WHAT WAR HAS WROUGHT

The War on Drugs: When the Solution Is Worse Than the Problem

The cover story by News Editor Curt Guyette in last week's Metro
Times turned the spotlight on a particularly odious episode in the
annals of the local law enforcement community, spelling out the terms
of an unholy collusion between a paid narcotics informer and the
Inkster Police Department, the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office and a
Wayne County circuit court judge to use perjured testimony in their
zealous effort to convict an accused drug smuggler fingered by the snitch.

Everything about this case stinks, but the worst part is that the
extensive illegal conduct by these local minions of the War on Drugs
perfectly exemplifies the methodology of persecution practiced
throughout the contemporary law enforcement industry.

Only the most nave, cynical or deluded among us can subscribe to the
pervasive mythology of drug police, prosecutors and judges as
fearless warriors valiantly fighting a depraved horde of heartless
pushers and evil dope fiends whose anti-social pursuit of
self-gratification by getting high threatens to destroy the American
way of life and everything it stands for.

The War on Drugs has served primarily to construct a police state
apparatus basically unchecked in its pursuit of power and control
over elements of our society deemed undesirable and detrimental to
the economic and cultural forces that shape and direct our national life.

Start with this: There's nothing intrinsically wrong with getting
high. People have been getting high as long as there have been
people. People get high on beer, wine, whiskey, vodka and gin without
criminal sanction. They get high on pills prescribed by their doctors
or purchased on the black market. And people get high on marijuana or
cocaine or heroin or whatever they desire for the physical and mental effects.

People get high when they want to. They obtain the drugs they crave
however and wherever they can, and if they can't buy them over the
counter somewhere they will find them in the drug underworld and pay
whatever price is required to get what they want. People are
relentless in their pursuit of the drugs they want to get high on,
and they generally devise some sort of way to make it happen despite
the various obstacles thrust in their way by economic circumstances,
physical dislocation and the formidable forces of law and order
arrayed against them wherever they turn.

Marijuana was legal in the United States until 1937. Cocaine could be
purchased over drugstore counters until well into the 20th century,
and heroin wasn't really demonized until the second half of the
1940s. In passing their draconian laws against use, possession and
distribution of these once-tolerated recreational substances, our
federal and state legislative bodies repeatedly cited ethnic and
cultural minorities as the principal offenders and feared that their
example would corrupt and undermine the very fabric of American life.

Marijuana and cocaine were demonized as engines of erratic and
dangerous social behavior, geeking up black men and Mexicans to
commit sexual assaults on white women and making the fiends unfit to
function as productive members of the work force and responsible
Christian citizens. Jazz and swing musicians, poets and writers,
painters and other artists were tarred with the brush of illegal drug
use and tormented by the narcotics police and their burgeoning
consort of rat bastards and snitches.

Illicit drug use was pretty much an underground phenomenon confined
to the ranks of ethnic minorities and the bohemian element until the
hippie movement erupted out of suburban America in the 1960s. Legions
of white, middle-class youths turned their backs on the prescribed
way of life and embraced the cultural leadership of people of color
and renegade Caucasians exemplified by persons like Allen Ginsberg
and Timothy Leary.

Music suddenly became central to life for millions of young white
Americans - not the lily-white music of their parents, but
African-American music grounded in the realities experienced by the
victims of a segregated social order and charged with unprecedented
emotion and human feeling. At the same time, the courage and moral
authority manifested in the civil rights movement inspired hippies to
dream visions of social justice, nonviolent resistance, world peace
and a radical new way of life.

Black people fighting for their lives and demanding their freedom,
white youth rejecting the skewed reality of their parents, refusing
to fight their wars and trying to construct the world of their dreams
- - these were new and dangerous challenges to the hegemony of the
people in charge of America, and they demanded innovative new
strategies and tactics in the struggle for continued supremacy.

The battle against the Red Menace that fueled the machinery of the
forces of law and order had been raging since the end of World War I
and the establishment of communism in the Soviet Union, reaching its
peak in the early 1950s. American Reds were demonized as agents of
the Communist International and persecuted for "un-American"
political views. Their movement could be contained by the FBI and its
sympathizers in commerce, industry and the courts, and culturally
they posed little challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy.

But the soul power of blacks and the flower power of hippies were
radically different. Both mass movements sprang from the daily lives
of people who, in the first instance, had been locked out of any
opportunity to share in the vast national wealth and, in the second,
had been groomed to operate the oppressive machinery of the ownership
class and were now refusing to follow the program.

Both movements were fueled by passion and high ideals, yearning for a
social order that would promote life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness and guarantee equal opportunity. This would never do: There
would never be a place in the economic order for the masses of people
of color in this segregated nation, and the white renegades had to be
forced back into compliance with the iron rules of consumerism.

This is where the War on Drugs has its start. The phony rhetoric of
the drug warriors served to divert public attention from the
righteous social concerns of blacks and hippies and brand them
instead as enemies of society who must be hounded, snitched on,
dragged into court, locked away, stripped of their possessions and
otherwise removed from real life. If they escaped arrest and
prosecution for their illicit behaviors they would still live their
lives in a state of fear and trembling that the narcotics police
would find them out.

I'm out of space for this episode, but what I really wanted to say
was that the sensational Wayne County case detailed by Curt Guyette
is a compelling example of the way our legal system routinely
operates as a key component in maintaining the established economic,
cultural and political order. This is a rotten system, and they'll do
anything to keep it in place - and never forget that the War on Drugs
is a really big part of the big picture.

Like I've said here before, try to imagine a world without the War on
Drugs. This would be a whole different place indeed.