America's Longest Ongoing War: The War on Drugs
Attorney and Author
"The drug war is not to protect the children, save the
babies, shield the neighborhoods, or preserve the rain forests. The drug
war is a violent campaign against black men and by extension the black
family, among many others."-- Wilton D. Alston, "How Can Anyone Not Realize the War on (Some) Drugs Is Racist?"
After more than 40 years and at least $1 trillion, America's so-called "
war on drugs"
ranks as the longest-running, most expensive and least effective war
effort by the American government. Four decades after Richard Nixon
declared
that "America's public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse,"
drug use continues unabated, the prison population has increased six
fold to
over two million inmates
(half a million of whom are there for nonviolent drug offenses), SWAT
team raids for minor drug offenses have become more common, and in the
process, billions of tax dollars have been squandered.
Just consider -- every 19 seconds, someone in the U.S. is arrested
for violating a drug law. Every 30 seconds, someone in the U.S. is
arrested for violating a marijuana law, making it the fourth most common
cause of arrest in the United States. Approximately 1,313,673
individuals were arrested for drug-related offenses in 2011. Police
arrested an estimated 858,408 persons for marijuana violations in 2009.
Of those charged with marijuana violations, approximately 89 percent
were charged with possession only. Since 1971,
more than 40 million
individuals have been arrested due to drug-related offenses. Moreover,
since December 31, 1995, the U.S. prison population has grown an average
of 43,266 inmates per year, with about 25 percent sentenced for drug
law violations.
The foot soldiers in the government's increasingly fanatical war on
drugs, particularly marijuana, are state and local police officers
dressed in SWAT gear and armed to the hilt. These SWAT teams carry out
roughly 50,000 no-knock raids every year in search of illegal drugs and
drug paraphernalia. As author and journalist Radley Balko
reports,
"The vast majority of these raids are to serve routine drug warrants,
many times for crimes no more serious than possession of marijuana...
Police have broken down doors, screamed obscenities, and held innocent
people at gunpoint only to discover that what they thought were
marijuana plants were really sunflowers, hibiscus, ragweed, tomatoes, or
elderberry bushes. (It's happened with all five.)"
No wonder America's war on drugs has increasingly become an issue of
concern on and off the campaign trail. Back in 1976, Jimmy Carter
campaigned for president
on a platform that included decriminalizing marijuana and ending
federal criminal penalties for possession of up to one ounce of the
drug. Thirty-six years later, the topic is once again up for debate,
especially among Republican presidential contenders whose stances vary
widely, from
Ron Paul who has called for an end to the drug war, to Govs.
Rick Perry and Jon Huntsman who have said that states should be allowed to legalize medical marijuana without federal interference, to
Rick Santorum who has admitted to using marijuana while in college but remains adamantly opposed to its legalization.
Americans are showing themselves to be increasingly receptive to a
change in the nation's drug policy, with a Gallup poll showing a
record-high 50% of Americans favoring
legalizing marijuana use, nearly half of all Americans favor
legalizing the possession of small amounts of marijuana for personal use, 70% favoring legalizing it for
medical purposes, and a 2008 Zogby poll which found that
three in four Americans
believe the war on drugs to be a failure. "As an active duty jail
superintendent, I've seen how the drug war doesn't do anything to reduce
drug abuse but does cause a host of other problems, from prison
overcrowding to a violent black market controlled by gangs and cartels,"
said
Richard Van Wickler,
the serving corrections superintendent in Cheshire County, N.H. "For a
long time this issue has been treated like a third rail by politicians,
but polls now show that voters overwhelmingly agree that the drug war is
a failure and that a new direction is sorely needed."
A growing number of law enforcement officials and national
organizations are also calling for an end to the drug wars, including
the
US Conference of Mayors, the
Global Commission on Drug Policy,
which includes former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, former US
Secretary of State George Schultz, and former presidents of Mexico,
Colombia, and Brazil, and the NAACP. In fact, at their national
convention in July 2011, the
NAACP
voiced their concern over the striking disparity in incarceration
between whites and blacks, particularly when it comes to drug-related
offenses.
In terms of its racial impact, the U.S. government's war on drugs
also constitutes one of the most racially discriminatory policies being
pushed by the government in recent decades, with African-Americans
constituting its greatest casualties. As the ACLU has
reported,
"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."
Indeed, blacks -- who make up 13% of the population -- account for 40%
of federal prisoners and 45% of state prisoners convicted of
drug offenses.
