WAR ON DRUGS IS WAR ON OUR OWN PEOPLE

Mike Goldsby, a highly-respected local expert in drug addiction,
declared in last week's My Word opinion, "I have nothing good to say
about methamphetamines."

The estimated 1.4 million users in the U.S. would disagree.
Productivity-oriented professionals with demanding careers praise the
increased alertness afforded by meth. Timber fallers, mill workers,
truck drivers, and others in dangerous occupations extol the stamina
it provides. The military has always depended upon meth as a source of
courage and quick reaction time. Poor people, trapped in multiple
low-paying jobs or the exhausting paperwork demands of public
assistance, emphasize its empowering and antidepressant effect.

These people agree that, like other drugs, meth can be fatal. But its
high morbidity and mortality, they would add, rest in the fact that
its use is illegal.

Like marijuana, also a medicine, meth is a multibillion-dollar
criminal industry. There is naturally violence where such huge profits
are to be made.

As revealed by Gary Webb in his San Jose Mercury News articles on
crack cocaine, successful drug networks involve protection and
exploitation by government agencies, including law enforcement. Police
departments flourish on grants for drug interdiction. The domestic
cost of the War on Drugs was $51 billion in 2006.

The penal system, increasingly privatized, prospers as well. The
public pays an annual $27,000 for each of 2.5 million prisoners. As a
society, we are invested in this industry: Some cities are almost
exclusively supported by their prisons.

I recently attended a conference, "Methamphetamine, Hepatitis and
HIV," in Salt Lake City, where drug policy analysts described "set and
setting" as determinants of how a drug or medicine will affect an individual.

The law enforcement vendetta against meth, and media use of such
slogans as "meth kills," linking it to deviance, disease and violence,
provides a hostile setting, and amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Public opinion as reflected in Times-Standard op-eds echo the official
contempt. One guest opinion praised the policies of MaoTse-tung for
summarily executing drug offenders. Another called it "terrorism," and
suggested soliciting Homeland Security money.

The recent killings by the Eureka police were attributed to the
victims' use of meth, which is rapidly becoming a license to kill.
Even Mike Goldsby, in saluting law enforcement's "vital role in
holding addicts accountable," regretted that "there are not enough
police or jails to arrest, convict and incarcerate every addict."

A declaration of war is an open invitation to ignore the rights of
individuals in the name of a more urgent destiny. The War on Drugs is
no exception.

Harsher sentences than for murder, illegal searches and seizures,
intrusive urine testing, property forfeitures, disenfranchisement,
ineligibility for public support, housing, school loans or food
stamps, loss of children: Fourth, fifth, eighth and fourteenth
amendment protections are widely denied meth users.

Demonization of meth cripples democracy. A minority of our citizens
even votes, let alone takes an active role in policy decisions which
will affect their and their childrens' lives.

Involvement in illegal and socially-condemned activities has estranged
large segments of the population from political life. Paranoia
prevents users from exercising their first amendment rights to express
their opinions. Thus, in a democracy already handicapped by apathy, a
stigmatized class is prevented from defending their own interests.

This has powerful implications. One op-ed reported that 70 percent of
children in some Humboldt County schools come from "meth homes." Urine
tests at local clinics confirm wide use.

Paul Gahlinger, M.D., commander of the Davis County Jail in Utah,
observed that his inmates, 65 percent meth convicts and one-third
female, attribute their incarceration not to meth but to the chaotic
problems of poverty. They have no plan to stop using.

It is evident that meth is endemic, a street medicine used to treat
endemic conditions of life in the American culture of speed,
performance, achievement, self-absorption, alienation, waste and neglect.

The War on Drugs amounts to a war on our own people. It is contrary to
the precepts of Christianity and all other religions, and destructive
to the foundations of democracy.

We must treat the human conditions which cause suffering, instead of
demonizing the medicine that relieves the symptoms, if we wish to
restore family and human values to our communities.