THE ROOTS OF THE FIASCO

From Shoddy Premises to Final 'Failure,' a Look at the War on Drugs

I'd like to start off the new year, if I may, with a radical look at
the War on Drugs -- a close look at its roots and at the ugly growths
that have resulted in America's failing social order today.

I'd like to take as my text a statement by -- of all people -- TV
evangelist Pat Robertson, who commented recently on his 700 Club
broadcast on the Christian Broadcasting Network: "We're locking up
people that take a couple of puffs of marijuana, and the next thing
you know they've got 10 years.

"I'm not exactly for the use of drugs -- don't get me wrong," Pat
said, "but I just believe that criminalizing the possession of a few
ounces of pot and that kind of thing, I mean it's costing us a
fortune and it's ruining young people. Young people go into prison
.. as youths and they come out as hardened criminals, and it's not a
good thing." Robertson's spokespersons later tried to back away,
saying that he only wanted government to "revisit the severity of the
existing laws," but the episode is telling.

Our subtext is provided by the Associated Press in a piece cited by
Tony Newman in Alternet last month. The AP headline: "The U.S. drug
war has met none of its goals." The AP said, "After 40 years, the
United States War on Drugs has cost 1 trillion dollars and hundreds
of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence
more brutal and widespread."

"This year," Newman adds, "Mexico President Calderon called for a
debate on drug legalization to help reduce the bloody war in Mexico.
Former Mexico President Vicente Fox has since gone further and called
for an end to prohibition. Just last week, United Kingdom's Bob
Ainsworth, the former drugs and defense minister, called for the
legalization and regulation of drugs.

"All of this follows a 2009 report by three former Latin American
presidents, Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, Cesar Gaviria of
Colombia and Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, where they called the drug
war a failure and emphasized the need to 'break the taboo' on an open
and honest discussion on international drug policy."

"An open and honest discussion" would lead first to an examination of
what the War on Drugs is all about: Why do they have a War on Drugs?
What are its goals? Who are the combatants? Why has there been no
measurable success at all?

First off, it's not a war on drugs per se, because all sorts of drugs
are more prevalent than ever, and the pharmaceutical industry is
indeed the most profitable of enterprises, but it's a war on
recreational drugs and their users.

The purpose of the War on Drugs is to persecute and punish users of
recreational drugs in an effort basically to try to keep people from
getting high on substances ruled illegal by a political process with
little regard for medical or moral niceties -- nor for due process of
law, for that matter.

Recreational drugs like marijuana, cocaine and heroin were once
legal. One day, through some mystical process that took place in the
houses of Congress and in state legislative bodies in turn, each of
them was determined to be illegal.

Marijuana was declared a narcotic. The narcotics themselves were
deemed to have no redeeming social value whatsoever. Users and
suppliers would be subject to long punitive sentences up to and
including life in prison, and there would be no provision for medical
or mental health uses. The shit would be illegal, period. Case closed.

This "tissue of horseshit" (as William Burroughs would put it) was
sold to lawmakers and the nation's press by a creep named Harry
Anslinger not long after the repeal of alcohol prohibition (remember
that?) in 1933. Four years later, the idiotic marijuana laws were
enacted by Congress with absolutely no convincing medical evidence in
support, and users of cocaine and heroin began to be characterized as
bigger threats to society than bank robbers or kidnappers.

Like the great novelist Upton Sinclair (no relation) pointed out, as
cited by Paul Armentano on AlterNet: "It is difficult to get a man to
understand something, when his salary depends upon his not
understanding it." Quickly, however, the stakes progressed beyond
simply Herr Anslinger's measly salary to spawn a vast legion of drug
law enforcement personnel that gradually reshaped our nation's
approach to the very nature of law enforcement itself.

This is all in my own lifetime. I was born four years after marijuana
was criminalized, started smoking weed in 1962, and was a criminal
user of marijuana until the age of 67, when I was recognized as a
medical marijuana patient by the same State of Michigan that had held
me for three years in its various prisons some 40 years before.

I started my own war against the marijuana laws 46 years ago this
very month, even before the government admitted that there was a War
on Drugs -- or better said, a war on drug users. The drugs weren't
going anywhere, and in fact the government itself has arguably been
responsible for importing massive quantities of heroin and other
drugs from Afghanistan and Southeast Asia since World War II.

The drug user is a pretty easy target for the drug police. The real
criminal elements who present a law enforcement problem are the
large-scale suppliers of drugs to the recreational drug users, and
they're a problem because incredible sums of money are at stake in
their operations as a result of the criminality of the drugs themselves.

If the drugs were legal, these people would be druggists, not
criminal drug dealers, they would purvey a uniformly high-quality
product and they would be taxed on their sales and earnings. Duh!
Instead both users and suppliers are viciously demonized by the
forces of law and order, and their parrots in the press, persecuted
as a danger to society, and subjected to the entire range of
penalties and punishments mandated by the lawmakers.

While I'm sick of hammering at the same old wall -- not only for the
past few months in this column but almost my entire adult life --
somebody's got to say something to try to break this issue open and
end the War on Drugs at last. There's progress on several important
fronts, and the incessant hammering on the wall is beginning to be
heard over the babble of law enforcement, legislators and the
sensational media.

But we're fighting a fearsome opponent whose dimensions are revealed
in news bites like these gleaned from an AP story by Barry Hatton and
Martha Mendoza: "Arrests for marijuana possession in California
totaled 61,000 last year -- roughly triple the number in 1990" and
"The U.S. is spending $74 billion this year on criminal and court
proceedings for drug offenders, compared with $3.6 billion for treatment."

Hatton and Mendoza point out that "the first drug court in the U.S.
opened 21 years ago. By 1999, there were 472; by 2005, 1,250. This
year, new drug courts opened every week around the U.S., as states
faced budget crises exacerbated by the high rate of incarceration on
drug offenses. There are now drug courts in every state, more than
2,400 serving 120,000 people."

Now, they say, "even [U.S. drug czar] Kerlikowske has called for an
end to the 'War on Drugs' rhetoric. 'Calling it a war really limits
your resources,' he said. 'Looking at this as both a public safety
problem and a public health problem seems to make a lot more sense.'"

No shit, Sherlock. How about ending the rhetoric and the War on Drugs
itself -- starting today? Happy New Year, everybody.

- --Amsterdam, Dec. 29-31, 2010