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War Is Declared

From the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, the demographic profile of drug users changed. Previously, drug use had generally been associated with minorities, lower classes, or young "hippies" and "beatniks." During this period, drug use among middle-class whites became widespread and more generally accepted. Cocaine, an expensive drug, began to be used by middle- and upper-class whites, many of whom looked upon it as a nonaddictive recreational drug and status symbol. Drugs also become much more prevalent in the military, as they were cheap and plentiful in Vietnam.

While drug use gained wider acceptance in some circles, other sectors of the public came to see drugs as a threat to their communities—much as, forty years earlier, alcohol had acquired a negative image, leading to Prohibition. Drugs not only symbolized poverty but were associated with protest movements against the Vietnam War and the "establishment." Many parents began to perceive the widespread availability of drugs as a threat to their children. By the end of the 1960s such views began to acquire a political expression.

When he ran for president in 1968, Richard Nixon included a strong antidrug plank in his law-and-order platform, calling for a "War on Drugs." As president, Nixon created the President's National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse—but ignored its findings, which called for the legalization of marijuana (Marihuana: A Signal of Misunderstanding, Report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse, March 1972, http://www.cognitiveliberty.org/news/schafer.htm). (Marihuana is a variant spelling of marijuana.) Since that time the U.S. government has been waging a war on drugs in some form or another. In 1973 Congress authorized formation of the Drug Enforcement Administration to reduce the supply of drugs. A year later the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) was created to lead the effort to reduce the demand for drugs and to direct research and federal prevention and treatment services.

Under the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations, federal spending tended to emphasize the treatment of drug abusers. Meanwhile, a growing number of parents, fearing that their children were being exposed to drugs, began to pressure elected officials and government agencies to do more about the growing use of drugs. In response, NIDA began widely publicizing the dangers of marijuana and other drugs once thought not to be particularly harmful.

The Reagan administration favored a strict approach to drug use and increased enforcement efforts. The budget to fight drugs rose from $1.5 billion in 1981 to $4.2 billion in 1989. By the end of the Reagan administration, two-thirds of all drug-control funding went for law enforcement and one-third went for treatment and prevention. First Lady Nancy Reagan vigorously campaigned against drug use, urging children to "just say no!" The Crime Control Act of 1984 (PL 98-473) dramatically increased the penalties for drug use and drug trafficking.

Drugs—A Long and Varied History - War Is Declared

A Brief History

It is called The Drug War, and it has been America's longest war.

The federal government had no role in the health and drug trades until early this century, when labeling requirements were placed on patent medicines. Prohibition was repeatedly ruled unconstitutional until:

