Anniversary of the War on Drugs: Reflection and Action

Some anniversaries are occasions to celebrate; others open a period for reflection and others for action. Next June will mark 40 years since the American ex-President Richard M. Nixon declared a war on drugs and identified drug use as public enemy number one. As far as I know, there are no plans for celebrations. What is needed, and in fact is essential, is reflection … and action.

It is difficult to believe that Americans have wasted around a billion dollars (hundreds of millions, more or less) in this 40-year war. It’s difficult to believe that tens of millions of persons have been arrested, and many locked in prisons, for committing non-violent acts that a century ago weren’t even considered crimes. That the number of people incarcerated for drug-related charges has risen over 10 times, while the population of the country has only risen by 50 percent. That millions of Americans have been denied the right to vote — not because they’ve murdered a citizen or betrayed their country — but instead only because they bought, sold, produced or simply possessed a plant or chemical psychoactive substance. And that it’s permitted that hundreds of thousands of Americans die — by overdose, AIDS, hepatitis and other diseases — because the war on drugs prohibited treating addiction to certain substances as a health problem, instead of a criminal one.

We have to reflect not only on the consequences of the war on drugs in the U.S., but also abroad. The crime, corruption and violence that this policy has inflicted on Mexico draw parallels with Chicago during the Prohibition era … but 50 times worse. Parts of Central America continue to be even further out of control, and many Caribbean nations hope to not be next.

They say the illegal opium and heroin trade in Afghanistan represents between a third and a half of the country’s GDP. In Africa, the profit, trafficking and corruption that exist because of prohibition extend rapidly. As for South America and Asia, choose a moment and country, and the histories are pretty much the same — from Colombia, Peru, Paraguay and Brazil to Pakistan, Laos, Burma and Thailand.

Wars can be costly — in money, rights and lives — but still necessary to defend national sovereignty and core values. It’s impossible to sustain that argument when discussing the war on drugs. In fact, marijuana, cocaine and heroin are cheaper today than when the war began 40 years ago and are within reach of whoever desires them. Marijuana, which is responsible for half the drug-related arrests in the United States, has never killed anyone. Heroin is basically undistinguishable from hydromorphone (Dilaudid), a pain medication that thousands of Americans have consumed with a medical prescription without suffering negative effects. The large majority of those who have used cocaine do not become addicts. Each of these drugs is less dangerous than the government propaganda affirms, but enough to deserve intelligent norms instead of general prohibitions.

If the demand for these drugs were two, five or ten times the amount that exists today, the supply would be there. But those are the markets. And who benefits from persisting with the strategies of controlling supply, despite its obvious costs and failures? Basically, two interest groups: the producers and vendors of illicit drugs, who gain much more than they would if their products were legally regulated instead of being prohibited; and the supporters of the law for whom the expansion of prohibitionist policies translates into jobs, money and political power to defend their interests.

The Republican and Democratic governors who confront enormous budget deficits now support alternatives to the incarceration of non-violent criminals, something they flatly rejected 40 years ago. It would be a tragedy, nevertheless, if these steps — modest but important — turn into nothing more than a more friendly war against drugs. What is truly needed is a rationalization that recognizes that the problem is not only with drug addiction but also with prohibition, that reduces the role of criminalization and the criminal justice system in the control of drugs, and that stresses protection and public health.

The best way to mark the 40th anniversary of the war on drugs is to break the taboos that have impeded the frank evaluation of the costs and failures of prohibition, and to explore various alternatives. There has hardly even been a hearing, revision or analysis launched and commissioned by the government in the last 40 years that has dared to attempt such an evaluation. The same cannot be said about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, or nearly any other field of public debate. The war on drugs persists, for the most part, because those who are responsible for it focus their attention entirely on the implementation of the strategy without critiquing the strategy itself.

The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA, for its English abbreviation) and our allies in this movement, which is growing rapidly, propose breaking this tradition of denial and transforming this anniversary into a year of action. Our goal is ambitious: to achieve a mass critique in which the push for reform exceeds the powerful inertia that has for so long sustained the prohibitionist, punitive policies. This requires working with legislators who dare to tackle these important questions, organizing public forums in which citizens can take action, recruiting an unprecedented number of powerful and distinguished individuals who publicly express their disapproval, and organizing cities and states to incite new dialogue and directions for local policies.

