40 YEARS OF DRUG WAR HASN'T WORKED; "TIME FOR A CHANGE," SAYS 9-YEAR
VETERAN

The Public Understands How Disastrous It's Been -- Now It's Time for
the Politicians and Law Enforcement to Change Course.

The "War on Drugs" was launched by President Richard Nixon 40 years
ago this week. In 1980, at the end of its first decade, I began a
nine-year career as a "captain" in the war on drugs. I was the
attorney in the U.S. House of Representatives principally responsible
for overseeing DEA and writing anti-drug laws as counsel to the House
Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime.

White House leadership

The heart of Nixon's 5,300-word message to Congress on June 17, 1971
was a plan "to consolidate at the highest level a full-scale attack on
the problem of drug abuse in America" in a White House Office. The
office was dismantled soon after Nixon resigned having been resisted
by Cabinet secretaries and anti-drug agencies.

Soon after the Reagan Administration took office in 1981, Democrats in
Congress began attacking the disorganization of the anti-drug effort,
and mocked administration witnesses who insisted that President Reagan
was really in charge. Senator Joseph Biden's (D-DE) proposal to create
a "drug czar" passed Congress in 1982 but led to President Reagan's
only veto of an anti-crime, anti-drug package. The resulting political
outrage led to appointment of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush to
lead a South Florida anti-drug task force, a "mini drug czar."

Hearings I set up for the House Judiciary Committee helped lead to the
1984 enactment of an anti-drug strategy board led by the attorney
general, and then its replacement in 1988 with our current White House
"drug czar," the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). But,
40 years on, our anti-drug effort is no better managed now than when
Nixon decried bureaucratic red-tape and jurisdictional disputes among
agencies.

After 22 years, ONDCP has proven to be an ineffectual waste of money.
Anti-drug efforts remain haphazard and uncoordinated. Federal
anti-drug prosecutions are unfocused, wasteful and racially
discriminatory. An examination of the 25,000 federal drug cases
concluded each year reveals two outrageous facts. First, instead of
high-impact investigations targeting the most dangerous and powerful
drug traffickers, the typical federal cases target the lowest level
offenders: local street dealers, lookouts, bodyguards, couriers,
"mules," etc. selling small quantities of drugs that are tiny specks
in the picture of the national and global drug trade. Second, the
defendants in these cases are overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. Only
about one in four federal drug defendants is white.

This regular pattern of mostly unimportant cases with very long
sentences imposed predominately on racial minorities makes out a prima
facie case of a pattern or practice of racial discrimination. But this
well-known pattern has been ignored by the attorney general and the
director of ONDCP in an egregious abandonment of their leadership
responsibilities.

Another issue crying out for high-level coordination reveals the
fundamental failure of the drug war approach. For most of the history
of ONDCP, it has campaigned against state medical marijuana laws.
Since 1996, 16 states have passed laws that recognize patient use of
marijuana for medical treatment. But this conflicts with current
federal law. As the leader of the drug war, the drug czar has done
nothing to coordinate federal research, regulatory and enforcement
efforts necessary to resolve this conflict that leads medical patients
and doctors to legal danger and unsatisfactory medical care.

ONDCP's signature "achievement" has been to spend $1.4 billion in a
youth anti-drug media campaign that has been demonstrated by the
government's independent evaluators and the GAO to be utterly
ineffectual.

Death and Disease

In his 1971 message, Nixon lamented 1,000 narcotics deaths in New York
City in 1970, then the epicenter of the heroin addiction problem. At
the end of 1979, the annual number of drug abuse deaths was 7,101,
which grew to 9,976 in 1986, the year basketball star Len Bias died
from a cocaine-induced seizure. But the death rate from illegal drugs
has exploded! In 2007, there were an estimated 38,000 drug overdose
deaths nationwide. The death rate has grown from 3.0 per 100,000 in
1980 to 12.8 in 2006.