1919 The 18th Amendment banned commerce in alcohol on a national level. The violent and corrupt "Roaring Twenties" ensued.
1933 The people had had enough. The 21st Amendment repealed the Volstead Act, ending Constitutional authority for Prohibition.
1937 Prohibitionists disguised the Marijuana Tax Act as a revenue bill and banned an entire plant species through regulation enforcement. The narcotics bureaucracy had found a gateway drug law.
1961 The UN adopted the Single Convention Treaty on Narcotic Drugs, opening the way for more stringent enforcement. The CIA went into Vietnam and heroin began to flow into America from Asia.
1968 The U.S. signed the Treaty. In the grips of the Vietnam War and the "generation gap," federal policy continued to harden.
1969 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Marijuana Tax Act was unconstitutional. Drug control authority was eventually written into a "scheduling" hoax that extended prohibition enforcement. Under this system, drugs are not officially 'prohibited'; they're 'illicit'. But people still go to prison for using them.
1970 Congressman George Bush joined the growing majority of office holders who opposed mandatory minimum sentences "because they remove a great deal of the court's discretion."
1972 President Richard Nixon appointed a National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse. The panel, known as the Shafer Commission, called for decriminalizing marijuana and a policy of control based on medical risk, so Nixon denounced its report and declared a"War on Drugs". Nixon's war faltered amid a cloud of corruption when he resigned office during his second term, while facing impeachment charges.
1978 President Jimmy Carter publicly advocated decriminalizing up to an ounce of marijuana in his statement to Congress on drug policy, but behind the scenes moved to steer the Drug War back on course.
1980 Drug warrior Ronald Reagan assumed office and brought the military industrial complex into the battlefield. The CIA went to Central America and cocaine began to flow back to our cities.
1984 Reagan announced: "You ain't seen nothing' yet!" and promptly militarized the Drug War. Zero tolerance became the stepping stone to widespread implementation of urine testing. His 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act went farther, adding property forfeiture law under Nancy's rallying cry: "Just say no."
Late 1980s Democrats and Republicans vied to out do each other in criminalizing and punishing drug users. As Vice President and later as President George Bush supported the return of Mandatory Minimum prison sentences. Physical evidence was replaced by sentencing guidelines. No knock search warrants, hearsay evidence, and high-tech surveillance systems extended the realm of thought-crime into conspiracy laws.
Early 1990s Baby Boom President Bill "I didn't inhale" Clinton campaigned on MTV, stating "The punishment should fit the crime." Once in office, he reversed gears and pursued yet another round of escalations in the Drug War, including, for the first time ever, the death penalty for growing marijuana in the 1994 Federal Crime Bill.
1995 The 10 millionth marijuana arrest since 1965 occurred in Ohio when Tod McCormick, a medical marijuana patient with a Dutch prescription, was pulled over in an illegal roadside search. A national survey found that 95% of police officers believed the US to be losing the Drug War.
1996 More than 60% of federal prisoners are locked up for drug offenses. While mandatory minimum sentences require that drug offenders serve full term sentences, mandatory release programs put violent felons back out on the streets to reduce prison crowding. Marijuana arrests are at an all time high, and citizens of California and Arizona vote overwhelmingly to legalize medical marijuana. Federal policy continues to lose support when appointed officials threaten to arrest doctors and patients.
1997 Business as usual. The Clinton administration begins the year with an all-out assault on doctors and patients for medical marijuana until a court orders them to desist. Malicious prosecution continues. The rate of incarceration for African American males hits a new record high, as does federal spending on the failed drug war. A new war is beginning to be waged on tobacco users. The National Institute on Health reports that needle exchanges clearly save lives, and congress instantly forbids it from relaxing the ban on clean needles. Oregon legislators vote to re criminalize cannabis use, and a voters' referendum is launched to block it from taking effect.
1998 When confronted with scientific proof that needle exchange reduces infectious disease without increasing drug use, Janet Reno and Drug Czar Gen. Barry McCaffrey decide to ignore the results and continue the ban. Clinton launches a multi-billion dollar propaganda campaign that uses federal tax money to purchase advertising time and space for the private sector's leading advocate of prohibition, the PDFA (Partnership for a Drug Free America). Congress takes time from its investigations of Clinton to pass ever more repressive legislation. Numerous new studies vindicate the medical marijuana reform position, and voters in five states pass initiatives at the ballot box to legalize it. Faced with an overwhelming favorable vote, Congress directly intervenes to block the vote count in Washington DC. At the same time, Oregon voters overturn the state legislature's attempt to reinstate criminal penalties for marijuana, and Arizona voters vote to medical-ize all controlled substances (illegal drugs). California votes its leading drug warrior, Dan Lungren, out of office by a huge majority. Teenage use of all drugs levels off nationally.
1999 Public revulsion at the hypocrisy of the federal government is at a record high. Yet another drug warrior is elected speaker of the house, and Congress fights in court to suppress the count of the Washington DC popular vote to legalize marijuana for medical use.
None of this has had a substantial effect in reducing drug use or making the public more safe - only in reducing respect for human rights. The Drug War is an abject failure, and it is time for America to cut its losses and change political course to solve its problems.

Corruption

The United Nations Drug Control Program noted the inevitable risk of drug-related police corruption in 1998, when it reported that "wherever there is a well-organized, illicit drug industry, there is also the danger of police corruption."

Source: United Nations International Drug Control Program, Technical Series Report #6: Economic and Social Consequences of Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking (New York, NY: UNDCP, 1998), p. 38.

According to the international monitoring group Transparency International, "Mexico's police and armed services are known to be contaminated by multi million dollar bribes from the transnational narco-trafficking business. Though the problem is not as pervasive in the military as it is in the police, it is widely considered to have attained the status of a national security threat."

