Drug War: How We Got Into This Mess and the Special Interests That Keep Us Here
By Suzanne Wills
How We Got Into This Mess
The Drug Policy Forum of Texas was started by Dr. G. Alan Robison in 1995 when he retired Chairman of the Department of Pharmacology at UT Health Science Center in Houston. Dr. Robison was disturbed that drug laws have no basis in science. Drug laws are based on money and politics. The best way to begin to understand them is by reading these books, Drug Crazy, by Mike Gray, How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out and/or Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed by Judge James Gray, A Judicial Indictment of the War on Drugs.
In 1900 the US was awash in drugs. Cocaine was in Coca Cola and lots of other soft drinks. Over the counter medicines routinely contained morphine and cocaine. The Bayer Company introduced its brand of morphine, heroin, in 1898 and sold it over the counter for a year. In 1906 Congress passed the only law that has ever reduced drug consumption. It was not a prohibition law. It was the Pure Food and Drug Act. It required manufacturers to list the ingredients of their products on the label. When people realized that many of their favorite medicines contained narcotics, they simply stopped taking them. Of course, not everyone stopped taking all drugs. About 2 to 3 people per 1000 were addicted, usually to laudanum which was a mixture of alcohol and morphine.
This was treated as a family problem and a medical problem until Dr. Hamilton Wright decided to wipe out opium use worldwide. Other countries ignored his crusade, but in this country he had the support of the temperance movement and the financial support of his wife, Elizabeth Washburn Wright, who was a powerful senator’s daughter,. In the winter of 1914 he was able to get the Harrison Narcotics Act passed in the U. S. Congress despite the fact that he had no support from law enforcement and was opposed by the medical community. The act made it illegal for physicians to prescribe narcotics to addicts. Suddenly addicts who had been patients were criminals. The New York Medical Journal wrote “The results of this legislation will appear only gradually and will not always be recognized as such. These will be the failure of promising careers, the disrupting of happy families, the commission of crimes…, and the influx into hospitals for the mentally disordered of many who would otherwise live socially competent lives.” The Harrison Narcotics Act called for $150,000 in total funding. Today we spend that much every two minutes on drug law enforcement. And our rate of addiction is about the same.
Hamilton Wright was a severe alcoholic and had to leave government service for that reason. His work was carried on for half a century by Elizabeth Washburn Wright and by Harry Anslinger. The most notable thing that Anslinger did was to champion the campaign to outlaw Cannabis in the 1930s. At that time Cannabis was widely used in medicine and it grew everywhere. It was literally a weed. It was largely ignored by everyone except Mexican migrant workers who had come to this country to try to find work during the depression. Anslinger ran a very shrewd campaign. He received strong support from Hearst newspapers. Anslinger also used the radio, which was a new medium and got the additional respect that new mediums get. And he gave Cannabis a new name, marijuana. He called marijuana as “as hellish as heroin” and referred to “marihuana-crazed madmen.” He said “some beet-field peon takes a few puffs of this stuff, (and) thinks he has just been elected president of Mexico, so he starts out to execute all his political enemies.”
In 1937 the word marijuana was substituted for the word cannabis for the first time in U.S. law. A hearing was held on “The Taxation of Marijuana Act.” Only one medical expert was called to speak, Dr. William C. Woodward. He testified that none of the claims being made about Cannabis indica were true. The congressmen were New Deal Democrats. Dr. Woodward was a Republican. They had already been scrapping about Social Security. As usual, party lines held. Author Mike Gray writes, “In a vote they didn’t bother to record, on a matter of little interest, a handful of congressmen forwarded a bill that would one day help fill the nation’s prisons to the roof beams.” In 2001 there were 723,627 arrests for nonviolent marijuana offenses in this country, 88.6% for possession only, more than the combined total for all violent crimes. Every year enforcing marijuana laws costs an estimated $10-15 billion indirect costs alone.
Contrast the history of marijuana, which has never killed anyone, with the history of the most addictive, most deadly drug we know, tobacco. During the WWII, approximately the same time that marijuana was made illegal, about 65% of American adults smoked tobacco. Since then anti-smoking activists have reduced that number to about 21% using entirely non-violent, non-coercive methods. Fewer high school students smoke tobacco than smoke marijuana by a slight margin. This is in spite of the fact that tobacco is not only legal, but subsidized. It is one of the ironies of the drug war that while we spendmillions of dollars to spray coca and other crops in Colombia with herbicide our trade agreements require Colombia to accept not only our tobacco, but also our tobacco advertising.