Since 1981, when HIV entered the bloodstream of America's injecting
drug users, epidemiologists' projects to protect the lives of drug
users have been stymied by drug warriors. In 1998, HHS Secretary Donna
Shalala endorsed sterile syringe exchange as scientifically proven to
prevent the spread of blood-borne disease among injecting drug users.
But implementing this lifesaving approach was blocked by White House
ONDCP director, General Barry McCaffrey.

In February 2005, Bush White House ONDCP director John Walters was
found by the Washington Post to have completely misrepresented the
scientific research supporting syringe exchange. The opposition of the
White House directors of drug policy is due to the distorting effects
of the language and values of war introduced by President Nixon. The
emotional mobilization for war against drugs (and drug users) barred
acceptance of scientific findings that sterile needle exchange
protected drug users from HIV and hepatitis and other blood-borne
disease. In a war on drugs, users weren't supposed to be protected
from disease and death, they were to be stopped from using drugs.

I recall a member of Congress in the late 1980s saying that America
won't have to worry about the heroin problem anymore since the addicts
will all soon die from AIDS. This indifference to the lives and
dignity of drug users has been a hallmark of the war on drugs. Indeed,
between 1999 and 2007, over 48,000 persons died in the U.S. from AIDS
due to transmission by infected needles. These deaths are in large
part due to the absolutist ideology of the drug war that Nixon inspired.

Drug Use and Treatment

Nixon said his initiative "must be judged by the number of human
beings who are brought out of the hell of addiction, and by the number
of human beings who are dissuaded from entering that hell."

Most school-based prevention efforts, such as D.A.R.E., have been
proven to be ineffective. Yet hundreds of millions of dollars are
spent on such efforts by federal, state and local governments and with
private contributions. Not surprisingly, drug use has continued to
grow, especially marijuana use. In 2009, there were 21.8 million users
of illicit drugs.

Nevertheless, Nixon drove a dramatic expansion of federally funded
drug treatment using methadone in many cities, and crime went down in
time for the 1972 election. But over the long term, as the anti-drug
effort conformed to the strident rhetoric of war that Nixon
popularized, the supply of drug treatment has not kept pace with the
demand. By 2008, an estimated 7,559,000 Americans needed drug
treatment, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health,
but 6,351,000 did not receive any treatment. From 2002 to 2008, among
youth aged 12 to 17, the number who received drug treatment declined
from 142,000 to 111,000. Nixon's goal to expand drug treatment to meet
the need has never been met.

Federal Anti-Drug Costs

Nixon asked Congress for $159 million dollars for his initiatives,
plus an unspecified amount to pay 325 additional agents for what
became the DEA.

Over the past 40 years, the federal government has spent,
cumulatively, roughly a half trillion dollars on the "war on drugs."
By FY 1975, federal anti-drug spending had climbed to $680 million.
For the past 20 years, federal spending on drugs has exceeded $15
billion per year including the costs of imprisonment.

The costs are now so high, for a decade the "drug czars" seem to
regularly conceal almost one-third of the anti-drug spending by
excluding it from the formal anti-drug budget they report to Congress.
ONDCP says that $14.8 billion was spent in FY 2009 to fight drugs. But
another $6.9 billion was also spent in FY 2009 on anti-drug programs
such as the incarceration of federal drug prisoners.

The FY 2011 formal anti-drug budget request is for $15.5 billion,
excluding imprisonment and the many other costs which remain concealed
in the budget submission.

The cost of imprisoning federal drug prisoners has been over $3
billion annually since FY 2008. On June 9, 2011 the total federal
prison population exceeded 216,000. As of May 20, 2011, 50.8 percent
of convicted federal prisoners were drug offenders.

Economic Impact

Nixon wanted research and "development of necessary reports,
statistics, and social indicators for use by all public and private
groups."

Unfortunately, we do not have a clear idea of the cost to the economy
from the unemployment and underemployment of tens of millions who have
criminal records for drug use or distribution. With criminal records,
many such men are unmarriageable and can't obtain credit.

What has it meant to the shareholders and investment funds that own
Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, and the union workers who build
cars and components, that instead of the 200,000 prisoners in state
and federal prisons in 1972, now there are about 1.6 million adults in
prison (and another 600,000 in jails)? This is a population of about
1.4 million mostly young men (prime car owners) who can't buy a car.

