Drugs

America's Holy War

Arthur Benavie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135694760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Droit
• Subtopic: Droit des médias et du divertissement

Using the best scientific evidence, Drugs: America's Holy War explores the impact and cost of America's "War on Drugs" – both in tax spending and in human terms. Is it possible that US drug policies are helping to proliferate, not prevent, a multitude of social ills including: homicide, property crime, the spread of AIDS, the contamination of drugs, the erosion of civil liberties, the punishment of thousands of non-violent people, the corruption of public officials, and the spending of billions of tax dollars in an attempt to prevent certain drugs from entering the country?

In this controversial new book, award-winning economist Arthur Benavie analyzes the research findings and argues that an end to the war on drugs, much as we ended alcohol prohibition, would yield enormous international benefits, destroy dangerous and illegal drug cartels, and allow the American government to refocus its attention on public well-being.

Part I

Background

Introduction

On June 18, 1986, a young black athlete, Len Bias, died of heart failure. He was an outstanding basketball player for the University of Maryland and had just been a first-round draft pick for the Boston Celtics. Celebrating the good news, he tried cocaine for the first time, and his death was publicly attributed to the drug. Bias was not just an ordinary superstar. He was perceived as “a clean-cut kid from a religious family.”¹ If it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone, or so it seemed.

At that time the country was in the midst of a panic. The media had discovered crack cocaine and proclaimed that it was instantly addictive and deadly. The New York Times, in a front-page story, announced that crack was spreading from the inner city to “the wealthiest suburbs of Westchester County.”² A Newsweek editorial broadcast that “an epidemic is abroad in America, as pervasive and dangerous in its way as the plagues of medieval times.”³ The highly publicized death of Len Bias added to the hysteria. In the following month, the TV networks presented seventy-four news segments about the dangers of cocaine.⁴ Congress reacted quickly to the perceived crisis by toughening the punishments for drug law violators. Now, even small-fry pushers, arrested for the first time, would be sentenced to ten years in federal prison without parole. It was an election year and no politician wanted to appear soft on drugs.

The media stories scared me too. I remember being appalled by stories of mothers abandoning their babies because of crack. It looked to me like the politicians were doing the right thing to incarcerate the traffickers of this new virulent drug. The information we had was that these criminals were peddling poison.

For the next several years I was barely aware of the war on drugs. I had no contact with illicit drugs since I use none, and I don't even drink anything containing alcohol. What opened my eyes to the realities of the drug war was a 1996 article by two economists spelling out its social costs.⁵ They argued that the government's drug control policy was a major cause of homicides, property crime, the spread of HIV, drug poisonings and overdoses, the erosion of civil liberties, and the arbitrary confiscation of assets. The article was a shock, and it led me to begin researching the drug war. The subject is immense; its boundaries reach far beyond economics, the area in which I was trained, covering almost every discipline you can imagine, from law to criminology to political science to pharmacology.

The more I studied the more I discovered that the war on drugs is a holy war, a crusade aimed at eliminating certain “evil” drugs and punishing their sinful users. Costs and benefits be damned. This finding is the major theme of this book. The war is supposed to shrink the consumption of selected drugs, but study after study—many by our government—has concluded that it's a failure, and that treatment, not arrest and prison, is the way to combat drug abuse. Researchers overwhelmingly agree that the war causes incalculable damage to our society. Here are a few examples, which—along with many others—will be fully documented in subsequent chapters:

• • The war has been estimated to have caused about 10,000 homicides a year, most the result of turf warfare between rival drug gangs. Suppliers in this immensely profitable underground market obviously cannot appeal to the legal system to resolve disputes.⁶
• • Over 100,000 people are in federal, state, and local prisons for simply possessing (not selling) illicit drugs.⁷ It costs an average of $20,000 to maintain a person behind bars for a year.⁸
• • More than a third of the AIDS patients in the United States contracted the disease by using dirty needles to inject drugs.⁹ The federal government refuses to support the supplying of clean needles to illicit drug users, claiming—contrary to its own studies—that drug injection would be encouraged.¹⁰
• • African Americans feel the impact of the drug war disproportionately. Of the 265,000 state prison inmates serving time for drug offenses in 2002, about 47 percent were black, while blacks constituted about 15 percent of illicit drug users.¹¹ (The majority of traffickers are white.)¹²
• • Heroin is superior to morphine for alleviating some types of pain and marijuana is an effective anti-nausea drug for those on chemotherapy. Yet, in spite of the recognized therapeutic value of these drugs, physicians in the United States are prohibited from prescribing them.¹³

Crusades demonize the enemy and the drug war is no exception. Going back to the 1986 media stories about crack, the experts have pointed out that they were filled with misinformation. According to sociologists Craig Reinarman and Harry Levine, “most of the people who have tried crack or smoked cocaine have not continued to use it. … Daily crack smoking, like daily heroin injecting, occurs mainly among the poorest, most marginalized people in American society—and only among a small minority of them.”¹⁴ In 1989, the New York Times finally reversed its view, saying that crack was “confined mainly to poor urban neighborhoods,” and in 1990 Newsweek admitted that “a lot of people use it without getting addicted.”¹⁵

