A Battle Against Reason, Democracy and Drugs: The Drug War Deciphered
Lazare, Daniel
The drug war has evolved into a selfperpetuating movement that grows larger and larger the worse the drug problem grows. Each new failure sparks renewed fanaticism. Why is the United...
...It was an effort that would culminate in the White House dirty tricks squad and the Watergate break-in...
...Why escalate an unwinnable war if the only result is to make matters even worse...
...Are their dangers truly of a different order from those posed by any other substance...
...society...
...They are as different from one another in terms of their fundamental makeup as, say, alcohol and nicotine...
...Why is the United States in Colombia...
...Despite years of federally funded research, concerns that regular marijuana use might lead to birth defects, reduced sperm counts, or a lowered immune system remain unsubstantiated...
...Democracy," The Wall Street Journal, November 13, 2000, p. A36...
...Where the Clinton Administration at not too dissimilar from the logic that the Bush team least paid lip service to the goal of liberalizing Colomemployed during the epic post-election battle of bian society, the Bush Administration is clearly movNovember-December 2000...
...Formerly little more than an afterthought, it has long ago moved to the forefront and taken on a life of its own...
...Rather than emanating out of Asia, heroin boasted a sterling European pedigree, having been invented in Germany in 1898...
...The answer is not as clear as it might appear at first glance...
...7 Given the one who had come in first was cheating by virtue of stepped-up rhetoric now emanating from the Bush demanding an honest and accurate tally...
...Sure, Washington has tolerated drug running among Afghan mujahideen, Nicaraguan Contras, and others it has deemed useful to its strategic interests...
...The ostensible reason is something called the "war on drugs," a multi-billion-dollar effort aimed at wiping out a class of illegal substances seen as uniquely threatening to the fabric of U.S...
...The answer, in a nutshell, is no...
...Where Communism clearly did pose a mortal threat to U.S...
...8 It was a masdemocrats were hoping for a "peace dividend" in the sive propaganda campaign designed to bludgeon the aftermath of the Cold War, the drug war, with arrests public into believing that the candidate who had come up 43% since 1990 and the prison population nearly in second in the popular vote had in fact won and that doubling, has expanded to fill the vacuum...
...As John Morgan, a professor of pharmacology at the City University of New York and co-author, with Lynn Zimmer, of Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts, is fond of pointing out, "The only way pot will kill you is if a bale of it falls on your head...
...the belief that illicit drugs such as marijuana, cocaine and opiates are in a class by themselves in terms of the threat they Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, they are responsible for an estimated 14,000 premature deaths per year in the United States alone...
...The upper cerebral regions, whose more delicate tissues, apparently the most recently developed and containing the shrine of the spirit...
...Because it would be unable to assess where its true interests lay, it would be all the more subject to domination and control...
...I But are such substances really a class apart...
...utes to cigarettes...
...Rather than rendering U.S...
...Lynn Zimmer and John P. Morgan, Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts: A Review of the Scientific Evidence (New York: The Lindesmith Center, 1997), pp...
...While studies indicate that regular pot smokers do suffer from a slightly higher incidence of respiratory disease (although not nearly as high as cigarette smokers), researchers have found nothing linking pot with such killers as emphysema and lung cancer-most likely because marijuana users inhale comparatively tiny portions of the substance...
...9 Having already won rational analysis...
...6 Politics required, in other words, that rational criticism be painted as irrational and vice versa so that the crusade could go forward...
...The logic behind the drug war, it can be argued, is and another...
...citizens more capable of critical thought, the idea is to render them less-and hence easier to manipulate and control...
...Which leads to another question: If the drug war is obviously flawed, why don't the drug warriors face facts that the crusade is not working and go back to the drawing board...
...Is U.S...
...The more the drug warriors turn up the volume concerning the dangers posed by illicit drugs, the more skeptical young people will become and hence the more inclined to see for themselves...
...Why is it intervening with hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid in a decades-old civil war...
...the movement itself demands...
...Rather than addressing such arguments on their own terms, the logic of the anti-drug crusade requires that drug warriors mount deliberately irrational appeals whose goal is to sow confusion and fear...
...The Battle Against Reason, Democracy and Drugs 1. David E. Sanger, "Bush Names a Drug Czar And Addresses Criticism," The New York Times, May 11, 2001, p. A20...
...For starters, the charge that the anti-drug effort is somehow a phony crusade, less concerned with stamping out drugs at home than with combating leftism abroad, should be laid to rest...
...Because generations of drug warInternationally, the movement seems to be extending riors had successfully turned black into white, GOP its reach as well, creating mini-Vietnams throughout operators found the going all the easier in the waning the Andean region for no other reason than that is what days of the twentieth century...
...Rather than evading legislative or bureaucratic oversight, the idea has been to render oversight superfluous by enlisting Congress, the media, and ultimately the public itself in an all-consuming jihad...
