Friday marked the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s declaration of an American “war on drugs” — a struggle opponents say has cost $1 trillion, countless ruined lives, an eruption of dangerous crime rings, gross racial injustice and precious little success in reducing drug use or addiction.
Observing the date, the Drug Policy Alliance staged 50 events in cities ranging from New York to Los Angeles, Denver to Providence, Columbus, Miss., to Inglewood, Calif. Meanwhile, Students for Sensible Drug Policy organized a set of nationwide candlelight vigils to honor victims of the drug war.
But will it make any difference? Not if you check the White House’s brush-off of a just-released international panel report highly critical of the drug war, urging total U.S. and international rethinking of the issue, including the possible legalization of marijuana.
Members and signatories of the Global Commission on Drug Policy included a former secretary-general of the United Nations (Kofi Annan); a former U.S. secretary of state (George Shultz); a former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve (Paul Volcker); and former presidents of Colombia (Cesar Gaviria), Mexico (Ernesto Zedillo), and Brazil (Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the commission’s chair).
One would expect a serious reply, indeed a careful re-examination of U.S. policy that has driven so much of the international drug war. Here’s an eminent group declaring first that “the global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies.” Second, that “vast expenditures on criminalization and repressive measures directed at producers, traffickers and consumers of illegal drugs have clearly failed to effectively curtail supply or consumption.” And third, that it’s time to “end the criminalization, marginalization and stigmatization of people who use drugs but who do no harm to others.”
Rather than engaging those issues, Gil Kerlikowske, President Obama’s drug czar, replied that “legalizing illicit drugs increases drug use and the need for drug treatment.” It’s an assertion clearly disproven by international experience.
(Government-run heroin substitution programs for addicts have, for example, disrupted crime rings and reduced actual heroin use in both Switzerland and the Netherlands.)
Second, Kerlikowske claims illegal drug use is associated with “fatal drugged-driving accidents, mental illness, and emergency room admissions.” Technically, yes — sometimes. But the same is true many times over due to alcohol misuse — and alcohol is a far more dangerous demon, complicit in vast numbers of rapes, attacks, even murders. We tried prohibiting alcohol by constitutional amendment in the early 20th century — only to learn that people kept on imbibing even while prohibition spawned a vast criminal submarket and Al Capone-era surge of violent gang killings.
Kerlikowske says the White House no longer espouses “a culture war or drug war mentality.” But then he suggests no significant shifts, citing figures — disputed by critics — that overall U.S. drug usage has been cut by half in the last 30 years.
What’s not in the U.S. response to the international panel is a counting of the drug war’s horrendous toll.
Topping the list: the arrest and incarceration, in the United States and globally, of literally millions of people at the lower ends of illegal drug markets — petty sellers, “drug mule” couriers, and poor farmers desperate for any source of income. As the panel notes, the arrests have “filled prisons and destroyed lives and families” without reducing drug availability or the power of criminal organizations.
Next, the American appetite for drugs. Because it’s so dangerous to smuggle drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border, we’ve spurred creation of a rash of Mexican drug gangs now responsible for an appalling 40,000 murders.
Third, racial injustice. As Jesse Jackson recently wrote (for the Chicago Sun-Times): “The war on drugs turned, early on, into a new Jim Crow offensive against people of color. Although whites abuse drugs at higher rates than African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated at 10 times the rate of whites for drug offenses. Millions have been deprived of the right to vote for being convicted of nonviolent crimes.”
We still await the day when any U.S. administration has been willing to debate those massive impacts. We still await a “change we need” from the Obama White House.
And then, the international panel notes, there is our global complicity — that for 50 years, under a United Nations Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the U.S. government “has worked strenuously … to ensure that all countries adopt the same rigid approach to drug policy — the same laws, and the same tough approach to their enforcement.”
Yet this is precisely when the world so sorely needs new experiments, new learning, to deal with the complexities of drug regulation and today’s complex array of related health, justice, race and rights issues. Surely it’s time to turn a fresh page.
Neal Peirce’s e-mail address is nrp@citistates.com.