It relies on whether these five themes surface again and again during this anniversary year:

1. The legalization of marijuana is no longer a question of whether it will be done, but when and how. Gallup polls discovered that 36 percent of Americans in 2005 favored legalization, with 60 percent in opposition. By the end of 2010, support rose to 46 percent, and the opposition has fallen to 50 percent. The majority of citizens, in a growing number of states, now say that the legal regulation of marijuana makes more sense than persisting with prohibition. We know what we need to do: work with local and national allies to prepare and conduct public consultations about the legalization of marijuana in California, Colorado and other states; support federal and state legislators in the presentation of initiatives to decriminalize and regulate marijuana; ally ourselves with local activists to pressure the police and district attorneys to not prioritize marijuana-related arrests; and support prominent individuals in government, business, the media, academia and other fields that publicly support putting an end to the prohibition of marijuana.

2. The overpopulation in prisons is the problem, not the solution. Having the highest absolute and per capita number of prisoners in the world is a shameful distinction that the United States should hurry to lose. The best way to tackle this problem is to reduce the number of people incarcerated for nonviolent crimes related to drugs by taking action like decriminalizing and legalizing marijuana; providing alternatives to imprisonment for those who do not represent a threat outside the walls of the prison; reducing the minimum, mandatory sentences and other severe sanctions; dealing with drug addiction and other abuses of drugs outside of the criminal justice system; and insisting that no one should be in jail only for possessing a psychoactive substance, if there is no harm to a third party. All this requires legislative and administrative action by the government, but systemic reform will only occur if the objective to reduce prison overpopulation is adopted as a moral necessary by many groups.

3. The war on drugs is “the new Jim Crow.” The magnitude of the racial disproportionality in the application of these drug laws in the United States (and many other countries) is grotesque: African Americans have a dramatically higher chance of being arrested, tried and incarcerated than other Americans that commit the same violations of law. The worry about racial justice last year motivated Congress to reform the notorious laws that prescribe minimum, mandatory sentences for crack-related crimes, but much more is needed to be done. Nothing is more important at this point than the disposition and capacity of African American leaders to prioritize the necessity of a fundamental reform of drug policy. It is not an easy assignment, given the disproportional extension and impact within African American families and communities, but it is

essential, if only because no one else can speak and act with the moral authority required to transcend both the deeply entrenched fears and the powerful, harbored interests.

4. It should no longer be allowed that policy win over science — and over compassion, common sense and fiscal prudence — when confronting illicit drugs. Abundant evidence points out that it is more effective and less costly to treat addiction and other drug abuse as health problems and not criminal justice issues. This is why the DPA is increasing its efforts to transform the way in which drug problems are discussed and treated in local communities. “Think globally and act locally” is applicable as much to drugs as it is to any other field of public policy. Of course it would be better if a president would assign someone who is not a police chief, an Army general or a professional moralist to serve as an anti-drug czar. But what is truly important is to move the authority on drug-related issues in political and state municipalities from the criminal justice system to health officials and others. And it is equally important that the new dialogues relevant to drug policy be informed by scientific evidence, as well as the best practices within and outside the country. One of our specialties in the DPA is to make it so that people think and act outside of the frame established by drug policy and literature.

5. Legalization must be put on the table — not because it is necessarily the best solution, nor because it would be the obvious alternative to the failures of prohibition — but instead for three reasons: One, because it’s the best way to dramatically reduce crime, violence, corruption and other extraordinary costs and consequences associated with prohibition; two, because there exist so many options to legally regulate drugs instead of prohibition; and three, because putting legalization on the table implies proposing new fundamental questions about whether prohibition is necessary to protect human society from its own vulnerabilities. To insist that legalization be put on the table — for the legislative audience, public forums and internal governmental discussions — is not the same as arguing that drugs should receive the same treatment as alcohol and tobacco. It is, rather, a demand that the precepts and prohibitionist policies no longer be taken as gospel and be seen as policy options that deserve to be evaluated critically, including the objective comparison with non-prohibitionist methods.

That is the plan. Forty years after Nixon declared a war on drugs, we take advantage of this anniversary to push reflection and action. And we ask all of our allies — in fact, anyone who has reservations about the war on drugs — to unite with us in this venture.