And the vast majority of those people aren’t Americans:
The drug war has split in two, and there are increasing differences in how it is fought. In August, the Department of Justice advised federal prosecutors that while possessing a small amount of marijuana remains a federal crime, it is not an “enforcement priority.” A majority of U.S. citizens support decriminalizing the possession of marijuana, and Colorado and Washington have passed ballot measures legalizing it. “People see a war as a war on them,” Gil Kerlikowske, the current drug czar, told the Wall Street Journal, in 2009. “We’re not at war with people in this country.” The Obama Administration has managed to briefly lift a ban on the use of federal funds for needle-exchange programs and reduced sentencing disparities between crack and powder cocaine. Recently, the President commuted the sentences of eight inmates who had been convicted of crack-cocaine offenses, perhaps signalling a new approach; more than three hundred and twenty thousand people remain incarcerated on drug charges.
Overseas, however, the U.S. approach to drugs still looks a lot like war.
The D.E.A., assisted by the U.S. military, acts as an international police force, coördinating with foreign militaries through a network of offshore bases. Of the twenty-five billion dollars that the federal government spent fighting drugs last year, forty per cent went to treatment and prevention programs. The rest went to “supply reduction.” In Mexico, the $1.9 billion Mérida Initiative has relied on an enforcement-driven strategy somewhat similar to Plan Colombia’s. In 2006, President Felipe Calderón decided to deploy the Mexican military to fight drug cartels; since then, more than seventy thousand people have been killed in drug-related violence. …
“The war on drugs has simply not worked,” George P. Shultz, who served as Secretary of State under Reagan, told me. “It hasn’t kept drugs out of this country.” In 2011, Shultz, along with a committee of former heads of state, businessmen, and retired U.S. officials, called for an overhaul of U.S. drug-enforcement policy. The effects of interdiction programs like Anvil, they wrote, “are negated almost instantly,” wasting money that would be better spent on treatment and harm reduction. I asked Shultz why ineffectual policies have persisted. “We haven’t felt the full effects of it ourselves,” he said. “It took us twelve years to learn that Prohibition wasn’t working. There was Al Capone, there was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The violence was here. Now we have outsourced the violence, in effect, to Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras.”
Recent Dish on the violent toll of the drug war here. A reader responds to that post:
Just wanted to offer a counterpoint to the alleged lower number of alcohol related deaths during the “dry years” of Prohibition. This is a frequent example offered by those still wishing to believe that drug prohibition offers some extra health or safety benefit than a regulated environment would provide. The problem is there are some difficulties measuring black markets accurately – for obvious reasons – and in the years of Prohibition there are conflicting signals. Some early drops in reported use were significantly rolled back over the course of the dry years. Other sources show more consistent rates of drinking and abuse or increase:
The highest death rates from alcoholism occurred during the decade prior to Prohibition as did the highest death rates from cirrhosis of the liver. These statistics should be qualified by the observations of Dr. Charles Morris, Chief Medical Examiner for New York City: “In making out death certificates (which are basic to Census Reports) private or family physicians commonly avoid entry of alcoholism as a cause of death whenever possible. This practice was more prevalent under the National Dry Law than it was in preprohibition time” (Tillitt, 1932: 114-115).
But why stop there if we’re talking about Prohibition’s effect on safety!? When manufacturing moved to more illicit and clandestine means, delivered by ruthless gangs capitalizing on the invitation to satisfy an insatiable societal demand for alcohol, consumers had more risk and could not as reliably trust the quality of their alcohol. We’ve all heard the stories of “bad batches” made in backyards (it still happens, if on a much smaller scale) and there are parallels here with the cocaine market, where unreliable purity leads to fatal miscalculations and overdose deaths.
If the years of Prohibition are to be used to guide our current approach to drugs, then let’s not cherry pick a statistic that comforts us in our desired outcome and let’s instead look at the broader landscape: the criminalization of social practise, the destruction of families by agents of the law and murderous gangs (are we not living in a time where this is available for us to see close up every Sunday when Boardwalk Empire is on?). What benefit can be claimed is illusory and counterbalanced by other statistics showing no benefit at all? Some of the quotes from the time are instructive.
We should remind ourselves that the contours of this War on Drugs were really set during the Prohibition years. The legacy lives on – it’s just we tend to have replaced the Victorian moralizing with post-hoc statistical rationalizations of the status quo, offered by those interested in keeping their budget allocations and eagerly agreed to by those steeped in an ideology unable to contemplate an alternative approach.
Crandall sits on his perch and admonishes that we should not “blithely dismiss” the cautionary urgings of the Drug Warriors, of whose wisdom we have long been alleged beneficiaries. He urges that the Drug War cannot “simply” be reformed – as if proponents of regulation are people prone to breezy assertions of magical utopias once we choose to end the Drug War.
Some of this attitude stems from the strawmen Crandall and others construct in these discussions – it seems they are addressing their teenage kids and the crudest formulations for an end to the Drug War. But a lot of this is due to a failure of imagination and a basic ability to conceive of a different way of doing things. There should be little excuse for this failure to conceive of what a regulated environment could look like for illegal drugs, including hard ones, when we have access to materials like the wonderfully researched and thought-out “Blueprint” for regulation offered here. Crandall is slumming it – and should try to engage thoughtfully with more cogent, researched and well-articulated proponents of regulation than the hippie in his mind’s eye.
The Dish 