...To quote Gould: "[H]ow can we possibly defend our current policy based on an absurd dichotomy that encourages us to view one class of substances with ultimate horror...while the two most dangerous and life-destroying substances by far, alcohol and tobacco, form a second class advertised in neon on every street corner of urban America...
...In order to answer this question, it is necessary to turn to a classic of drug historiography, Agency of Fear, a 1977 study by the well-known intelligence expert Edward Jay Epstein...
...deaths that the CDC attributes to alcohol each year or the 430,000 it attribThe logic of the anti-drug crusade requires that the drug warriors mount deliberately irrational appeals to sow confusion and fear...
...Or is it about something else-the same old war against Communism, for instance, in a slightly different guise...
...The theme of the vampire-like addict lurking in the shadows was picked up and embellished by generations of drug warriors in Hobson's wake, from Harry J. Anslinger, director of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 until 1962, to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, author of the draconian drug laws that bear his name, and then to Richard Nixon a few years later...
...intervention in Colombia really about protecting ordinary Americans against a class of ultra-dangerous substances...
...The Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2001, part 2, p. 13...
...Pot, for example, is notably benign...
...As some of the more sober drug experts of the day already realized, heroin did not deprive users of their moral sense and did not afflict them with a vampire-like desire to addict others...
...Described by one of the Drug Enforcement Administration's own administrative law judges as "one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man," it has never been linked to a single overdose death...
...the drug wa As no less an authority than George W. Bush has declared, illegal drugs are sui generis in terms of their ability to rob Americans of their "innocence and ambition and hope...
...As an internal Nixon Administration memo put it in 1970: "If the misuse of all drugs-illicit drugs as well as alcohol and tobacco-was discussed in only medical and public health terms, the problem of drug abuse would not take on inflated importance requiring an undeserved federal response...
...9. Ethan A. Nadelmann, "Change of Tune on Drug Policy...
...The answer is that there is no rational answer at all...
...The result, as Agency of Fear points out, was a manufactured crisis that key Nixon operatives like G. Gordon Liddy, a former Poughkeepsie, New York county prosecutor turned Nixon anti-drug warrior, hoped would allow them to operate in such a way that was "free of any normal restraints from the 'bureaucracy,' from congressional subcommittees, and from the press...
...The entire brain," he wrote in 1924, "is immediately affected when narcotics are taken into the system...
...Or that John P. Walters, the major force propping up the Fujimori regime in Peru...
...Rather than eradicatinn th npurnnpose of pose to the moral and physical well-being of American society...
...that merely by calling for a confrontational...
...Like the Cold War before it, the drug war rests on an exceedingly simple premise, i.e...
...Putnam's Sons, 1977), p. 27...
...one victory in the war against democracy, the Bush On the other hand, perhaps it is not so crazy after Administration is clearly preparing to wage another...
...all...
...Bush Administration's new drug czar, has vowed to This is crazy--ordinarily, one would think that capital- step up intervention in Latin America, stiffen penalties ism would demand stability rather than deepening tur- against marijuana, and put a halt to further federal moil-but then a movement whose ultimate goal is to financing of needle-exchange programs that are meant encourage fear and hysteria is by definition immune to to prevent the spread of AIDS...
...Yet since neither the ghetto poor, nor Hollywood hipsters, nor others long associated with drug use are people that Washington politicians, especially Texas Republicans, have ever particularly cared about, can such rhetoric be taken at face value...
...But what, exactly, does the drug war mean...
...See also Paul A. Gigot, "Burgher Rebellion: GOP Turns Up Miami Heat," The WallStreet Journal, November 24, 2000, p. A16...
...8. William J. Bennett, "Gore Challenge Undermines U.S...
...2. Ethan A. Nadelmann and Jann S. Wenner, "Toward a Sane National Drug Policy," Rolling Stone, May 5, 1994, p. 24...
...113-4...
...The real purpose was to confound and confuse so that, like frightened horses, the American public would be reduced to rearing and bucking at shadows...
...If war for war's sake is good, then recount, Al Gore, in the view of former drug czar more war is better...
...According to the Centers for r is war itself...
...are at first tremendously stimulated and then--quite soon-destroyed...
...With drug arrests in the United States currently running at nearly 1.6 million a year, triple the level of the 1970s, and a U.S...
...Rather than destroying Colombia William Bennett and other top Republican honchos, in order to save it, it is destroying it merely so that the was guilty of "a massive campaign to subvert" Ameri- drug war can continue...
...If it is factually impossible to rebut arguments that illicit drugs are not uniquely threatening, then so much the better...
...What is its goal...
...But now that the Cold War has faded into history, the anti-drug crusade has emerged as a holy crusade in its own right, one encompassing everyone from the White House to the local PTA...
...6. Edward J. Epstein, Agency of Fear, p. 184...
