Daniel Spichtinger (January 1997), revised 2001

Drugs are often, especially in the mass media, portrayed as a threat of enormous proportions. They are held responsible for all sorts of problems like crime, (assumed) moral decay and unemployment, to name only a few. Thus, more and more extreme measures are introduced to win the war on drugs. This essay will not only try to define the somewhat vague term "war on drugs", it will also give the major theories about the true purpose of the war and will present alternative models of how to deal with the drug problem.

In 1986 Ronald Reagan held a speech in which he officially declared the war on drugs using metaphors of war, illness, crusades and religious righteousness to justify actions against drug users and dealers. According to the psychologist Bruce Alexander such warlike language and violent imagery is part of a possible definition of the war on drugs. When drug users are described as a menace to society, steps to eradicate the "enemy" are met with little resistance from the public. Alexander considers the enhancement of police power, which results in legal violence, spying, and an increase in illegal violence to be further characteristics of the war against drugs.

To understand the current situation, is necessary to go back to the beginning of this century. The Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 heavily taxed the opium trade. Much worse, however, was the fact that a clause in the Act allowed law enforcement personnel to arrest physicians who prescribed opiates. This led to the creation of a big black market and many addicts were thus forced to turn to crime to maintain their addiction. The reasons behind the Harrison Act were mainly a racist attitude to immigrants from the Pacific Rim and a moralistic tide which swept through the country and eventually led to the prohibition of most psychoactive drugs and to control through the police.

However, the background reasons of the ongoing war on drugs are much more complex. Bruce Alexander tries to explain the war by subdividing society in various groups: the drug warriors are the proponents of the war on drugs, the resisters are totally against it and the neutrals do not care about the problem. For Alexander the drug war is a war between two philosophies of life. The warriors, on the one hand, feel a strong need to enforce societal power and to suppress personal autonomy and are concerned that drug use reduces the compliance with social conventions. The resisters, on the other hand, place individual autonomy well over societal control.

Another possible explanation is offered by conflict theory, which sees the war on drugs as a polarisation of conservative forces against left wing political activists and minority members. The theory basically assumes that the powerful in society selectively criminalize actions of those who are subordinate to them. The enforcement actions of the war on drugs seem indeed to be focused against minorities. According to conflict theory, this is the case because the powerful want to take attention away from underlying factors; the dominant groups want to legislate their life style and culture in others in order to maintain their hegemony. Conservatives admit that what makes drugs a serious problem (for them) is less its medical aspect than its social purpose.

A similar view is offered by a theory called social construction of the drug problems. It assumes that the media's constant reports on the threat of drugs, the evil, crime, death, insanity and the pictures of crack babies create a social perception of a problem when in reality there is none. The immorality of drug use is again and again used as a justification for strict laws. Ethan Nadelmann, a professor at Princeton, points out that drug prohibition has created a permanent under-class of unemployable inner-city youths, whose lives are interwoven with drugs and crime. Thus, if the war on drugs really is a social construction, it is a superbly constructed one.

The situation of drug users was worsened during the presidency of George Bush. The Bush era is particularly interesting because much has been found out about his dubious role in the drug war. When Bush won the election in 1988 people said the budget was America's biggest problem; only three percent named drugs. After Bush's media campaign, 40 - 45 percent said drugs were America's biggest problem. On the one hand, George Bush introduced tougher laws and allocated new funds for law enforcement. Furthermore, the Bush era supreme court upheld police power to detain and interrogate travellers resembling drug couriers and to secretly tap conversations. On the other hand his involvement in CIA activities during the Iran Contra affair is more or less proven. During the nineteen eighties the CIA waged a covert war in Central America against the Marxist Sandinista Party. The CIA and the Contras were involved in drugs-for-guns barter arrangements. This is proven by the fact that - because of guns and drug smuggling - Lt.Col. Oliver North and other White House assistants were banned for life from entering Costa Rica in 1989. Furthermore, General Manuel Noriega, later overthrown by Bush because of his involvement with drug cartels, was on the CIA payroll during the nineteen seventies and eighties. It is extremely unlikely that George Bush, former head of the CIA and Vice President, knew nothing about all this.

Bush's predecessor Ronald Reagan's drug policy was also not successful. He started a massive eradication program called Operation Delta Nine. Troops and helicopters were used against domestic marijuana growers in all 50 states. Unfortunately, this only served to put the competitors of the Medellin cartel out of business and thus secured the market for the cartel. Reagan's wife Nancy's "Just say No" campaign which emphasised the destructiveness of drugs to families and the cost to business was eventually replaced by several new drug education programs. The largest and costliest is D.A.R.E. which stands for Drug Abuse Resistance Education. Developed under direction of former Los Angeles Police chief Daryl Gates the program is taught by uniformed cops to students from kindergarten to twelfth grade. However, critics claim that the course material, methods of delivery and basic philosophical premise are seriously flawed and point out that the content of D.A.R.E. is not only taught in D.A.R.E. courses but also in other areas like maths or spelling. They say that better programs exist and that D.A.R.E. might do more harm than good. Another organisation with access to a broad audience is the Partnership for A Drug Free America which continues to censor important drug data and produces a simplistic view of illegal drugs. In addition, the partnership has accepted contributions from legal drug manufactures (see appendix) and therefore only deals with illegal drugs but not with alcohol or tobacco.

