Nothing Succeeds Like Failure: The War on Drugs

 

We are in the third decade of what has come to be called the "war on drugs." It continues to dominate the headlines everywhere, as millions of individuals are consistently rounded up, convicted and incarcerated in the nation's prison system on drug charges.  About half of the growth in the prison system during the past couple of decades can be directly attributed to drug convictions. 

There are two prevailing views that have become dominant in recent years; actually, there are two variations of one view, and that one view is that the war on drugs has been a monumental failure.  The first variation is that since we have "lost" the war, the only course of action is to declare a "cease fire" if not totally "withdraw our troops" and seek a "peaceful settlement," to use the war metaphor.  The other variation is that we should not totally abandon the war efforts, but rather try different tactics or even (again using the war metaphor) go in with "guns blazing" and "get this over with."

I would like to offer yet another view: the "war on drugs" has been a huge success.  Let me explain my rationale.

In order to determine the success of a program you have to first define what you mean by "success."  If the "war on drugs" was aimed at reducing the use of certain harmful drugs, then few would argue that it has been a success. But what if this was not the goal of this war? 

Contrary to popular belief, several studies have shown that those who were the leading instigators for this war were well aware of the overwhelming evidence from the scientific community that the way to reduce drug addiction is through education and treatment, not punitive legislation.  This they ignored as they proceeded to spend billions of dollars on police and military hardware, plus jail and prison expenditures, over the decades of the 1980s and 1990s.  Dan Baum, in his excellent book Smoke and Mirrors, reports an interview he had with John Ehrlichman, Nixon's domestic policy advisor at the time.  Ehrlichman stated quite bluntly that at that time that the "silent majority" (the term Nixon used to describe the average white middle class American) feared and hated "hippies" and urban blacks, as did most in the Nixon administration.  Since they could not come right out and say this directly, they instead used the "war on drugs" to control them by specifically targeting marijuana use (code word for "hippies") and heroin (code word for blacks).  So, recalled Ehrlichman, we were able to send the "storm troops" onto the campuses and black ghettos.

So the main targets would be the poor, especially racial minorities, along with "hippies."  It soon became obvious that this "war" was declared only on a few harmful drugs, not all harmful drugs, the drugs used by the "outcasts" members of society - "hippies," blacks, Hispanics, the poor in general.  No such war was declared on alcohol and tobacco, which account for around 500,000 deaths each year - not counting the thousands who die in alcohol-related crimes, including traffic accidents (in the recent Supreme Court ruling that the FDA cannot regulate tobacco, Justice Breyer, in his dissent, stated quite frankly that Atobacco products kill more people in this country every year than AIDS, car accidents, alcohol, homicides, illegal drugs, suicides and fires combined@).  No such "war" was declared on the more privileged segments of the population.  In fact, when too many middle class white youths were arrested on marijuana charges in the 1970s, this part of the "war" was called off.  The parents of these youth (many of whom were politicians and law enforcement officials) said (sometimes openly, sometimes not) that "this is not what we had in mind" or "we didn't mean to arrest our own kids," the nice, clean-cut white kids in the suburbs!