When it comes to the debate on the war on drugs, I remain as dispassionate as possible. This is because,regardless of our opinion or point of view regarding this issue, no one knows for sure what the result of legalization will be on our society. Opposition to legalization is not without merit. Logic dictates that when you increase access and decrease legal consequences, use will skyrocket because these incentivize the targeted behavior. I don't think most parents want their children to be able to pick up a package of marijuana, cocaine, or heroine at a local dispensary. Worse yet would be a black market for underage youth that would illegally sell to this audience.
Yet, if we take a close look at what is going on in our country with regard to our policies regarding drugs, it becomes painfully apparent we need to reform the way we do business in the United States.
Part of the problem is that in our "war on drugs," the enemy is faceless, diffuse, and abstract. As pointed out in by Claire Suddath in a 2009 Time magazine article, "It's a war without a clear enemy. Anything waged against a shapeless, intangible noun can never truly be won — President Clinton's drug czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey said as much in 1996.nd yet, within the past 40 years, the U.S. government has spent over $2.5 trillion dollars fighting the War on Drugs."1 We seem to be spending a lot of money, and getting more negative than positive results. This is corroborated by a comprehensive analysis by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, which reached the following conclusions:2
--legalizing drugs would save roughly $41.3 billion per year in government expenditure on enforcement of prohibition
--drug legalization would yield tax revenue of $46.7 billion annually, which could be used for treatment of addicts
And yet, the consequences of this war ago far beyond economics. As Suddath explains:
"Despite the ad campaigns, increased incarceration rates and a crackdown on smuggling, the number of illicit drug users in America has risen over the years and now sits at 19.9 million Americans."2
The picture among our youth is equally grim. Although illicit drug use was on a steady decline starting in 2001, according to a recent youth survey conducted by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, "Illicit drug use in the United States has risen to its highest level in 8 years."3 As Pamela S. Hyde, administrator of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) states: "These results are a wake-up call to the Nation...(O)ur strategies of the past appear to have stalled with 'Generation Next.' Parents and caregivers, teachers, coaches, and faith and community leaders must find credible new ways to communicate with our youth about the dangers of substance abuse."4
Yet, the picture gets more complicated, however, when you try to tease out the cause versus the effect. According to Gil Kerlikowske, director of National Drug Control Policy under President Obama, the survey spotlights two possible contributing factors: the shift in state policies regarding drug use, and the widening availability of medical marijuana. But as Dr. Wilson Compton, director of NIDA's Division of Epidemiology, Services and Prevention Research asked: "Do the changes in perceived risk lead to changes in laws and regulations, or do these policy changes lead to a shift in attitudes?"5
However, drug use alone is only part of the picture. While some state have moved to relax their laws regarding marijuana use, the use of a police apparatus remains problematic. The analysis of a former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who oversaw the Planning and Research Department sheds light on this issue. The lieutenant used data to map the occurrences of robberies and murders that occurred in the city over a period of six months. He then mapped all Baltimore city addresses for people, vehicles, and other entities identified in drug related incidents which occurred in adjacent jurisdictions over the same time frame. According to FBI statistics, "The results show a pattern where the areas in the city with an increase in murders and robberies are consistent with the areas where addresses are identified from drug related incidents occurring in the adjacent jurisdictions."6 Based on this information, the lieutenant concluded the city's crackdown on drug trafficking led users as well as dealers who resided in Baltimore to go to adjacent jurisdictions to buy and sell drugs.7
Moreover, the lieutenant surmised that the increase in drug demand in adjacent jurisdictions caused the price of drugs to increase, and as a result, users are engaged in more robberies to acquire the additional money needed to purchase drugs. Concomitant with this dynamic, Baltimore city dealers attempted to sell more of their drugs in adjacent jurisdictions where other drug dealers already operated, resulting in more drug-related murders.8
The issue gets even thornier when you inject race into it. The reality is, regardless of the cause, black youth are the the greatest casualties in the war on drugs. We are arresting and incarcerating an alarming percentage of our black youth, leaving a wake of decimated families, overcrowded prisons,and mired in poverty and despair. Although African Americans represent 12.7% of the US population and 15% of US drug users, they represent 36.8% of those arrested for a drug-related crime.9 It is not my contention that we are instituting whole-sale racist policies in order to destroy communities. I will leave that debate for another time. However, what I am getting at is a more commonsensical: if we keep arresting and incarcerating black people for crimes related to drugs, we will perpetuate the destruction of these communities and families, even if unintentionally so. Moreover, we create another problem that tears at our social fabric, the perception of a racist witch hunt as symbolized by a rapacious, aggressive police force, the foot soldiers in this on-going war.
