.

In recent years, American students have been given more anti-drug education
in school and have been bombarded with more anti-drug advertisements in the
media than any generation in history. Yet their experimentation with drugs,
and their general drug-use patterns, remain much like that of their peers
in other developed Western countries. Contrary to the political and media
hype, compared to other Western societies, the United States has not been
having an ``epidemic'' of teenage or adult drug use.

While American drug use is unremarkable, its drug problems and its drug
policy are the most severe in the Western world. No other industrial
country has the rates of heroin and crack cocaine addiction of the United
States. None has our rate of drug-related AIDS transmission. None has our
rates of imprisonment and our tax bill for that imprisonment.

All Western European countries, along with Canada, Australia and New
Zealand, have instituted needle exchange programs and/or pharmacy sale of
syringes to reduce the spread of AIDS. Needle exchange programs have been a
stunning success and every scientific commission to review the evidence has
recommended their adoption. Yet, to this day, politicians in Washington do
not permit federal money to be spent on needle exchange. As a result, the
United States still has the fastest-growing AIDS population in the Western
world.

Most other Western countries are moving in the direction of decriminalizing
personal possession and use of marijuana or have done so already --
including the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Poland,
Australia and New Zealand. In most regions of those countries, and
increasingly in many other countries, people are not arrested and put in
jail for possessing a small amount of marijuana.

Policymakers in those places have been influenced by the fact that every
scientific body in the 20th century that has examined the evidence about
marijuana has concluded that its use is much less risky than that of
cocaine or heroin, and probably significantly less risky than alcohol or
cigarettes. Right now, for example, Great Britain is in the midst of a
major debate about marijuana policy with members of Parliament, prominent
scientists, and major newspapers calling for decriminalization. In the
United States, on the other hand, the number of people arrested for
possessing marijuana continues to grow. In 1997, more than 600,000 people
were arrested simply for possessing marijuana. Despite the clear intent of
voters in California and Arizona, even medicinal use of marijuana by cancer
and AIDS patients under a physician's care remains a jailable offense.

Drug abuse, drug dependence, drug addiction, and the medical problems
resulting from drug use are health issues and should be dealt with as such.
In Europe, and increasingly in the United States, people seeking
alternatives to drug wars talk about ``harm reduction policies'': needle
exchange, methadone maintenance, experiments with heroin maintenance,
various other forms of treatment. Physicians and public health workers
should be dealing with drug problems, not police and prison guards.

Drug wars are not an ``investment in our future.'' They are frauds on the
taxpayers. If we want kids to say no to drugs, we need to give them
something they can say yes to: good schools; sports, music and art
programs; a future with decent jobs.

If we want to substantially reduce inner-city hard drug abuse -- heavy
heroin and crack use -- we must substantially reduce poverty. Drug wars and
the massive imprisonment of drug users -- what we have now, and what
Clinton and Gingrich threaten even more of -- are expensive, repressive,
and harmful. There is another way.

Craig Reinarman is a professor of sociology and legal studies at the
University of California-Santa Cruz.

Harry G. Levine is professor of sociology at Queens College, City
University of New York. Their new book, ``Crack in America: Demon Drugs and
Social Justice,'' was published last fall by the University of California
Press. They wrote this article for Perspective.