America's economy is famously consumer driven and is terribly hurt
when tens of millions of residents can't work and can't buy the goods
manufactured and sold by American businesses. This constriction of our
domestic market is not a problem our Japanese and German competitors
face.

Veterans

Nixon asked for $14 million "to make the facilities of the Veterans
Administration available to all former servicemen in need of drug
rehabilitation." SAMHSA, using data from National Surveys on Drug Use
and Health from 2004-2006 indicate that out of a veteran population of
25.9 million persons, an annual average 7.1 percent of veterans met
the criteria for a past year substance use disorder, and another 1.5
percent had co-occurring serious psychological distress and substance
use disorder. We all know the population of veterans with physical and
psychological injuries is rapidly growing and that substance abuse is
growing in that population. The ONDCP focuses on the criminal cases,
touting special criminal courts to treat veterans who commit crimes,
while treatment in general languishes.

International initiatives

A major feature of Nixon's message stressed the need for international
cooperation. He had already stumbled badly when "Operation Intercept"
in September 1969 created enormous traffic jams at the Mexico-U.S.
border, and severely damaged trade and bilateral relations.

Opium grown in Turkey was the source of 80 percent of the heroin
consumed in the U.S. in 1968. Nixon made an overture to Turkey and
they cracked down on illegal opium growing and required cultivation
licenses. Opium is now grown legally there to make morphine, and none
is diverted to heroin. Instead of following this successful
legalization strategy, Nixon's successors tried to rely only on
forceful crop eradication. But enforcement is like squeezing a
balloon. The drug production shifts to new countries which render such
successes meaningless. Sadly, expanding production of opium and heroin
has become a disaster for other nations such as Mexico, Colombia,
Guatemala and Afghanistan, fueling insurrection, wholesale corruption
and widespread assassination.

Support for Prohibition Is Vanishing

In the face of threats of prosecution from the federal government,
stuck in the ideology of the "war on drugs," state legislatures and
governors continue to pass medical marijuana laws. On May 10, 2011,
Maryland's governor signed a law creating a complete medical use
defense to a marijuana prosecution and creating a state commission to
write a model medical marijuana law. On May 13, 2011, Delaware's
governor signed a medical marijuana law, making it the sixteenth state
with a comprehensive law to protect medical use of marijuana. On June
2, 2011, Vermont's governor signed a law to add medical marijuana
dispensaries to that state's medical marijuana law.

On June 7, 2011, the Connecticut legislature voted to decriminalize
possession of less than a half ounce of marijuana and the governor has
promised to sign the law. In November 2010, in California, 46.5
percent of the voters supported legalizing marijuana, and polls
revealed that 30 percent of "no" voters said they supported
legalization but not in the form of Proposition 19 that was the regime
on the ballot.

I have been involved in making drug policy professionally for more
than 30 years -- three-quarters of the war on drugs. On June 14, I
joined five veteran police officers (local, state and federal), a
former judge, and a corrections commissioner -- all speakers from Law
Enforcement Against Prohibition - to bring to ONDCP Director Gil
Kerlikowske LEAP's indictment of the failures of war on drugs policy.
We held a press conference on the sidewalk outside his office near the
White House. As it was breaking up, four construction workers asked my
chief of staff what it was all about. She told them it was about
legalizing drugs. Immediately they started telling her all the various
reasons why our drug policy is a failure.

For 10 minutes they described the racial disparity in arrests, the
drug violence in Mexico and in American neighborhoods, the deaths from
drug overdose, the pointlessness of arresting a drug dealer who gets
immediately replaced or putting drug users in jail. They noted the
parallels between the failure of alcohol prohibition and drug
prohibition. They noted the tax revenues from drug sales that we are
losing. This telling anecdote reveals how broadly the public
understands that Nixon's "war on drugs" has been a widespread failure.

The next step is for the drug policy reform community to present
concrete proposals for analysis to legislators and the public. Surely
most of us can agree with prestigious groups such as the Global
Commission on Drug Policy that the facts of the war on drugs after 40
years are clear signs we need a very different strategy.