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What we call the War on Drugs is probably one of the most widely hated group of policies in the U.S. We have great reasons to oppose it, the most obvious of which is that it’s not bringing down drug abuse rates. It’s also been implemented with violence toward minorities and the poor, and it’s wildly expensive to boot. Assuming that both houses of Congress, as well as our last few presidents, aren’t a bunch of maniacs, there has to be some reason they’ve continued with this disaster. It would help to realize that the War on Drugs itself is a myth—the phrase has no more meaning than a slogan in a cereal commercial. The policies themselves are quite real and worth a look, but they are the policies of a government that has zero interest in getting rid of drug addiction in America.
America definitely has a drug problem, to the tune of 480,000 deaths a year from tobacco alone. A government dedicated to ending drug deaths clearly has a whopper of a problem on its hands. But listening to Ronald and Nancy Reagan telling America to, “Just Say No” to drugs in their 1986 television address, it would seem that the drugs destroying America can’t be bought in a gas station. The Reagans never once mentioned tobacco in their address. Imported drugs like crack cocaine and marijuana, however, were the national obsession. In 1985, the New York Times ran an average of 36 articles a month about drug trafficking and its use. On the month of the famous, “Just Say No” address, it only published 169. The public relations campaign that is the War on Drugs was in full swing.
The astounding incarceration rate we see today started under Reagan with artificial support from the public. At first the policies seemed innocent, with the establishment of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in 1988. The target population, however, was already feeling the heat. Just like the 1870s prohibition against opium targeted Chinese migrants and the early 1900s marijuana prohibition targeted Mexicans, the toughening of laws on crack had its own racial element. The number of incarcerated people in the U.S. quadrupled to nearly 2.3 million within the next 28 years, almost a million of them black. The trend had already been set for blacks to be persecuted under laws that were created to do it.
It’s easier to sell a war on drugs than a war on people, which is what prohibitions have always been. Minorities and the poor seem to be the only ones who are targeted. This historical trend isn’t only in the U.S. — when gin became the poor man’s drink in 18th century England, the government passed laws making it prohibitively expensive to make and sell it. The poor also happen to be on the wrong side of the law today, too. In the U.S. you’d have to get caught selling 100 grams of powder cocaine to get the same prison sentence as someone selling one gram of crack, which is much cheaper.
College students should recognize the class disparity very well. A Friday night spent on the Hill will have you thinking that drugs are completely legal, but the cops wouldn’t go so easy on us if we didn’t bring massive amounts of money to their city. Say what you want about campus police, but they’ve never thrown a grenade into your house while searching for drugs like they did to an Atlanta family last year. To put it another way, a Wall Street broker with a coke habit can probably rest easy (Leonardo DiCaprio might even play him in a blockbuster movie someday), but an inner-city worker addicted to crack will have a tougher time with the law. Take even more comfort if you’re white. Even though white people are more likely to use illegal drugs, black people are three times more likely to go to prison for drug offenses.
America’s poor aren’t the only ones being targeted. Under the U.S. initiative called Plan Colombia, the military is spraying huge amounts of Colombian land with herbicide. NPR describes Plan Colombia as “an effort to decrease the amount of cocaine produced in that nation.” That would be an utter failure if it were actually the goal. Ninety percent of cocaine in the U.S. still comes from Colombia after more than a decade of fumigation, but the U.S. is making strides in aiding the Colombian government while it goes to war against guerilla groups. Many “coca-growing areas” are now conveniently under the government’s control since U.S. involvement began, and the largest rebel group in the country is on the retreat. So is Plan Colombia really a failure? If it was intended to get rid of the cocaine trade, yes, but as a military tactic it’s worked pretty well. That’s the beauty of the War on Drugs—at worst, the government’s actions are seen as failures, while the uglier motives remain invisible.
Policies in the U.S. today—entanglements in foreign conflicts, militarization of police and SWAT raids on American homes—don’t even appear to have the goal of reducing drug abuse rates. This is especially obvious compared to other countries that actually have tried to solve the problem. In the 1990s, Portugal was going through a true drug addiction epidemic. At its height, 100,000 people had a drug addiction and the rate of HIV infections was higher than most other countries. Since the Portuguese government actually wanted a change, it made one. Possession of ten days’ worth or less of any drug results in a mandatory meeting with a social worker, a psychologist and a lawyer. Drug possession is simply not criminalized. The policy is working, of course. The number of adults who have tried illegal drugs is rising (along with most of Europe), but the number of teenagers who have done the same is falling. Far fewer drug addicts are getting infected with HIV and more are going to rehab.
With a shining example of an actual war on drugs going on right now in Portugal, it’s clear that there’s no effort being made to curb drug addiction in the U.S. Our arguments against our own War on Drugs become meaningless when we call it a failure. You can’t fail at something you never tried to do in the first place. After three decades of this latest campaign, it’s time to stop believing that the assault against minorities and the poor is just a mistake in the crusade against drugs. When this particular fraud is over and new scare tactics are conjured up, Americans will hopefully be more skeptical than they are now.
Contact CUIndependent Staff Writer Jared Conner at jared.conner@colorado.edu.