Back to the history lesson. Richard Nixon was swept into office in 1968 on law-and-order, anti-drug sentiment. Young people in the US and western Europe were protesting the war in Vietnam and smoking marijuana. The United Kingdom, Canada, The Netherlands and the US each created scientific commissions to study marijuana and what should be done about it. Nixon appointed his friend and Republican drug war hawk war, Ray Shafer, to head ours. It was widely expected that his report would reflect his views. It did not. The Shafer Commission found the same things that all the other scientific commissions found. Marijuana use does not cause crime. There is no basis for the gateway theory. Personal use of marijuana should no longer be a crime.
The Shafer Commission made another comment that did not grab headlines, but was just as insightful.
“Perhaps the major consequence of [well-meaning efforts to do something about drug use] …
has been the creation of a vested interest in the perpetuation of the problem among those dispensing and receiving funds.” The amount of money spent in 1972 that so disturbed the Commission was a small fraction of the amount that special interests spend today.
Only the Netherlands took the advice of its scientific commission. The Dutch began selling marijuana for personal use in their famous “coffee shops.” Thirty years have passed and the results are in. The Dutch, including Dutch teenagers, now use marijuana at about half the rate that Americans do. According to a 1994 survey taken in Amsterdam the average age of first use of marijuana among the Dutch is 20, among Americans it’s 16. The rate of heroin addiction in the Netherlands is about 1/3 of the rate here. Here is the most important result. In the mid-1970s the average age of a heroin addict in the US and the Netherlands was about the same, about 26 years old. Today the average age of a heroin addict in the US is 19. 87% of American heroin users are under age 26. The average age of a heroin addict in the Netherlands has risen to 40. The Dutch wanted to keep from their kids away from drug dealers and they did. Using the opposite approach, the U. S. created the highest rate of illicit drug use in the world.
Instead of following the recommendations of the Shafer Commission, the Nixon administration created the Drug Enforcement Agency. This was a vast new organization with the power to call for wiretaps and no-knock warrants. Today it has more than 10,000 agents in the United States and 58 foreign countries.
Even that didn’t quite get the job done. In 1984, the Omnibus Crime Bill gave prosecutors the right of forfeiture. They could now confiscate cash, cars, boats, homes, bank accounts, stock portfolios, anything, based on an accusation that it was used in a crime. Law enforcement agencies throughout the country promptly factored forfeiture into their budgets. Billions of dollars worth of property has been seized. Fewer than 20% of the owners of that property have ever been charged with a federal crime.
In 1972, the year before the Nixon administration created the DEA, the federal budget for enforcing the drug laws was roughly $101 million. Gen. McCaffrey says, quite proudly, that under his term as drug czar the federal budget for drug law enforcement increased from $17.8B to $19.2B. By comparison, the average monthly Social Security check in 1972 was $177. Today it’s about $800 per month. If Social Security benefits had increased at the same rate as drug war spending, today’s check would be around $35,000 a month. The minimum wage in 1972 was $1.60. Today it’s $5.15. If the minimum wage had increased at the same rate as drug war spending, the wage today would be $316.80/hour. The cost of the drug war exceeds $40 billion per year when state and local costs are added to federal costs. That’s half the budget for law enforcement, half the budget for courts and half the budget for prisons every year.
The only place that prohibition makes drugs unavailable is in a medical setting. In 1996, California voted to allow patients to use marijuana as a medicine. That same year Arizona voted to allow physicians to prescribe any drug they saw fit regardless of federal law. Since then 8 more states and DC have voted to allow use of marijuana as a medicine. Maryland law requires the court to consider use of marijuana for medical purposes to be a mitigating factor in marijuana-related state prosecution.
Since the first laws were passed the federal government has been trying to block any legal distribution of marijuana in a medical setting, except for its own medical marijuana program, the Compassionate Investigational New Drug Program run since 1978 by the Food and Drug Administration, which has 5 patients. The federal government won a class action suit by hundreds of patients who sued for the right to join the program. California physicians had to go to the Supreme Court to avoid losing their right to prescribe drugs if they discussed cannabis with their patients. The 9th Circuit Court has ruled that the DEA must cease interfering with distribution of medical cannabis that does not involve interstate commerce. The case (Ashcroft vs. Raich) will be heard by the Supreme Court in the winter, 2004 session. About 1% of marijuana users in California are medical users, yet in 2002 half of all federal marijuana cases filed in the U.S. district court in San Francisco were against medical patients.
The controversy over medical use of cannabis is really a controversy over whether this very easy to grow herb should be allowed to compete with pharmaceutical products for pennies on the dollar. According to a survey conducted by the Australian National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre in 2004, nearly two-thirds of people using marijuana for medical reasons decreased or stopped taking other medications.
