A Dose of Reality

The case for legalizing drugs

by Megan Cornish 

 

The war on drugs is a catastrophic failure. In Mexico last year, 6,290 people died in government battles with drug cartels. In the US, harsh anti-drug laws are filling prisons with millions of people. Yet global production of illegal drugs is higher than ever. How can the blights of addiction and the international illicit drug trade be stopped?

Not by military or police action, as is current policy. Drug abuse, like alcoholism, is a social and public health problem. Driving drugs underground, like alcohol prohibition during the 1920s, only pushes prices up, and brings crime and police crackdowns to poor communities. Prohibition also feeds organized crime through the huge profits reaped off the black market.

Drug legalization and support services to communities are the real cure. This includes full funding for treatment. In 2002, only one-fifth of anti-drug money went toward rehabilitation. Equally important is ending the widespread poverty and lack of opportunity that make drugs attractive in the first place.

 

US role in the international misery trade

The illegal market that arises from drug prohibition also creates profound social injuries globally. Today’s drug war in Mexico is only the most current example.

The US fueled the mayhem last year, when Congress passed the Merida Initiative. This measure gave $1.3 billion to Mexico and Central America for arms, military equipment and police training to battle drug cartels. Merida has funded horrific bloodshed, and the dispatch of 45,000 federal troops throughout Mexico. Residents of border regions have charged these troops with torture, rape, and forcing confessions.

The US has fed organized crime in Mexico and Central America with a policy begun in 1996 of deporting noncitizen immigrants, including legal residents, convicted of some crimes. Besides victimizing ordinary people, especially youth, authorities export the drug problem and violent gang culture that is created in the US to countries unprepared to deal with these crises.

And while the US government publicly preaches against drugs, it secretly deals in narcotics. The US has a long history of manipulating drugs as cover for political power plays abroad, and social control at home.

Many carefully researched books expose US drug pushing. One is Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. Here are a few items:

• During the Vietnam War, the CIA participated in the Southeast Asian heroin trade, which supplied US troops (an effort to blunt GI opposition to the war).

• In the 1980s, the CIA traded cocaine for weapons and cash to the contra rebels fighting Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government.

• During the former Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan, the US aided right-wing Muslim fundamentalist groups (some of whom became the Taliban) by trading their heroin for arms. 

Repeatedly, the US has used drug wars to target radical groups. For instance in the 1990s, President Clinton launched “Plan Colombia.” This supposed anti-cocaine campaign funded military and paramilitary death squads, who killed guerilla revolutionaries and poor peasants. An estimated 3,000 people a year were murdered, while right-wing cocaine trafficking went undisturbed.

In Colombia and Afghanistan, the US has sprayed tons of herbicides. These poisons destroy not only drug plants, but food crops, the Amazon rain forest, and the Afghan countryside. And they cause serious health damage.

But the flow of illegal drugs continues because of the huge profits to be made from selling them — as well as weapons to protect the trade. Legalizing drugs would eliminate this huge market for organized crime. In underdeveloped countries, many poor farmers depend on illegal drug crops for survival. Only giving them alternatives will change the equation.

Meanwhile, even though the US government professes a war on drugs, the CIA has shielded large scale US and international dealers from prosecution. And has helped get drugs onto the streets, especially in people of color communities.

 

The racist “war on drugs”

People of all colors and income levels in the US use illegal drugs, for recreation or medical purposes or out of addiction. But enforcement is grossly unequal. For example, Blacks are arrested on drug charges up to five times more often than whites. The drug crusade is a war on the poor, especially Blacks and other people of color.

In low-income communities, jobs, education, and opportunity are severely limited. Street drugs can provide a form of self-medication for those with bleak futures. But poverty and inequality also spark revolt.

Controlling rebellion was the original goal of the “war on drugs” declared by President Richard Nixon in 1970. African Americans were rocking the power structure with struggles for civil rights and social justice. Their fights inspired other movements. Nixon was quoted as saying, “The whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system [of squashing protest] that recognizes this while not appearing to.”

Today, Nixon’s “system” has spawned the highest imprisonment rate in the world. For Black men between 20 and 24 years old, it is one in nine. Eighty percent of all arrests are for drug possession, 40 percent of drug arrests are for marijuana.

The drug war has also put eight times more women in prison since 1980, most of them women of color. Women with drug convictions, many of them mothers, also typically get longer sentences than men.

Prisoners who are released are set up to fail. They are excluded from subsidized housing, college loans, and often jobs. Most lose their voting rights. These policies sabotage rehabilitation and punish the families of ex-felons too.

The anti-drug campaign is also used as a pretext to further criminalize immigrants and militarize the border. The Obama administration has said it favors treatment over incarceration, yet drug rehab is still unavailable to most people who need it. Instead, money is going for beefed-up border patrol.

The failure of drug laws is so clear that Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) was launched in 2002 to call for legalization. Founder Jack Cole believes that drug prohibition should be ended, as was the prohibition of alcohol in 1933. “The day after we ended that terrible law, Al Capone and all his smuggling buddies were out of business.”

 

What can be done

The good news is that the legalization movement is growing. More people are calling for an end to police measures against street drugs, and for treating addiction as the health problem it is. In that light, here are effective ways to address the drug issue:

• End drug prohibition! Provide free rehabilitation for all who want it, with no waiting.

• Release prisoners convicted of petty drug crimes. Redirect money from prisons to job training, drug treatment, education and social services for ex-offenders. End punitive policies against ex-felons and restore their voting rights!

• Redirect the billions spent for drug wars to education, jobs and human services for poor communities, especially for young people.

• No US military intervention abroad. Stop covert US drug-dealing!

 

The above article originally appeared in the Freedom Socialist newspaper (Seattle), June-July 2009, see www.socialism.com.