DRUG BUST

Friday marks the 40th anniversary of one of the biggest, most
expensive, most destructive social policy experiments in American
history: The war on drugs.

On the morning of June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon, speaking
from the Briefing Room of the White House, declared: "America's
public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to
fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out
offensive. I have asked the Congress to provide the legislative
authority and the funds to fuel this kind of an offensive. This will
be a worldwide offensive dealing with the problems of sources of
supply, as well as Americans who may be stationed abroad, wherever
they are in the world."

So began a war that has waxed and waned, sputtered and sprinted,
until it became an unmitigated disaster, an abomination of justice
and a self-perpetuating, trillion-dollar economy of wasted human
capital, ruined lives and decimated communities.

(Since 1971, more than 40 million arrests have been conducted for
drug-related offenses.)

And no group has been more targeted and suffered more damage than the
black community. As the A.C.L.U. pointed out last week, "The racial
disparities are staggering: despite the fact that whites engage in
drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans,
African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that
is 10 times greater than that of whites."

An effort meant to save us from a form of moral decay became its own
insidious brand of moral perversion - turning people who should have
been patients into prisoners, criminalizing victimless behavior,
targeting those whose first offense was entering the world wrapped in
the wrong skin. It feeds our achingly contradictory tendency toward
prudery and our overwhelming thirst for punishment.

Last week, the Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy, a
19-member commission that included Kofi Annan, a former U.N.
secretary general; George Shultz, President Ronald Reagan's secretary
of state; and Paul Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve,
declared that: "The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating
consequences for individuals and societies around the world. Fifty
years after the initiation of the U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic
Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the U.S.
government's war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global
drug control policies are urgently needed."

The White House immediately shot back: no dice. The Obama
administration presented a collection of statistics that compared
current drug use and demand with the peak of the late 1970s, although
a direct correlation between those declines and the drug war are
highly debatable. In doing so, it completely sidestepped the human,
economic and societal toll of the mass incarceration of millions of
Americans, many for simple possession.

No need to put a human face on 40 years of folly when you can swaddle
its inefficacy in a patchwork quilt of self-serving statistics.