DRUG POLICY FAILURES FROM NIXON TO BUSH
By Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho
nickgier@roadrunner.com
Every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish.
What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob?
--Richard M. Nixon to Robert Haldeman
A Proud Drug SWAT Team
For an analysis of the abuse of pharmaceutical drugs, click here
I just saw the excellent film Frost/Nixon, and I was amazed to find myself empathizing a bit with that most despised of all presidents. That may have been due, however, to the superb acting of Oscar-nominated Frank Langella. The film reminds us that Nixon was the first post-war president to press the envelope of executive power, epitomized in this statement in the Frost interview: "When the president does it that means that it is not illegal." Attorneys for a recent Republican president were of course taking the same fate-filled position with regard to torturing terror suspects.
Richard Nixon Declares War on Drugs
Nixon is the first post-war president to declare war on drugs. He was determined to enforce a policy that placed marijuana in the same category as heroin. In the early days of Nixon's war, a person caught with any amount of marijuana could be sentenced to seven years in prison. In 1971 Nixon appointed Pennsylvania Gov. Ray Shafer to chair the National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, which unexpectedly recommended that pot possession be decriminalized. Always coarse and obscene, Nixon lashed out at members of the Commission calling them "bastards" and "Jews."
Since the day Nixon rejected the recommendations of the Shafer Commission, fifteen million Americans have been arrested for marijuana charges (88 percent for possession only), but pot dealing and smoking continue unabated. Since 1980 the number of drug offenders incarcerated by states increased from 6 percent to 21 percent of inmate population and those in federal prisons went from 25 to 57 percent. Sadly, 80 percent of all those in prison for drug offenses are either Latinos or African Americans.
Paramilitary SWAT teams in U.S. cities have been overly aggressive against suspected drug dealers. The libertarian CATO Institute has reported that these units have entered the homes of 170 innocents and killed 43. The CATO website also lists 23 nonviolent offenders and 25 police officers killed.
Dramatic Escalation of the Drug War in Mexico
Last year the U.S. spent $69 billion interfering in the lives of North and South Americans, supporting military activities and crop eradication that have alienated millions of people south of the border. In 2007 one of the first acts of Mexican President Felipe Calderon was to use the army to crack down on Mexico's three major drug cartels. Calderon used the army because local and regional police and many office holders had already been bought off by the cartels. There are fears that the entire western state of Sinaloa has gone over to the Sinaloa Cartel.
The results of Mexico's military solution to drug smuggling have been disastrous. In the past two years an estimated 8,790 people have been killed, including 800 soldiers and police officers. Previously, the cartels had fought among each other and had left others alone. But now, the cartels have declared war on the Mexican army, and 95 percent of the cartels' weapons, mostly automatic rifles, have been sold by U.S. gun dealers and smuggled across the border. The drug lords are daring each other in how brutal and gruesome their killings, including beheadings, can be. It is said that about 100,000 soldiers have deserted and have been paid to join the drug war, bringing their weapons and training into the fray.
Recently the Mexican people have taken to the streets to protest the militarization of the drug war and the presence of 50,000 soldiers in their cities. The government claims that the protesters have been paid by the drug lords. In response the protestors say that they are volunteers, and that the army has raped four women and murdered 13 unarmed civilians.
After $6 Billion in U. S. Aid Columbia Cocaine Production up 4%
Mexico is the transshipment point for 90 percent of the cocaine coming to the U.S. The main source of this drug is Columbia, which has been the focus of U.S. efforts of eradication and interdiction. Since 2000 the U.S. has poured $6 billion dollars into Columbia, but cocaine production has still increased 4 percent during that time.
Large acreages of coca have been destroyed; the big cartels have been broken up; left-wing guerrillas are in retreat; and the streets of Bogata are safer. But the coca farmers have simply switched to smaller plots closer to the jungle and right-wing paramilitary units are still involved in cocaine production and smuggling. As Richard Curtis of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice states: "[Cocaine] prices go up and down seasonally, but there has not been significant change in price, and there has not been any change in availability or purity" (NY Times, 8/19/06).
Nixon's war on drugs have turned entire nations against us. Evo Morales, a former coca grower, is now Bolivia's president. At recent speech at the UN, Morales held up a coca leaf and spoke about a World Health Organization (WHO) study that concluded that the ingestion of coca was not harmful and that it might even have some beneficial effects. When I was in Peru in 2002, my guide distributed coca leaves to our group as a remedy for altitude sickness.