Moreover, a November 2011 study by researchers at Duke University found that young blacks are arrested for drug crimes
ten times
more often than whites. Likewise, a 2008 study by the ACLU
concluded that
blacks in New York City were five times more likely to be arrested than
their white counterparts for simple marijuana possession. Latinos were
three times more likely to be arrested. The Drug Policy Alliance and
California NAACP
released a report
claiming that between 2006 and 2008 "police in 25 of California's major
cities arrested blacks at four, five, six, seven, and even 12 times the
rate of whites."
This disproportionate approach to prosecuting those found in
possession of marijuana is particularly evident in California, where
black marijuana offenders were imprisoned 13 times as much as non-blacks
in 2011. In fact, between 1990 and 2010, there was a 300% surge in
arrests for marijuana possession for nonwhites. As the
Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
concluded, "California's criminal justice system can be divided into
two categories with respect to marijuana: one system for
African-Americans, another for all other races."
Thus, while the government's war on drugs itself may not be an
explicit attempt to subjugate minority groups, the policy has a racist
effect in that it disproportionately impacts minority communities.
Moreover, the
origins of drug prohibition
have explicitly racial justifications. In the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, prohibitionists clamoring to make drugs illegal tapped into
common racial prejudices to convince others of the benefits of drug
prohibition. For example, opium imports to America peaked in the 1840s,
with 70,000 pounds imported annually, but Chinese immigrants did not
arrive in large numbers until after the 1850s. Thus, Americans were
using opium in copious amounts before Chinese immigrants arrived. Once
they arrived however, they became convenient scapegoats for those
interested in making opium illegal. Prohibitionists portrayed opium
smoking as a habit below the respectability of "white" men. In a similar
manner, marijuana was later associated with blacks, Latinos, and jazz
culture, making marijuana an easy target for prohibition.
Yet despite 40 years of military funding to eradicate foreign drug
supplies, increased incarceration rates, and more aggressive narcotics
policing, the war on drugs has done nothing to resolve the issue of
drug addiction.
Consumption of cocaine and marijuana has been relatively stable over
the past four decades, with a spike in use during the 1970s and 80s. And
a European Union Commission study determined that "global drug
production and use remained largely unchanged from 1998 through 2007."
In fact, the only things that have changed are that drugs are cheaper
and more potent, there are more people in prison, and the government is
spending more taxpayer money.
So what's the solution?
As Professor
John McWhorter
contends, problems of addiction should be treated like the medical
problems they are -- in other words, drug addiction is a health problem,
not a police problem. At the very least, marijuana, which has been
widely recognized as medically beneficial, should be legalized. As a
society, we would be far better off investing the copious amounts of
money currently spent on law enforcement in prevention and treatment
programs. Of course, the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want marijuana
legalized, fearing it might cut into its profit margins. However, as
California has shown, it could be a boon for struggling state economies.
Marijuana is "California's
biggest cash crop, responsible for $14 billion a year in sales." Were California to legalize the drug (it legalized
medical
marijuana in 1996) and allow the state to regulate and tax its sale,
tax collectors estimate it could bring in $1.3 billion in revenue. Prior
to the Obama administration's crackdown on the state's medical
marijuana dispensaries, which has cost the state thousands of jobs, lost
income and lost tax revenue, California had been raking in
$100 million in taxes from the dispensaries alone.
As
Neill Franklin,
the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition who
worked on narcotics policing for the Maryland State Police and Baltimore
Police Department for over 30 years, remarked in the
New York Times:
In an earlier era it may have been a smart move for
politicians to act "tough on drugs" and stay far away from legalization.
But today, many voters recognize that our prohibition laws don't do
anything to reduce drug use but do create a black market where cartels
and gangs use violence to protect their profits.
While some fear that legalization would lead to increased use, those
who want to use marijuana are probably already doing so under our
ineffective prohibition laws. And when we stop wasting so many resources
on locking people up, perhaps we can fund real public education and
health efforts of the sort that have led to dramatic reductions in
tobacco use over the last few decades -- all without having to put
handcuffs on anyone.
I have spent my entire adult life fighting the war on drugs as a
police officer on the front lines. I have experienced the loss of
friends and comrades who fought this war alongside me, and every year
tens of thousands of other people are murdered by gangs battling over
drug turf in American cities, Canada and Mexico. It is time to reduce
violence by taking away a vital funding source from organized crime just
as we did by ending alcohol prohibition almost 80 years ago.
The goals of reducing crime, disease, death and addiction have not
been met by the "drug war" that was declared by President Nixon 40 years
ago and ramped up by each president since.
The public has waked up to the fact that we need to change our marijuana laws. Savvy politicians would do well to catch up.