As John H. McWhorter, contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal pointedly states:
"Making black America better will entail battling the senseless war on drugs. Police forces assigned to trawl black neighborhoods create thousands of young black people wary of whites -- and thus less likely to ever succeed in a world full of them. When drugs are illegal, you can make money from the markup that selling them entails, and thus, so very many young blacks step outside of legal work to do so -- especially when their schools are bad -- and end up in prison or a coffin.
"Their children grow up in communities where two-parent families are rare, are subject to the disruptive home lives that make it hard to be a good student, and often end up recapitulating the lives of their parents. Selling drugs means turf wars wielded with guns, which kill people, including little girls and grandmothers caught in crossfire.
Take away the war on drugs and all of this dissolves. With one generation of black inner-city boys who have never known cops as the enemy; who think of "slingin' on them corners" as something old-school that no one could do now; and who stay in their neighborhoods to help raise their kids, black America would turn a corner." 10
There is empirical evidence to back up MCWhorter's claims. In 2001, the country of Portugal, in an effort to deal with their own problems with drug abuse, decriminalized once-illegal drugs. Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, conducted research to measure the effects of this policy shift. "Judging by every metric," stated, Greenwald "decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," adding that "[I]t has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."11
In fact, a comprehensive report on the study conducted by the Cato institute yielded the following sets of data:12
--following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.:
--rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%
--drug use in older teens declined, with lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds falling from 2.5% to 1.8% (
--deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half
--money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.
Yet, even with these startling statistics, we should not overgeneralize. As Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming book "When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment" and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA cautions, "Portugal [is not]a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries."13
This does not mean, however, that we should avoid a national conversation that embodies a different direction and tone regarding the connection between policy, drug abuse, and crime.
As Brian Vastag, writer for Scientific American opines: "Drug decriminalization did reach its primary goal in Portugal," of reducing the health consequences of drug use, he says, "and did not lead to Lisbon becoming a drug tourist destination." 14
Still, there are many factors to consider, and a radical policy shift could unleash a torrent of drug abuse that we would regret for decades. The bottom line is that if we truly want our kids to have lives unadulterated by drugs, we seem to be loosing ground. This is precisely why I am dispassionate, because anyone who claims that they have a panacea constructed strictly around a legal framework is at best naive, and worst, myopic. As cliche as it sounds, kids need guidance and involved parents, parents who hopefully remain married and committed to the welfare of their spouses and their children. Without this moral component undergirding any policy shift, we will be treating the symptom, not the disease. Parents have to be willing to monitor their kids, and they should send a strong message that drug abuse is wrong, that there are healthy alternatives to personal and psychological fulfillment. Then they should provide these opportunities and support their kids' endeavors, always keeping the lines of communication open. In my next blog, I will suggest some national strategies to revise how we deal with this problem realistically, and hopefully, effectively.
Gary
1.http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1887488,00.html
2. http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/DrugProhibitionWP.pdf
3.http://www.nida.nih.gov/NIDA_notes/NNvol23N3/tearoff.html
4. Ibid
5. Ibid
6. http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/n-dex/law-enforcement-scenarios/scenarios19
7. Ibid
8. Ibid
9. http://www.prisonerswithchildren.org/pubs/color.pdf
10. http://www.theroot.com/views/no-more-forums-about-black-agenda?page=0,1
11.http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1893946,00.html
12.Ibid
13. Ibid
14. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=portugal-drug-decriminalization
