The ‘war on drugs’ gets more insane

Before 9/11, the drug war was “only” creating growing social chaos in the United States, Columbia, Mexico and a few other parts of the planet.  Today, it is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into the hands of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.  What is at the top of their shopping list?  Nuclear bombs.  Who are their intended targets?  Americans living in New York, Washington and Los Angeles – us.

Even if America's enemies cannot get nuclear bombs, illicit opium proceeds are buying them munitions that are tearing through the bodies of our troops in Afghanistan.  Counter-narcotic efforts have alienated poor Afghan farmers by destroying their only crop, opium poppies, propelling them into the arms of the Taliban, which is resurging to power -- thanks to America's foolish policy of drug prohibition. 

Replay of Prohibition – with key differences

Throughout its increasingly violent history, drug prohibition has been a foolish replay of alcohol prohibition, causing all of the same social pathologies: high crime levels; powerful, violent gangs; and an ugly, brutal culture.  The replay is not perfect, however.  Drug prohibition is worse, in many ways. 

Building America’s “criminal infrastructure”

Waged more intensely and over many more decades, the drug war has produced many more violent criminals than alcohol prohibition.  The drug war has effectively created a “criminal scholarship program”.  Some features of this program:

·        Millions of non-violent drug offenders have been “enrolled” into America’s prisons, our “universities of crime”.

·        In prison, they gain real criminal skills in murder, armed robbery and fraud from the professionals in the fields.  (Note: This education is not limited to the intellectual realm. It transforms their personalities as well, in an environment that features violent homosexual rape.)

·        Every day, 1,600 “graduates” emerge back into American society as more brutal and skilled thugs. 

·        The number of drug prohibition’s “criminal scholarships” has exploded with America’s convict population: 200,000 in 1970 to 2.2 million, today.  Upon arrest, a nonviolent drug is replaced in a low-income neighborhood before he enters the squad car, fueling an endless supply of “scholarship winners”. 

Drug prohibition promotes racism

Black and brown Americans have replaced Italian, Irish and Jewish Americans in our prisons.  One young black American male in three has the unwelcome attention of the Law; he is in prison, on probation or on parole.  While alcohol prohibition promoted bigoted stereotypes against Italian-Americans, drug prohibition promotes the racist stereotype of young black and brown man as criminal gangsters. 

Drug prohibition’s new toady: the press

Prohibition-era journalists understood and reported the connection between prohibition and its effects: crime, gangs and brutality —e.g., the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.  Modern reporters routinely carry water for drug warriors, principally by conflating the harm resulting from drugs with the harm resulting form drug prohibition.  America’s bipartisan press wipes clean the government’s bloody thumbprints from every story about gangs, crime and brutality in the culture.

How did a profession that produced H.L Mencken become one that always buys the increasingly absurd folly of the drug war? 

Re-criminalize rape and murder by re-legalizing drugs

Contrary to the views of all drug warriors, the resources of the criminal justice system are not unlimited.  Based on the use of these resources, drug warriors have given higher priority to the protection of pot heads from themselves over protecting people from real crime: i.e., crime where the victim and criminal are two different people.  Two cases in point:

·        The LA Times reported that the LA County Sheriff’s Department routinely releases criminals, guilty of burglary, robbery and fraud early in order to make room for nonviolent drug offenders.  The Times also reported that some of these prisoners have committed murder, after serving 10% or less of their sentence.  The Sheriff has effectively decriminalized burglary, robbery and fraud.

·        Drug prohibition also aids and abets violent criminals by comprising the investigation of their crimes.  In November 2004, Californians resoundingly passed Proposition 69, which requires all convicted felons, certain misdemeanor offenders and those arrested for rape or murder to give up DNA samples. The samples are subjected to genetic testing, and the results are uploaded into the FBI laboratory’s Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS. DNA evidence from crime scenes can be run against the database for matches that will help identify suspects of unsolved murders, rapes, etc. Unfortunately, more than a quarter of a million DNA samples have not been tested.  While even trace amount of suspected illicit drugs are routinely tested in police labs, police claim that they “lack the resources” to test these DNA samples.  The result is that thousands of rapists and murders are free to rape and kill again.  By effectively placing a higher priority on “protecting adult boneheads from themselves” over protecting rape and murder victims, drug prohibition has effectively decriminalized rape and murder.

Prohibition: dumb and dumber

Americans enjoy a shared creed: The Declaration of Independence.  America has suffered mightily whenever we have violated one of its principles.  (The most infamous cases: slavery and Jim Crow’s violation of the proposition that “all men are created equal”.) 

Our creed also declares that the “pursuit of happiness” is a “God-given, inalienable right”.  Note: not the wise pursuit of happiness and certainly not the government-approved pursuit of happiness.  (A right ceases by definition to be a right if it requires government approval.) 

Carrie Nation and the other alcohol warriors foolishly thought they knew better than America’s Founders.  The disastrous results of their “war on alcohol” demonstrated their folly.

Today’s drug warriors are even more foolish.  They have not only disregarded the moral and political instruction of America’s Founders, they have ignored the bitter lessons of alcohol prohibition. 

Drug prohibition: a Trojan Horse for a police state

Drug prohibition has had many effects; one of them has not been a reduction in drug use.  So, throughout its history, drug warriors have responded to their ongoing failure with the demand to give the government added police power.  Each law has eroded all Americans’ rights – especially, their fourth and fifth amendment rights.  Some particulars:

·        In 19 of the last 20 Congressional sessions, the federal government has passed laws that criminalize more peaceful, consensual activity.  Conservative columnist George Will has observed: “The criminal class is not impressed.” 

·        The ever-escalating drug war has also been marked by the growing “militarization” of domestic police force.  Increasingly, drug raids are no-knock forced entries carried out by masked, heavily armed SWAT teams using paramilitary tactics more appropriate for the battlefield than the living room. In fact, the rise in no-knock warrants over the last 25 years neatly corresponds with the rise in the number and frequency of use of SWAT teams. Eastern Kentucky University criminologist Peter Kraska, a widely cited expert on the “militarization” of domestic police departments, estimates that the number of SWAT team deployments has jumped from 3,000 a year in the early 1980s to more than 40,000 a year by the early 2000s.

The war on drugs & the war on terror

Drug prohibition has become the main source of money for terrorists, at home and abroad.  Illicit drug profits, which are possible only because these drugs are illegal, fund terrorist efforts against democracies in Columbia, Mexico and Afghanistan.  Transnational gangs, like the infamous MS-13, rely on illicit drug profits to bankroll their mayhem. 

Conclusion: increasing the risk of a “mushroom cloud”

Most ominously, drug prohibition is not only creating social chaos inside America.  Since 9/11, it is empowering terrorists, providing them with money to buy the things they want the most: nuclear weapons – all in a ineffective attempt to protect adult boneheads from themselves.  Will America’s bipartisan political establishment – again! – attempt to counter this with another feckless, expensive TV campaign designed to shame heroin addicts?  

There’s a better way.  End drug prohibition and stop the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, immediately.  Failure to do so may end, as our Secretary of State once observed in another context, in a “mushroom cloud”.  

End the insane “war on drugs”, now.