THE DRUG WAR ISN’T ABOUT COMBATING USE

Crusaders fight medicinal marijuana to help justify the cause’s bloated budget.

If there is one stunning bit of stupidity that instantly garners bipartisan support, it’s the failed war on drugs. Virtually all politicians march in lock-step to do battle with unmitigated fervor against each and every banned drug as if they were all created equal in destructive potency and anti-social impulse.

Nowhere is the simplistic arrogance that underwrites national drug policy more blatant than in the continual denigration of voters in the states that dare dissent from official policy. In 1996, it was the electorate of California and Arizona that begged to differ and, by voting in favor of the limited legalized use of medical marijuana, incurred the blistering wrath of the anti-drug crusaders.

To hear the uproar in official circles, you would have thought marijuana, even in small quantities and prescribed by doctors for AIDS and chemotherapy patients, was demon rum itself, and that the ghosts of the temperance society ladies had risen from their graves to smash open the doors of the cannabis clubs.

But the hysteria failed. Despite police harassment, the nonstop fulminations of President Clinton’s drug czar Barry McCaffrey and a massive advertising campaign against medical marijuana, the electorate has remained sane.

In this last election, voters in Nevada, Oregon, Alaska and Washington joined California and Arizona in approving patient use of marijuana. In Arizona and Oregon, voters moved beyond medical marijuana use, opting for serious steps in the direction of decriminalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana.

Exit polls show that voters in the nation’s capital similarly voted for legal use of medical marijuana, but in one of the more egregious violations of the spirit of representative government, Congress approved a ban to even count the D.C. vote on this measure. The fight to prevent the vote count was led by ultra-right wing Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.), who perfectly embodies the contradictions inherent in his ideological obsessions. Barr has been the most vociferous opponent of gun control legislation and even gutted an anti-terrorist bill to tag explosives material on the grounds that it would be an unwarranted extension of government power. But locking folks up for smoking weed is his favorite cause.

He’s not alone. Marijuana remains the scourge of the $11-billion-a-year anti-drug bureaucracy not because of any documentable antisocial impact but simply because that’s where it gets the big numbers of drug users to justify the bloated budgets.

According to the latest FBI statistics, 545,396 Americans were arrested in 1996 for possessing marijuana, a substance that, if legal, would prove no more dangerous to society than the vodka martini one occasionally sips. That doesn’t mean it’s good to abuse any mood-altering drug, but rather that a national policy which turns the relatively benign use of marijuana into a highly profitable and socially disruptive criminal activity is absurd.

But don’t try to tell the politicians that, or they’ll tear your head off. Just look at the smear job McCaffrey has done on financier/philanthropist George Soros and other businessmen for daring to help finance recent state ballot initiatives that present voters with a drug policy choice.

McCaffrey thundered recently that the folks putting up money for these campaigns are "a carefully camouflaged, exorbitantly funded, well-heeled elitist group whose ultimate goal is to legalize drug use in the United States." Interesting that McCaffrey was silent on the far larger amounts of tobacco industry money that poured into California to challenge a ballot initiative to increase the tax on tobacco products and divert it to education. It is invidious to pretend that the drugs now classified as legal are less harmful than those whose use is branded as a crime.

Drug abuse, both of legal and illegal drugs, is a medical problem requiring treatment by health professionals, not cops. What makes the war on drugs so nutty is that it’s more about maintaining the coercive power of anti-drug bureaucrats than treating those who suffer from serious drug abuse.

The voters have been vilified as naive, but that appellation belongs to a war-on-drugs crusade that has filled our jails while leaving illegal drugs more plentiful and cheaper. It drives the anti-drug bureaucracy mad that voters in six states have now voted to ever so slightly challenge its total grip on the awesome power of government, but it bodes well for our representative system of government.
Copyright: 1998 Los Angeles Times.

From the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram
(Marijuananews note: This column was also printed in the Sacramento Bee, which is significant, given the Bee’s occasionally reactionary views.)

