Dispatches from the Front Line: The War on Drugs
by: Peter Marmorek on November 19th, 2009 | 8 Comments »
If the war on drugs needed a spokesperson, it could hardly do better than select Chico Marx in Duck Soup, saying “Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Sadly for the drug war effort, increasing numbers of both people and governments are starting to believe their own eyes. And what they see is that the war has been futile and counterproductive, causing over half the incarcerations in the US, with no measurable decrease in the amount of drugs consumed. But the war fights back, shooting messengers who speak truth to power. It’s enough to make you reach for a …. whatever.
First, a quick flashback: drug use goes back further than we once thought it did. David Hillman has been the messenger (and his academic career has received a few grievous wounds as a result) about the extent of drug use among Greek philosophers:
An example from Hillman’s own research is a text by Thucydides where brave slaves are sneaking supplies to besieged Spartan soldiers. They carry with them skins of “poppy mixed with honey and pounded linseed.” The original text uses the Greek word for poppy (mekon), which is another word for opium, but in this passage the English version is translated as “poppyseed.” “You don’t send poppy seeds to wounded soldiers,” chides Hillman. “You send them opium.”
The earliest banning of drugs came in the 7th century, when Islamic countries prohibited the consumption of alcohol In the US, the first ban was on smoking opium, prohibited in San Francisco due to fear that “many women and young girls, as well as young men of respectable family, were being induced to visit the Chinese opium-smoking dens, where they were ruined morally and otherwise. ” There was no evidence of that having happened, and the consumption of opium in laudanum, a pain-killer sold to white consumers, remained legal for years afterwards. Selective drug law enforcement based on race and media fear mongering is sadly traditional.
That tradition is carried on today, and nowhere more dramatically than the phoney teen drug crisis.
In the U.S. as a whole, teens are the least likely of any age group except children to die from drug abuse….But there is indeed a major, exploding drug problem in the U.S. — one inconvenient for anti-drug warriors. In the last dozen years, drug deaths have risen 8 percent among adults, primarily middle aged men of all races, and today stand at record-high levels.
The Guardian newspaper recently ran a glorious graphic showing the ratio of numbers of deaths caused by specific drugs versus the coverage of deaths. For alcohol, a 2% ratio; for cannabis 484%. In response to such absurdities, the defections from the war effort have started. Professor David Nutt was the British government’s chief drug advisor, at least until he started giving the “wrong” advice. Nutt was sacked a day after he claimed in a paper that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than many illegal drugs, including LSD, ecstasy and cannabis. After his firing, not surprisingly, other scientists on the committee felt that there wasn’t much point to doing research if only the government’s predetermined answers were acceptable. As the Guardian reports:
Three more government drug advisers resign over the home secretary’s sacking of ProfessorDavid Nuttas chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse ofDrugs(ACMD). The three all resigned after a face-to-face meeting with Alan Johnson, the home secretary, which was called in an attempt to heal the rift between the scientists and the government over Nutt’s sacking.
The loss of three more members of the council brings the total who have gone to six out of an original membership of 31 the home secretary appointed to advise him ondrugs policy… The scientists in particular [had] wanted assurances their reports and recommendations would in future be taken seriously
But of course science is based on what you see with your own eyes, so sometimes it doesn’t necessarily produce the answers the Government wants. Reality, as Mr Colbert memorably noted, has a well-known liberal bias.
Perhaps the crisis was precipitated by evidence from the Portuguese experiment. In 2001 Portugal decriminalized the use of almost all drugs, and as the results of that experiment come in, it’s clear that deaths are down, and drug use isn’t up. The Scientific American has a full report:
In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases ofHIVlinked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem – it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections. Five years later, the number of deaths from streetdrug overdosesdropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006,
And that was just the start. If western democracies were studiously averting their eyes from Portugal, Latin America was not. After years of being blamed for North American drug use, they’re saying no más en masse. Simon Jenkins reports:
Push has finally come to shove. Last week theArgentine supreme court declared in a landmark ruling that it was “unconstitutional” to prosecute citizens for having drugs for their personal use. It asserted in ringing terms that “adults should be free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state”. This classic statement of civil liberty comes not from some liberal British home secretary or Tory ideologue. They would not dare. The doctrine is adumbrated by a regime only 25 years from dictatorship.
In August Mexico decriminalized possession of small amounts of all major narcotics, (marijuana, heroin, and cocaine most notably). But in the rest of North America, not only are there no major bills being passed, there’s barely even small change. The AMA announced its support for medical marijuana. But as the US Senate started to appoint a blue-ribbon panel to explore the current state of the situation formerly known as the War on Drugs (a term the Obama administration has quietly dropped) Senator Charles Grassley (Rep-Iowa) proposed an amendment “that would explicitly forbid any recommendations that even mention drug legalization or decriminalization“. That way one avoids messy situations such as the UK, where you have to shoot the messengers after the message leaks out. And in Canada, Donald MacPherson, the Vancouver “drug czar” resigned, saying in his letter of resignation, “the approach to the drug problem that we have in Canada . . . [a] war-on-drugs approach has utterly failed over the past 40 years and must come to an end. The emperor truly has no clothes in this case.”
But it seems inevitable that the disaster of prohibition will eventually pass. And really doesn’t recreational drug use seem just a little twentieth century? Looking forward, the next real drug problem is just shooting up over the event horizon. That’s the use of so-called “smart drugs”, drugs that enable you to work longer and harder. The Atlantic has a fine and scary coverage in Jamais Cascio’s article “Get Smarter“, focusing on that classic performance drug issue: if the guy in the next cubicle is working sixteen hours a day productively because he’s using them, how can you afford not to?
If the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don’t have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves. Most people don’t realize that this process is already under way. In fact, it’s happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It’s visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity.