As for the death of Len Bias, it was unlikely to have been caused by cocaine alone, but rather cocaine mixed with alcohol, a potentially lethal combination.¹⁶ (Interestingly, the danger of combining alcohol and cocaine is not mentioned on alcohol packaging.) As Judge James Gray pointed out, “What is not widely known, however, is that Bias was having his third convulsion before his friends sought medical attention. They were too afraid that Bias or they themselves would be arrested that they did not take him to a hospital. If not for our drug prohibitionist laws … more people like him would probably still be alive today.”¹⁷

You may think my views are extreme. You rarely hear them expressed in the media, since politicians and journalists can't risk appearing to be soft on drugs. In fact, I'm in the mainstream of those who have studied the drug war. In researching this book I scoured the current literature on this topic. Of all the books, articles, and websites I found that claimed to be based on scientific research, the only material that favored the war came from the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), whose director (the drug czar) is responsible for crafting the nation's drug control policy. Drug researchers from such diverse fields as law, sociology, history, and pharmacology overwhelmingly condemn the war. In addition, all twenty-three of the blue-ribbon commissions that have studied the topic over the past century have opposed a war on drugs.¹⁸ Law enforcement officials who have been on the front lines almost always come to view the war as futile as well as harmful. In a 1995 survey of 365 police chiefs, police officers, prosecutors, and judges, 90 percent in each of these groups reported that the United States was “losing the war on drugs.”¹⁹ In the 2006 annual national survey of 22,587 chiefs of police and sheriffs, conducted by the National Association of Chiefs of Police, 82.0 percent of the respondents answered “no” when asked if the drug war had “been successful in reducing the use of illegal drugs.”²⁰

Here is a sampling of the opinions of some of the experts and public figures:

• • “We are presently spending $50 billion a year on the war on drugs. I'm talking about police, courts, and jails. For all the money that we're putting into the war on drugs, it is an absolute failure … Should you go to jail for simply doing drugs? I say no … People ask me, ‘What do you tell kids?’… You tell them that by legalizing drugs, we can control them, regulate them, and tax them.”
  Gary E. Johnson, the Republican former governor of New Mexico²¹
• • “We are speaking of a plague. … The cost of the drug war is many times more painful, in all its manifestations, than would be the licensing of drugs combined with intensive education of non-users and intensive education designed to warn those who experiment with drugs. We have seen a substantial reduction in the use of tobacco over the last thirty years, and this is not because tobacco became illegal.”
  William F. Buckley Jr., conservative columnist, and founder of National Review²²
• • Our supply reduction strategy is “a colossal failure” and our demand reduction policy is one that “can never produce a victory.”
  Steven B. Duke, professor of law at Yale University, and lawyer Albert C. Gross²³
• • “America's highly punitive version of prohibition is intrusive, divisive, and expensive and leaves the United States with a drug problem that is worse than that of any other wealthy nation.”
  Robert J. MacCoun and Peter Reuter, behavioral scientists at the RAND Drug Policy Research Center²⁴
• • “Our country's attempts through the criminal justice system to combat drug use and abuse, and all of the crime and misery that accompany them, were not working … Our so-called War on Drugs was our biggest failure.”
  Judge James P. Gray of the Superior Court in Orange County, California²⁵
• • “About $500 worth of heroin or cocaine in a source country will bring in as much as $100,000 on the streets of an American city. All the cops, armies, prisons, and executions in the world cannot impede a market with that kind of tax-free profit margin. It is the illegality that permits the obscene markup, enriching drug traffickers, distributors, dealers, crooked cops, lawyers, judges, politicians, bankers, businessmen. Naturally, these people are against reform of the drug laws.”
  Joseph D. McNamara, former police chief of Kansas City, Missouri, and San Jose, California. He has a doctorate in public administration from Harvard and is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution²⁶
• • “The day in the fall of 1988 that I was mandated to sentence Luis Quinones, an eighteen-year-old with no prior record, to ten years of real time because he was a bouncer in an apartment where drugs were being sold, I faced our national drug policy and … concluded that our present policy of criminal prohibition was a monumental error.”
  Robert M. Sweet, a district judge in New York City and former deputy mayor²⁷
• • “Blanket prohibition is a major source of crime: it inflates the price of drugs, inviting new criminals to enter the trade; reduces the number of police officers available to investigate violent crime; fosters adulterated, even poisonous, drugs; and contributes significantly to the transmission of HIV. These are not problems that are merely tangential to the war on drugs. These are problems caused, or made substantially worse, by the war on drugs. That is why I have long advocated that the war on drugs be fought as a public health war.”
  Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore, Maryland, and U.S. attorney for the district of Maryland²⁸
• • “Deterrence strategies have not been successful in reducing drug use. Enforcement strategies have consumed resources, aggravated health risks associated with drugs, and increased the levels of violence surrounding drug markets. Drug policy has also increased profits for drug dealers and attracted other young people into selling … Severe sentencing laws applied broadly and indiscriminately have undermined, rather than reinforced, the moral authority of the law.”
  American Society of Criminology²⁹
• • The war is “lost” and “making drug use a crime is useless and even dangerous.”
  Raymond Kendall, head of the international police force, Interpol³⁰

1 Overview

Since the war on drugs is so severely criticized by drug researchers and law enforcement officials as well as respected public figures, it raises the question: why does the war continue? Also, why do those who study it, as well as those who enforce it, condemn it so harshly? Here, we look briefly at these questions.

Why Certain Drugs Are Prohibited

Who's the enemy in this war on drugs? It's a set of prohibited or “illicit” d...