It's well known by reform advocates that the drug war exacts a huge toll -- social, financial and moral -- on America and other lands. An April 18th "town meeting" at Stanford University spelled out that toll in understated but relentless detail and offered a few pointers on how we might reduce it.
Stanford's United Campus Christian Ministry sponsored the event, which drew a crowd of about 50 people to hear Joseph McNamara of the Hoover Institution, Marsha Rosenbaum of the Lindesmith Center in San Francisco and John Lindsay-Poland of the Fellowship for Reconciliation.
McNamara, a 25-year veteran of urban police forces and noted historian of the drug war, used a folksy blend of statistics and anecdotes to describe the awesome human toll of lives ended and shattered. America has more than 2 million people in prison, about 20 percent of whom are there for non-violent drug offenses. Last year there were about 1.4 million arrests for drug possession and about 300,000 for drug trafficking.
Given the consensual nature of drug crimes, McNamara said that so many arrests all but required police to undermine our legal system by conducting "hundreds of thousands of illegal searches," the venality of which is compounded by phony testimony in court. "There were cops in New York who referred to this as "testilying," and in Los Angeles, officers would talk about belonging to the "Liar's Club," McNamara said. The ongoing Rampart corruption scandal in Los Angeles, McNamara said, has led to a new name for the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD): the Los Angeles Perjury Department.
In 1972, when then-President Nixon kicked off the modern phase of the drug war, the Federal budget for the effort was about $100 million; today that figure is about $18 billion. "If Social Security payments to retirees had gone up the same amount," McNamara said, "the average monthly payment of $177 in 1972 would now be more than $30,000."
McNamara said that "the magnitude of the drug war's failure is so great that even many 'hawks' in academia are getting uneasy." He cited James Q. Wilson's column in the Wall Street Journal last week as an example of this trend. "Things will change only when the public becomes much more aware of how violent, racist and harmful the war is," he added.
Marsha Rosenbaum, a renowned drug educator and scholar, pointed to the widespread cynicism among teenagers -- created by propaganda masquerading as drug education -- as a "huge cost" of the war on drugs. "We're wasting a great opportunity to truly educate youngsters," she said. "Let's face it -- it's a real challenge to get kids' attention, but when you talk about drugs, you've got their attention."
Rosenbaum showed a videotape of interviews she had conducted with teens over the last six months. One young person on the tape decried the lack of a real distinction "between drug use and abuse" in drug education she had gone through. Another teenager talked about how "some kids would smoke pot before soccer practice -- and they'd STILL be better than you. After that, there was no credibility to what we learned." Other teenagers expressed bafflement about what they see as a misguided notion of peer pressure. "It's not like people are forcing you to smoke or drink," one young woman said. "It's more like, kids do it to be part of the 'in' crowd."
Declaring that kids' safety should be the bottom line, Rosenbaum called for "honesty as the core of any education program about drugs." She said that "teenagers want an opportunity to talk about drugs, and they want information they can trust." Recent enhancements to standard drug education, such as teaching "resistance skills" and "how to stay abstinent," are simply more sophisticated versions of the "just say no" approach that has fueled so much skepticism. "Today's teenagers are the most drug-educated people in history. But more than 80 percent will try alcohol before they finish high school, and more than half will try marijuana. Does this sort of 'prevention' work?"
"I'm going to take us a little farther afield," said John Lindsay-Poland as he recounted a number of trips to Colombia to work in support of human rights and peace in that war-ravaged nation. He vigorously denounced the Clinton Administration's proposal for $1.7 billion in military aid to Colombia. "That package would have no effect on the availability of cocaine on the street," he said. "It will also undermine peace negotiations and will add to the massive displacement of Colombians from their homes and villages. There are about 1.4 million displaced persons already," Lindsay-Poland said. "While we're here tonight, about another 68 will suffer the same fate."
He also savaged the American government's motives for stepping up its involvement in Colombia. "Last October, a poll reported that 56 percent of Americans believed that kids were using more drugs than they had been," Lindsay-Poland said. That poll had been commissioned by Lockheed-Martin, the aerospace/defense manufacturer with a potential interest in building helicopters and other necessities of a ground war in Colombia.
Lindsay-Poland cited Drug Czar Barry McCaffery's claim that insurgents in Colombia receive about $500 million dollars annually by protecting coca leaf growers. "That's just 1 percent of the street value of cocaine that comes from Colombia every year," Lindsay-Poland said. "One reason there's so much money involved is that the supply-side strategy increases the value of the crop so sharply."
After the speakers finished, an audience member asked them what they would do as drug czar. "The drug czar is appointed by the President, so the government's policies would have to change for the drug czar to make a difference," said McNamara. "I'd define drug abuse as a public health problem and address it from that perspective," said Rosenbaum. For Lindsay-Poland, the root of drug production is poverty. "People in Colombia and other places don't grow coca because they want people to do cocaine," he said. "They grow it for very rational economic reasons."
The Lindesmith Center is online at http://www.lindesmith.org.
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| Issue #135, 4/28/00 Do Taxpayers Get a Discount at the Door? DEA, State Agencies Cosponsor Michigan Anti-Drug Reform Conference | Hawaii Legislature Passes Medical Marijuana Bill: Governor to Sign First Bill of its Kind in the United States | Veterans to McCaffrey: Stay Out of Colombia | Hiding in Plain Sight: Panel Maps Drug War's Hidden Costs | New Latin America Drug War Site Pulls No Punches | Patients and Activists Rally in Washington, DC for Millennium Medical Marijuana March | This is Only a Test | URGENT Action Items | New Study Shows Racial Disparities in Criminal Justice System | Events | Media Scan | Editorial: Image of an Invasion |
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StoptheDrugWar.org: the Drug Reform Coordination Network (DRCNet)
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