...As Agency of Fear tells it, Hobson specialized in regaling his middle-class audiences with nightmarish accounts of the hideous effects wrought by heroin and similar substances...
...Rather than reducing drug use, drug prohibition pumps it up to loftier levels...
...Epstein begins his tale with Richmond Pearson Hobson, a former naval officer who, as a member of Congress, crusaded against alcohol in the years leading up to Prohibition and then, in the 1920s, carved out a lucrative career for himself by crusading against drugs...
...This is what the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould meant when, in Dissent magazine in 1990, he labeled the drug war "a tragedy born of a phony taxonomy," which is to say a false system of classification...
...3 Bottom line: Illegal drugs are not a class apart in terms of their health consequences nor presumably, therefore, their moral consequences either...
...Rather than eradication, the purpose of the drug war is thus war itself...
...A Gore Coup d'Etat...
...After all, a people unable to distinguish truth from falsehood when it came to drugs would be unable to distinguish truth from falsehood when it came to global warming, energy policy, separation of church and state, or tax cuts for the rich and famous...
...This is bad, certainly, yet it is a fraction of the 81,000 U.S...
...It was an Administration-despite George W.'s refusal to attempt to stand truth on its head that might not have answer questions concerning his own youthful drug succeeded if years of drug-war propaganda had not use-the escalation promises to continue, prepared the way...
...However, because of the political significance of the problem, visible, hard-hitting programs must be highlighted to preclude irrational criticism...
...Chemically speaking, substances like pot, coke, and heroin are far too diverse to be regarded as in any way constituting a distinct, readily identifiable class...
...The following is an attempt to run through some of the answers...
...Moreover, the more effort that goes into making such a policy work despite the absurd dichotomy on which it is based, the more damage it will wind up doing...
...Where liberals and social attempting to steal a national election...
...From a war on reason, the drug war thus metastasized over the ensuing decades into a low-intensity military conflict whose ultimate target is political democracy...
...If that is the case, then why does the entire U.S...
...From a sideshow to the struggle against Communism, the drug war has evolved into a self-perpetuating movement that grows larger and larger worse the drug problem grows...
...3. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Comparative Causes of Annual Deaths in the United States," available at <<httpJ/twww.cdc.gov/tobacco/research-data/health consequences/a ndths.htm...
...4. Stephen Jay Gould, "Taxonomy as Politics," Dissent, Winter 1990, p. 7. 5. Edward J. Epstein, Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America (New York: G.P...
...Christopher Marquis, "Tough Conservative Picked for Drug Czar, Officials Say," The New York Times, April 26, 2001, p. A20...
...Since pot, coke and heroin are not a class apart in terms of either their chemical composition or their impact on public health, he wrote, any attempt to construct a public policy on such an assumption can only wind up doing more harm than good...
...7. Annual drug arrests available from "Uniform Crime Reports," pub- lished yearly by the Department of Justice, and available at <<www.fedstats.gov...
...That effort also hinged on ing in the direction of something harder and more a simple premise, i.e...
...In terms of their health effects, they are highly diverse as well...
...5 Little of it was true...
...Written when the modern drug war was still in its relative infancy, it argues that, historically, the goal has not been to stamp out drugs per se, but to create a war-time atmosphere of hysteria in which the government would feel justified in using extraordinary measures to counter an extraordinary threat...
...The Wall Street Journal, November 10, 2000, p. A18...
...Each new failure can democracy, of launching "a coup d'6tat," and of sparks renewed fanaticism...
...It has in an interview to "relaunch" the drug war on a new caused repeated social turmoil in Bolivia and was a and intensified basis...
...political establishment, liberal Democrats no less than conservative Republicans, insist that they are...
...capitalism, why does Washington insist on assigning that same role to a diverse group of chemicals that manifestly do not...
...The drug war is multi- Is it any wonder, therefore, that shortly after he was plying the social chaos in Colombia and sending it nominated, Attorney General John Ashcroft promised washing over the border into Brazil and Ecuador...
...Sure, it would never allow fighting drugs to get in the way of the far more important fight against Communism...
...Yet the truth was irrelevant...
...Drug consumption will remain stubbornly high as a consequence, while drug production needed to meet demand will remain stubbornly high as well...
...4 How indeed...
...Hobson went on to declare that users have "an insane desire to make addicts of others," and then played on xenophobic fears by adding: "Like the invasions and plagues of history, the scourge of narcotic drug addiction came out of Asia...
...For prison statistics, see www.sentencingpro- ject.org...
...Three decades later, the results are all too evident...
...2 Cocaine and heroin, by contrast, do have serious health consequences...
...incarceration rate that, thanks largely to the drug war, is by now the highest in the world, the anti-drug effort must be seen as nothing if not serious...
Vol. 35 • July 2001 • No. 1