Yes, when it comes to North America, drug use, and laws, you can’t go wrong with Chico. In A Night at the Opera he said, “You can’t fool me – there ain’t no sanity clause”. And this remains an area where there really isn’t.
Thank you for this wonderful article coming from a formerly wounded messenger. My county has some of the highest rates of accidental poisoning deaths in the nation. About a decade ago, when we first learned this statistic, the Department of Justice suddenly descended on us with a plan to save our county by building a wall across the Mexican border to keep out drugs. They described the epidemic as “The Mexican Black Tar Heroin problem.” Our community vociferously objected, initiating a media campaign declaring the drug issue “a public health emergency.” We demanded access to treatment. Even our police insisted that we could not arrest our way out of the problem.
I had the temerity to wind up on 60 Minutes. I studied ten years of OD deaths from my county and could not find a single example of a “heroin overdose.” What I found were multiple drug overdose deaths. Alcohol was the most frequently involved drug followed by heroin. I pointed this out on 60 Minutes.
All hell broke loose. A US Senator called my boss and suggested I be retired to a very remote location. The state Secretary of Health followed suit. Colleagues and friends told me someone from the US Attorney General’s office had visited them and suggested they cease collaborating with me. Newspaper articles appeared accusing me of every heinous action that can be imagined. Grant funding was cut off. I was called to a meeting with an emmisary from the drug czar’s office who ordered me to go on television saying that our then Governor (who I detested) was causing kids to use drugs by suggesting we discuss legalization. I refused.
Let me be clear. I am in favor of decriminalization of drug use combined with increased access to treatment and community development. I do not support outright legalizaton. I do not wish to have to combat a heroin lobby every time I make a request of Congress or my state legislature. The alcohol lobby is heinous enough. I want to see less drug marketing, not more.
In the end, the war on state governments has trumped the war on drugs. By passing various anti-tax laws and referenda, Grover Norquist and company have forced states to choose between schools and jails. In many states, schools are the winner of the popularity contest. California is releasing inmates in order to save the jobs of teachers and nurses.
The war on drugs has busted state and county budgets, mandating stiff sentences for relatively minor non-violent crime. Today, most of our prisoners are either suffering from mental illness, substance abuse or developmental disabilities. The high cost of incarceration prevents us from investing in schools, health care and treatment.
I know. I work for local government.
Correction: I did not find an example of a single heroin overdose death. I did not look at ODs. I looked at accidental poisoning deaths which means I also excluded suicide ODs. People were dying from mixing alcohol with other drugs, especially heroin.
I started working with a parent support group for families with mental illnesses (in kids but understandably given genetics, some parents have them too). The more I work in the MI advocacy field I too find the anti-drug lobby’s propaganda (especially the anti-pot ilk) exceptionally problematic. The toll on families is unnecessary and needless anxiety and pain over nonsense in families who already have enough to deal with. Thankfully the org is listening to the science because of my advocacy for sanity and the unique aspect of MI’s and “illegal” drug use. We’re formulating a plan to help educate people with facts instead of fiction so parents can worry about what’s worth worrying about and not nonsense imposed by vested monied interests.
Efforts to get anti-drug innoculation programs based on propaganda garbage in defiance of the science out of our schools and appropriate Safety-First type programs to replace them have not gone very well locally. Thirty years of propagandist framing is tough to cut through.
Thirty years of propagandist framing is tough to cut through.
Sigh. I hear you. My ex-school once asked for staff to volunteer to participate in an anti-drug program. I showed up for the first meeting and suggested that giving our students a realistic assessment of the relative dangers of different drugs, and explaining smarter (as opposed to dumber) ways of using drugs if they did make that choice. The head of the project made it clear that all drugs were absolutely evil, and there were going to be no shades of grey on this spectrum. I didn’t go the second meeting….
An intoxicating pot pourri, sir. And it has given me an acidulous flashback to the Le Dain Commission of Inquiry into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs, which began its investigation exactly half a century ago, sponsored by Canadian taxpayers.
I had previously worked on a prototype, which included interviews with virtually everyone at my small university, and it turned out that a majority of not only students but also professors had inhaled and intended to do so again, and an even larger majority would do so were it not for the criminality thing. They were generally scared of needles and chemicals, but it was so clear that marijuana was less of a slippery slope than alcohol, and had less of a downside, that I awaited the publication of the results (for five years!) with bated breath …
Wikipedia concludes with stubby regret: “Although the report was widely praised for its thoroughness and thoughtfullness, its conclusions were largely ignored by the federal government.”
Thank you, Lauren, both for the brave and insightful response, and for what you’ve suffered in your persistent work trying to move society towards a saner and more compassionate way of addressing drug issues. Sadly, both incarceration and enforcement have become big businesses, and have vested interests in staying that way (not universally: LEAP is a brave counterexample).
I do think that the Portuguese experience, (combined with the goad – or taser – of budgetary deficits) may push other countries towards decriminalization. Given the huge sums spent in the war on drugs, the final irony is the utter failure of the war to in fact reduce the availability of drugs. Supply/demand would drive up the price if less were available and drug prices for illegal drugs have remained remarkably constant over the last half century. Or anecdotally, while teaching in large urban high schools for 30+ years, I never heard anyone say they didn’t use drugs because they weren’t available.
Thanks again for the comments.
Ah, the Le Dain Commission!
I remember when it came out betting a friend that Canada would change its drug laws within a year. It’s that kind of political acuity that makes me so grateful I still have readers. But, as Niels Bohr once observed, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
Fine article summing up change in the US on Marihuana laws
http://blog.norml.org/2009/11/20/marijuana-law-reform-is-a-political-opportunity-not-a-political-liability/