Report: Drug war a failure

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.

Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked.

"In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."

And

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:

_ $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.

_ $33 billion in marketing "Just Say No"-style messages to America's youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have "risen steadily" since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.

_ $49 billion for law enforcement along America's borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.

_ $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.

_ $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.

More here.

Well, if the winning the War on Drugs is defined by eliminating or greatly reducing the usage of illegal drugs in the US, yeah, it's an enormous failure. But if you define winning in terms of incarcerating and controlling the majority of African American men, and other Americans of color, the Drug War has been a resounding success. Indeed, the War on Drugs has been such a massive failure as far as its ostensible purpose is concerned, that it is easy to wonder if the powerful elites who push this "war" are really all that interested in ending drug use.

To be fair, I have no doubt that millions of people involved in the "war" over the years, the rank and file drug warriors, have been genuinely concerned with eradicating illegal drug use. Teachers, cops, parents, recovering addicts who have turned to activism, all these types, no doubt, sincerely want to get people off drugs.

But what are the actual political forces fueling the "war"? And why are they still going strong years after it has been clear to anybody with half a brain that prohibition is an abject failure?

Certainly, the drug war has created its own incentives. Police departments get huge federal and state grants aimed at fighting drug use. Schools, too. The anti-addiction industry has grown wildly in direct proportion to the growth of the drug war. So, too, have the private prison contractors who own and operate jail facilities for dealing with the inevitable overflow of drug convicts from federal and state facilities. Boot camp operators, too. I mean, people have gotten rich off of fighting drugs, so you can bet your bong that they don't want drug peace.

But the one thing that the "War on Drugs" has been really effective at doing is putting black and brown men behind bars, and then on parole, often taking away their voting rights and ability to get a job that would pay their bills. I don't know for a fact that the people who keep the "War on Drugs" going in perpetuity consciously believe that the whole thing is about marginalizing non-white populations, but I'm pretty certain that race plays a major factor.

After all, the first anti-marijuana laws on the books were adopted in the Southwest early in the twentieth century, directly and consciously aimed at Mexicans and Mexican Americans, the only people at the time who were using it. Some years later, during the 1930s, the political campaign to adopt national anti-drug laws was deeply infused with the notion that black men do drugs and then want to have sex with white women. Years later, in the 1980s, severe sentences were federally mandated for users of crack cocaine, who were by and large black, while sentences for powder cocaine, used mainly by whites, remained the same, relatively lax. And that happened while the CIA was literally funnelling cocaine from South America into black ghettos in the US.

Like I said, I can't stare into the souls of politicians in order to fathom their true motives in perpetuating the "War on Drugs," but the only thing such policy has succeeded in doing over the decades is devastating American communities of color. Indeed, the "War on Drugs" has been so successful in oppressing minorities, that it really doesn't matter what these anti-drug politicians feel in their hearts. Vile racism is the necessary effect of their approach.

So who says the "War on Drugs" is a failure? It's one of the most successful racist policies in world history, rivaling Hitler's holocaust, slavery, South African Apartheid, Jim Crow, and the genocide of Native Americans.

USA! USA! USA!

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