November 16, 1998
letters@star-telegram.com
http://www.star-telegram.com/
By Molly Ivins, Fort Worth Editorial Columnist mollyivins@star-telegram.com.

(Marijuananews note: Molly Ivins is a Texas "good ol’ girl" with an attitude. Progressive, that is. She doesn’t go as far as I would like with this, but what she says is taken seriously by Texas progressives, and she is liked even by the conservatives.)

IT’S TIME FOR NEW TACTICS IN AMERICA’S WAR ON DRUGS

AUSTIN—Heads up, team: I think we’re starting to see a major change in the old ‘Zeitgeist’ on the issue of drugs. This is one of those seismic shifts when the unsayable suddenly becomes sayable, when we notice that the emperor is wearing no clothes. The main problem with the war on drugs— you’ve probably noticed—is that we’re losing.

We’re also seeing the start of a consensus that it’s time to try something else. One way you can tell when one of these major shifts is happening is when some of those speaking out are so respected and respectable that they give cover to others who are more conformist.

The Lindesmith Centre in New York has marshalled an impeccable set of world citizens behind the simple proposition that the global war on drugs is now causing more harm than drug abuse itself. Among those who signed that declaration are Walter Cronkite, former U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar, former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz, Nobelist Oscar Arias, and on and on and on.

There are also several indications that the people are well ahead of the politicians on this one. On Election Day, medical marijuana initiatives passed in Washington state, Alaska, Arizona (second time), Oregon and Nevada—this despite drug czar Barry McCaffrey and the rest of the drug war establishment swearing that this was tantamount to legalizing heroin. The people are perfectly capable of deciding that relieving the suffering of the dying is not the same as supporting the Medellin cartel.

Notice, too, that Jesse "the Governor" Ventura, the crackerjack populist surprise in Minnesota, was elected in large part by young people who like his libertarian straight talk on drugs.

Of course, our normal politicians are frozen on this issue. Liberals have been drug-baited for so long that they live in terror of the dread accusation "soft on drugs." And the law-‘n’-order conservatives have been making hay at the polls with this cheap scare stuff for so long that they’re hooked on it. Fortunately, the libertarian wing of the right has made uncommon sense on the issue all along, and even establishment conservatives like William F. Buckley are open to reasonable discussion; there’s a real chance here for conservatives to seize an important issue and do major public service at the same time.

Just to give you an idea how petrified the libs are on this issue, note President Clinton’s performance—he fired Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders not for advocating legalization of drugs but for suggesting that it should be studied! And he stopped Donna Shalala, secretary of health and human services, from implementing a clean-needle program—an obviously sensible public health measure.

The liveliest recent polemic on the subject is Mike Gray’s book ‘Drug Crazy: How We got Into This Mess & How We Can Get Out of It.’ Gray has some horrifying reports on how deeply the drug war has corrupted law enforcement across the country. He also makes a strong case that the war on drugs is just as disastrous a failure as was Prohibition, with exactly the same consequences in the growth of enormous criminal empires.

However, it may be that debating legalization will simply turn out to be polarizing and futile while it takes the focus off the need to at least reform drug regulation. For starters, we could consider decriminalizing marijuana, rethinking the mandatory minimum sentences that put small-time users in prison for years while leaving major dealers untouched. Another idiotic injustice that needs to be addressed immediately is the disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine—mostly used by inner-city blacks because of its cheap street price—and the powder cocaine favored by wealthy whites. Same drug, gross inequity in sentencing.

In-prison drug treatment programs make far more sense that the usual litany of more money, more cops, more prisons, longer sentences, etc. Well short of legalization, any fool can see how we could spend anti-drug money more effectively and fairly. That’s a mandatory minimum in itself.

Our poor frozen political establishment does in fact replicate Prohibition. President Hoover appointed a commission to study Prohibition back in 1929, and after 19 months of labor, the commission reported that it was a disaster area—and recommended no changes.

A columnist known as F.P.A. summarized the finding in doggerel:

Nevertheless, we’re for it.

Time for new tactics and strategy, and anyone who says so is not soft on drugs but strong on common sense.