LOSING THE WORD WAR

Leonard Pitts Jr. had an excellent editorial entitled "Battle of words
in War on Drugs" in the July 19 Juneau Empire. In it, he points out
that we have spent untold billions of dollars, ruined untold millions
of lives and racked up the highest incarceration rate in the world to
fight drug use and he concludes that the War on Drugs is a failure. To
help clarify just why it is such a failure I'd like to expand on his
thinking about the battle of words a bit.

In order to survive as a congruent civilization, all cultures must
determine how they will categorize the human behaviors of its members
and thereby develop social mores, regulations, laws, rules and social
expectations which help to make life more predictable and minimize
social chaos. The primary behavioral categories are good, bad, sick,
stupid, and crazy. Thus social means are developed to reward the good,
punish the bad, cure the sick, educate the stupid, and contain the
crazy.

How any given behavior is categorized has an enormous impact on how
the society responds and how it employs its resources to address the
behavior. Because drug use was labeled 'bad,' we have, as Pitts points
out, spent untold billions of dollars, ruined untold millions of lives
and racked up the highest incarceration rate in the world, and
completely failed to solve the problem. We focused nearly all of our
resources on punishing the bad guys. Thus the rampant incarceration,
coupled with extensive federal, state, and local agencies and
departments engaged in everything from clandestine investigations to
high school drug-testing programs. Also, there is now a strong focus
on looking outside ourselves to solve the problem by trying to 'close
the borders,' putting pressure on Mexico, Columbia, Afghanistan, and
many other countries to stop trafficking in drugs.

Suppose we had labeled drug use stupid instead of bad. We might have
directed those untold billions of dollars and hours of work to
educating our citizens to find other means of satisfying their needs
than illicit drugs. Imagine major drug education programs in every
public school at every level (not just high school age, but
kindergarten through 12th grade) and in every undergraduate college
and university. Or, if we had labeled the behavior sick instead of
bad, we might have used major portions of those wasted resources to
develop extensive drug rehabilitation programs.

The point is, how we label behaviors dictates how we respond. Just in
our lifetime alcoholism has gone from bad to sick - thus facilitating
a different response to that behavior.

The phrase 'war on drugs' is a metaphor, and as George Lakoff and Mark
Johnson point out in their book "Metaphors We Live By," how we use
words to frame our behavior often creates our reality. The use of
drugs is not something one can go to war with, nor is an ideology
something we can go to war with. And yet through the metaphor 'war on
terrorism,' we have constructed a reality that has permitted us to
invade and occupy two foreign countries which have in no way
threatened us and in doing so we have sacrificed the lives of
thousands of our own young people and the lives of hundreds of
thousands of the citizens who live in those countries.

Meanwhile the 'war on terrorism,' being a misnomer, can't actually be
won and must go on forever unless we choose to follow the lead of most
other countries in the world and categorize terrorism as a criminal
act rather than an act of war. The War on Drugs metaphor does indeed
have a valuable lesson to teach us about the cost of the misuse of
words.