One of the most tragic consequences of the drug war is the denial of treatment to those in chronic pain. Survey after survey has found that physicians routinely under prescribe pain medication because they fear they will be disciplined by medical licensing boards or the DEA. Dr. Russell Portnoy of the PainCenter at SloanKetteringMemorialHospital, has said, “The undertreatment of pain in hospitals is absolutely medieval.” Dr. Ronald Myers, a Baptist minister who operates clinics for poor people in the Mississippi Delta is president of the American Pain Institute. He says, "The war on drugs has turned into a war on doctors and pain patients. Such is the climate of fear across the medical community that for every doctor who has his license yanked by the DEA, there are a hundred doctors scared to prescribe proper pain medication for fear of going to prison. The DEA is creating a situation where legitimate pain patients now have to go to the streets to get their medication.”
Even more horrifying is our failure to stem the worldwide AIDS epidemic.More people died of AIDS during 2003 than in any previous year. More people became infected with HIV during 2003 than in any previous year. 8,000 per day die of AIDS related illness. Providing sterile syringes to addicts and patients is among the most effective and least expensive ways to curb the epidemic yet it receives no federal funding and is illegal in most states. The United States, influenced mostly by Sen. Jesse Helms, has used its influence in the United Nations to prevent countries that receive UN aid from distributing sterile syringes for disease prevention.
In the last 30 years the United States has created the largest prison system in the history of the world. More than 2 million people are imprisoned, up from 400,000 in 1970. We imprison a larger percentage of our citizens than any country, more than 700 per 100,000 population. About 500,000 U.S. prisoners are non-violent drug offenders. That is more than the European Union imprisons for all offenses and they have 100 million more people. Children of inmates are at high risk of educational failure, joblessness, addiction and crime. They are the people in our society most likely to eventually be imprisoned themselves. Since 1986, Texas has increased general-fund spending on higher education by 47 percent, while increasing spending on corrections by 346 percent.
Other countries have begun to take a different approach to drug policy. In January 1994, the Swiss instituted a program of giving injectable doses of heroin to addicts at certified medical centers. After three years, crime among the addicts had dropped by 60%, half of the unemployed had found jobs, nobody was homeless and the general health of the group had improved dramatically. There are now 24 participating clinics, up from 6. There have been no drug related deaths among these addicts. A referendum has been held on whether or not to continue the program. It was approved with more than a 70% majority. Swiss property insurance companies are among the most ardent supporters of the program because their claims in the areas around the clinics have decreased significantly. The head of the Swiss police has called this the best crime fighting program he has ever seen. During 2000 the clinics distributed 55lbs of heroin. It cost $128,000. On the illegal market that heroin would have brought traffickers, and possibly terrorists, $3.7 million.
Italy, Spain, Portugal, Luxemburg and Ukraine have decriminalized all drug use. Russia has decriminalized possession and use of small amounts of drugs. Belgium and the United Kingdom have decriminalized possession and use of small amounts of cannabis. The effort to decriminalize cannabis in the UK was lead by the British police. Canadaand The Netherlands have begun distributing cannabisthrough their public health programs.
King County Washington Bar Association together with the county medical association did a drug policy project in 2001.
"Any examination of criminal sanctions related to drugs should consider whether current drug policy is serving essential public policy objectives. Among the most important of those objectives are:
1. Enhanced public order and reduced crime
2. Improved public health
3. Protection of children
4. Efficient use of scarce public resources.
This report finds that the War on Drugs has not only failed to fulfill any of these objectives, but also has exacerbated the very problems it was designed to address."
The DPFT is an education organization and has no legislative agenda. I think it is fair to say that most members would agree with the King County Bar Association’s conclusion.
Drug prohibition, in the popular vernacular, is regulation carried to such extreme that the black market becomes the primary supplier. At that point there is no regulation. Drug policy reform is the effort to return regulation to the market place. I would regulate sales of the relatively less dangerous drugs the way we sell alcohol today. Examples would be marijuana, MDMA, the psychedelics. I would regulate sales of the relatively more dangerous drugs using a permit system. Examples would be tobacco, alcohol, heroin, cocaine, etc. Permits need not and should not be onerous, but they would help us with the problem of underage purchases, they would give us an opportunity to offer education to the buyer, they could be used to limit drug purchases to personal use amounts and they could be suspended or revoked if a person committed a crime associated with the drug, like DWI. I would limit advertising for non-medical drugs to in store advertising and direct mail to permit holders.