One of the most obvious effects of the war on drugs is the enormous increase in prisoners. Since 1970 the percentage of Americans in prison has tripled. At present, 1.3 million citizens of the United States are serving a prison sentence; in other words, five out of 1.000 Americans are in jail. Not only does that make the USA the country with the highest percentage of its citizens in correctional facilities, it also forces the government to add 1000 prison beds each week! California, for example, has built 18 new prisons in the last 12 years (five more are planned) but no college in over 27 years. 75% of all inmates in California serve for drug or drug related crimes. Because the appointment of judges, the feeding, clothing and maintaining of prisoners - not to speak of the actual building of prisons - are big business, many corporations want to keep drugs illegal. Although President Clinton has admitted that "we cannot jail our way out of the problem" his National Drug Control Strategy, introduced in 1994, does not sound much different than that of his predecessors and the emphasis remains on law enforcement. Moreover, the huge profits that can be made ensure that every time a criminal is convicted someone is ready to take his place.

Nevertheless, it has to be pointed out that many addiction experts are not in favour of decriminalisation. They think legalising drugs would lead to a sharp rise in use and advocate that the current policy of zero tolerance against drugs should be retained. Because drugs would be cheaper, addicts would buy more of them and would spend more time using them and less time working. Therefore, they would continue to commit crimes to acquire money. These experts conclude that through the increase of addicts that comes with legalisation crime would also increase. Many politicians who are in favour of zero tolerance policy agree with this statement and think that drug user deserve the worst of fates. Former Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates advised the Senate that "casual users should be taken out and shot". Furthermore, Newt Gingrich says mandatory executions for convicted drug smugglers would kill so many that it would curb the flow of illegal drugs to the USA. People who smuggled large quantities of drugs "wouldn't have ten years of playing games with the system" but should only have one appeal and 18 months to fight their conviction.

This opinion is not shared by the Mayor of Baltimore, Kurt Schmoke. He argues that the violence connected with drugs is caused by the failed national drug strategy which makes the drug trade enormously profitable. He thinks that decriminalisation would greatly reduce violent and property crimes. Schmoke points out that there are 48,000 addicts in Baltimore but only 5,300 treatment slots and sees this as a root cause for many of the city's problems. Moreover, many deaths of addicts result from use of contaminated drugs and could be prevented. Consequently, Schmoke thinks that legalisation is a reasonable alternative to the war on drugs. Legalisation could take many forms. The libertarian concept, for example, wants a free market distribution of all drugs, while the proponents of a controlled distribution concept argue that there should be a system similar to alcohol and tobacco licensing and taxation.

Another alternative to the war on drugs is the harm reduction model that is used in the Netherlands, Australia and the UK. It concentrates on the community and individual level and tries to reduce the negative consequences of drug use, among other things through needle exchange programs. Merseyside, near Liverpool, is the model city of this approach. Here clinics, doctors, pharmacists and the police work together and try to treat the user on an individual basis. Emphasis is on getting many different people involved which gives people the feeling that they are helping to solve a serious problem. The model reduces the conflict between user and community and results have so far been encouraging. In the Netherlands the goal has been to make marijuana "boring" through legalising the drug and since decriminalisation the use of marijuana has steadily declined. Through decriminalisation (or harm reduction), money that was once allocated to enforcement could be budgeted for education and treatment programs.

From the arguments presented the reader will easily realise that the war on drugs has not been successful. Although the laws against drugs have become stricter and stricter and basic civil rights have been diminished, draconian penalties have not reduced the crime and violence connected with drugs, the police has become more brutal, particularly against minorities, and - worst of all - the population has lost faith in the rationality of the government. Everything indicates that the war on drugs cannot be won and it would be time to consider an alternative drug policy. The real threat is not the misuse of drugs but that the habits of liberty, citizen responsibility and tolerance fall into disuse. In the words of President Eisenhower: "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence...The potential for disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

(1,989 words)

Bynum, Russ (1995) Gingrich Proposes Death for Drug Smugglers (Assoicated Press).

http://tfy.drugsense.org/killsmug.htm

Chomsky, Noam (1993) What Uncle Sam really wants (Z Mag / Odonian Press)

http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/

Cieslikowski, Carl J. (1992) Bankrupting a Society (Lectric Law Libary)

http://www.lectlaw.com/files/drg12.htm

Cotts, Cynthia (1992) the Partnership: Hard Sell in Drug War (The Nation Magazine)

http://www.pdxnorml.org/Nation030992.html

Cundiff, Kirby R. (1994) Crime and the Drug War (Claustrophobia)

http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu:8001/Liberty/Tales/CrimeAndDrugWar.Html

http://dpa.state.ky.us/~rwheeler/drugs/curtis.htm

D' Angelo, Ed: (1994) The Moral Culture of Drug Prohibition (The Humanist)

http://tfy.drugsense.org/moralcul.htm

Fall, Hanns David (1994) Why is there a "War on Drugs" (graduate essay)

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Misc/haans1.htm

Germuska, Joe: (1989) American Drug Policy: What's the REAL Problem? (Tose)

http://www.totse.com/en/drugs/legal_issues_of_drug_use/wodprobl.html

Lazare, Daniel (1990) The Drug War is Killing Us (Village Voice)

http://www.cures-not-wars.org/DWCrack.html

Skolnick, Andrew A.: (1994) Collateral Casualties Climb in the Drug war (Journal of the American Medical Association)

http://www.pdxnorml.org/JAMA_Collateral_Casualties_060194.html

Stacke, Leslie (1994)Programming Fascism: The Drug war on our Children (High Times)

http://www.welcomehome.org/cohip/PAGES/DRUG_WAR/DARE/DARE-HT.HTM

All material obtained from the Internet.

Cops against the Drug War

http://www.drcnet.org/cops/

Drug Reform Coordination Network

http://www.drcnet.org/

Human Rights & the Drug War

http://www.hr95.org/

Media Awareness Project

http://www.mapinc.org/

November Coalition

http://www.november.org/

Salon.com: War on Drugs

http://www.salon.com/directory/topics/war_on_drugs/

Warstop

http://www.ibiblio.org/warstop/warstop.html