Writing for the New York Times, John Tierney states that U. S. "officials fought against the publication of the WHO report [more from this below] and against the loosening of restrictions on coca products, just as they've resisted proposals to let Afghan farmers sell opium to pharmaceutical companies" (9/23/06). Ethan Nadelman, head of the Drug Policy Institute, has proposed that coca be put back in Coca-Cola, presumably as a substitute for the caffeine.
The Legal Regulation of Drugs
In 1989 I chaired a University of Idaho symposium on the topic "Cocaine and Conflict" and Nadelman was our keynote speaker. He is a leading spokesman for drug legalization, which means legal regulation, not total free use (except of marijuana) of hard drugs. At a conference in Seattle sponsored by the King County Bar Association, Nadelman outlined a policy in which cocaine would be sold in pharmacies and regulated in the same way that alcohol and tobacco are.
Proponents of legal regulation contend that removing the illegal drug trade and the criminals who profit from it will have the same positive effect as the ending of Prohibition in 1933. A $250-350 billion business that is now the illegal drug trade would become a source for much needed tax revenue that can be used to rebuild communities ad rehabilitate those relative few who have been addicted to drugs. Dr. Benson B. Roe reminds us that most "drug users are not addicts just as the vast majority of alcohol users are not alcoholics."
Tom Ammiano has introduced a bill in the California State Assembly that would tax marijuana, the state's largest cash crop. According to Drug Policy Alliance, the bill would regulate pot just "like beer, wine, and liquor while barring access to those under 21. Annual revenues from fees and excise taxes could be in the billions, and Californians could save another billion a year that they now spend on marijuana prohibition."
A 2007 Zogby Poll asked the following question of 1028 people: "If hard drugs such as heroin or cocaine were legalized, would you be likely to use them." Only 6 of them said "Yes." There are over 250 shops in the Netherlands where one can buy marijuana legally, but, according to the WHO report mentioned above, only 19.8 percent of the Dutch had tried cannibals, while 42.2 percent of Americans had. One commentator quipped that the Dutch have made smoking pot "uncool." The same report found that 16.2 percent of Americans had tried cocaine, while only 4 percent of Columbians and 1.9 percent of the Dutch had.
Reading the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) website, one would think that liberalizing drug laws in Europe has been a complete failure. In England doctors used to prescribe heroin to addicts under controlled conditions and their numbers stabilized at 2,000, but since that program was abolished in 1970 the number has risen to 300,000. In a December 2008 Swiss conservatives forced a national referendum on a successful program of prescribed heroin, which, according to the Guardian, "has been credited with reducing crime and improving the health and daily lives of addicts since it began 14 years ago." The vote was 68 percent to continue the program.
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
One of the most effective organizations for legal regulation of drugs is Law Enforcement against Prohibition (LEAP). Since its founding in 2002, LEAP's membership, former police officers, DEA agents, and city officials, has grown to 5,000. These men and women have seen first hand how Nixon's war on drugs has devastated their communities and made criminals out of ordinary citizens. LEAP members have also seen heavily armed gangs take over the drug trade that used to be in the hands of nonviolent dealers. The combination of SWAT teams and these gangs make for the same deadly mix that we are now seeing in Mexico. LEAP does not discount the problems of drug abuse, but its speakers point out as an example that the number of Americans smoking cigarettes, containing the most addictive substance known, has been reduced by 50 percent through education alone. LEAP has a superb 12-minute video at www.leap.cc/cms/index.php?name=Content&pid=28.
Parallels between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror
There are instructive parallels between the wars on terror and drugs. The rhetoric of war identifies an enemy that must be defeated. Taking the enemy as drugs without any consideration of their relative harm dictates a goal of total eradication of the enemy. Identifying the enemy in the war on terror as Muslims, as many on the right actually do, leads to the conclusion that Islam itself must be defeated. Even a sophisticated former Muslim such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali believes that there are no such persons as moderate Muslims and that Islam cannot be reformed.
SWAT teams that arrest or kill innocents in their indiscriminate sweeps are just as destructive as CIA paramilitary teams kidnapping terror suspects, who have for the most part been turned in by bounty hunters. Putting these people in prison runs the risk of radicalizing them and making the problems worse.
As long as the U.S. has the highest drug use rate in the industrialized world, this demand will drive the criminal drug trade and will continue to destabilize all the countries south of the border. We should immediately un-declare the wars on drugs and terror. Police surveillance and investigation should replace paramilitary over-kill. We should decriminalize the use of marijuana and we should try the policy of legal regulation of all other drugs and see if it works.