My favorite graffito is one I saw 10 years ago in Washington, DC. It was neatly painted on the brick wall of a abandoned house and read: “Real jobs for real wages. Stop the phoney war on drugs.” A decade later, that “war” is still being fought, with no end in sight. I’m not even sure there’s any progress in sight. Thanks to Kosovo, we’ve all become reacquainted with military theory and since our action against drugs is a “war,” let’s ask the pertinent “war” questions.
First, what is our objective in this war? That’s an easy one. In the mid-1980s, Congress decreed that it is national policy to have a Drug-Free America by 1995. That’s what we wanted, but what we got by 1995 was Heroin Renaissance.
War question two – How do we achieve our objective? Throughout the war on drugs, the answer has been police and military force. Arrest the users and dealers and throw them in jail. Just like Drug-Free America by 1995, we’re not even close. What we do have are expensive jails jammed with drug users and dealers, whose mandatory sentences are routinely longer than those given rapists and murderers, we have a shredding of constitutional rights across the board which affects the guilty, the suspect and the obviously innocent, we have imposed our military on several sovereign nations, we have kidnapped one head of state, we spend $17 billion of federal funds each year and that’s not counting what we spend on prisons. And we have come no closer to achieving our goal of Drug-Free America. In fact, I am left to wonder if “Drug-Free America” is really the goal at all.
The anti-drug 90s are starting to resemble the anti-Communist 50s. Political harpies with no real ideas to bring to the political market shriek that their opponents are “soft on drugs.” We throw our civil liberties into reverse gear when, instead of requiring our prosecutors to prove an accused person is guilty of using or selling drugs, we require all citizens to submit to roadblocks and urine tests to prove that they are not using or carrying drugs.
Since the “war” on drugs is not achieving its stated objective, since it is such a burden on the nation’s economy, since it so warps our political debate, since it puts the soldier in the role of police officer for the first time since the Civil War, since it subjects citizens to search and seizure of property without due process, I have to wonder if the real goal of the “war on drugs” is not to bring about the birth of a police state, that the goal is not “Drug-Free America,” but an America that is clamped and controlled, where the Constitution is only a paper in the National Archive.
I don’t think anyone is consciously trying to bring about this state of affairs, but conscious or not, that’s where we’re headed.
War question number three – what’s our exit strategy? We don’t have one. If we’ve achieved anything, it’s that the people who smoked pot and took acid 20 years ago are now on Prozac and red wine, because they’re afraid of getting busted. Excuse me if I don’t recognize that as progress.
What do you do when you fail in war? Negotiate, cut your losses, the sooner the better. We should legalize drugs in America. Instead of spending billions on interdiction and imprisonment, we could put billions in the Treasury through taxes. Those tax dollars could be spent to keep drugs out of the hands of children and to provide treatment for those who want to quit drugs.
We could save jail space, so we don’t have to put violent offenders on the street to make room for drug offenders with draconian minimum sentences. By regulating drugs, we can control potency and purity, so people don’t accidentally kill themselves. We can make the therapeutic benefits of drugs available, so we don’t have to arrest AIDS patients and grandmothers with glaucoma.
Finally, we can do what America does best. We’ve never been good at heavy-handed police-state tactics, I’m happy to say, but America has great culture. If we want to have a war on drugs, let’s have a culture war, like the one we’re waging – and winning – against tobacco.
War is Hell
My favorite graffito is one I saw 10 years ago in Washington, DC. It was neatly painted on the brick wall of a abandoned house and read: “Real jobs for real wages. Stop the phoney war on drugs.” A decade later, that “war” is still being fought, with no end in sight. I’m not even sure there’s any progress in sight. Thanks to Kosovo, we’ve all become reacquainted with military theory and since our action against drugs is a “war,” let’s ask the pertinent “war” questions.
First, what is our objective in this war? That’s an easy one. In the mid-1980s, Congress decreed that it is national policy to have a Drug-Free America by 1995. That’s what we wanted, but what we got by 1995 was Heroin Renaissance.
War question two – How do we achieve our objective? Throughout the war on drugs, the answer has been police and military force. Arrest the users and dealers and throw them in jail. Just like Drug-Free America by 1995, we’re not even close. What we do have are expensive jails jammed with drug users and dealers, whose mandatory sentences are routinely longer than those given rapists and murderers, we have a shredding of constitutional rights across the board which affects the guilty, the suspect and the obviously innocent, we have imposed our military on several sovereign nations, we have kidnapped one head of state, we spend $17 billion of federal funds each year and that’s not counting what we spend on prisons. And we have come no closer to achieving our goal of Drug-Free America. In fact, I am left to wonder if “Drug-Free America” is really the goal at all.
The anti-drug 90s are starting to resemble the anti-Communist 50s. Political harpies with no real ideas to bring to the political market shriek that their opponents are “soft on drugs.” We throw our civil liberties into reverse gear when, instead of requiring our prosecutors to prove an accused person is guilty of using or selling drugs, we require all citizens to submit to roadblocks and urine tests to prove that they are not using or carrying drugs.
Since the “war” on drugs is not achieving its stated objective, since it is such a burden on the nation’s economy, since it so warps our political debate, since it puts the soldier in the role of police officer for the first time since the Civil War, since it subjects citizens to search and seizure of property without due process, I have to wonder if the real goal of the “war on drugs” is not to bring about the birth of a police state, that the goal is not “Drug-Free America,” but an America that is clamped and controlled, where the Constitution is only a paper in the National Archive.
I don’t think anyone is consciously trying to bring about this state of affairs, but conscious or not, that’s where we’re headed.
War question number three – what’s our exit strategy? We don’t have one. If we’ve achieved anything, it’s that the people who smoked pot and took acid 20 years ago are now on Prozac and red wine, because they’re afraid of getting busted. Excuse me if I don’t recognize that as progress.
What do you do when you fail in war? Negotiate, cut your losses, the sooner the better. We should legalize drugs in America. Instead of spending billions on interdiction and imprisonment, we could put billions in the Treasury through taxes. Those tax dollars could be spent to keep drugs out of the hands of children and to provide treatment for those who want to quit drugs.
We could save jail space, so we don’t have to put violent offenders on the street to make room for drug offenders with draconian minimum sentences. By regulating drugs, we can control potency and purity, so people don’t accidentally kill themselves. We can make the therapeutic benefits of drugs available, so we don’t have to arrest AIDS patients and grandmothers with glaucoma.
Finally, we can do what America does best. We’ve never been good at heavy-handed police-state tactics, I’m happy to say, but America has great culture. If we want to have a war on drugs, let’s have a culture war, like the one we’re waging – and winning – against tobacco.