Source: Hodess, Robin (ed.), Transparency International, Global Corruption Report 2001 (Berlin, Germany: Transparency International, 2001), p. 158.

According to the international monitoring group Transparency International, "Colombia has suffered the tragic consequences of endemic theft by politicians and public officials for decades. Entwined with the production and trafficking of illegal drugs, this behavior exacerbated underdevelopment and lawlessness in the countryside, where a brutal war continues to claim the lives of some 3,500 civilians a year. A World Bank survey released in February 2002 found that bribes are paid in 50 per cent of all state contracts. Another World Bank report estimates the cost of corruption in Colombia at US $2.6 billion annually, the equivalent of 60 per cent of the country's debt."

Source: Hodess, Robin (ed.), Transparency International, Global Corruption Report 2003 (Berlin, Germany: Transparency International, 2003), p. 108.

According to the international monitoring group Transparency International, "The Presidential Programme Against Corruption in Colombia specifically addresses 'narco-corruption'. Colombia, with a capacity to produce 580 tonnes of pure cocaine in 2000, is particularly poisoned by the interplay of narcotics and violence, with an estimated one million people internally displaced as a result of battles for territorial control by rebel groups and paramilitary forces. 'The corruptive effect of this kind of profit is devastating, since it has penetrated to perverse levels in the judiciary and the political system,' the official report of the Presidential Programme concluded, adding that the rapid accumulation of wealth from illegal drugs 'has fostered codes and behaviors which promote corruption, fast money and the predominance of private welfare over general interest'."

Source: Hodess, Robin (ed.), Transparency International, Global Corruption Report 2001 (Berlin, Germany: Transparency International, 2001), p. 176.

According to the international monitoring group Transparency International, "Another problem occurs when officials turn a blind eye to a narcotics trade that looms large in the region. 'Central America has become the meat in the sandwich' - as a trans-shipment point, storehouse and money laundering centre - in the drug traffic from Colombia to the US, said Costa Rican parliamentarian Belisario Solano. The Costa Rican Defense Ministry estimates that between 50 and 70 tonnes of cocaine travel through Costa Rica to the US every year."

Source: Hodess, Robin (ed.), Transparency International, Global Corruption Report 2001 (Berlin, Germany: Transparency International, 2001), p. 160.

The difficulty of maintaining an honest government while fighting a drug war was noted by the UN Drug Control Program in 1998: "In systems where a member of the legislature or judiciary, earning only a modest income, can easily gain the equivalent of some 20 months' salary from a trafficker by making one "favorable" decision, the dangers of corruption are obvious."

Source: United Nations International Drug Control Program, Technical Series Report #6: Economic and Social Consequences of Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking (New York, NY: UNDCP, 1998), p. 39.

A 1998 report by the General Accounting Office notes, "...several studies and investigations of drug-related police corruption found on-duty police officers engaged in serious criminal activities, such as (1) conducting unconstitutional searches and seizures; (2) stealing money and/or drugs from drug dealers; (3) selling stolen drugs; (4) protecting drug operations; (5) providing false testimony; and (6) submitting false crime reports."

Source: General Accounting Office, Report to the Honorable Charles B. Rangel, House of Representatives, Law Enforcement: Information on Drug-Related Police Corruption (Washington, DC: USGPO, May 1998), p. 8.

A 1998 report by the General Accounting Office cites examples of publicly disclosed drug-related police corruption in the following cities: Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Savannah, and Washington, DC.

Corruption caused by the illicit trade in narcotics is especially prevalent in some foreign countries. "In 1998, DEA reported that drug-related corruption existed in all branches of the [Colombian] government, within the prison system, and in the military... In November 1998, U.S. Customs and DEA personnel searched a Colombian Air Force aircraft in Florida and found 415 kilograms of cocaine and 6 kilograms of heroin."

Source: US General Accounting Office, Drug Control: Narcotics Threat from Colombia Continues to Grow (Washington, DC: USGPO, 1999), p. 15.

On average, half of all police officers convicted as a result of FBI-led corruption cases between 1993 and 1997 were convicted for drug-related offenses.

As an example of police corruption, the GAO cites Philadelphia, where "Since 1995, 10 police officers from Philadelphia's 39th District have been charged with planting drugs on suspects, shaking down drug dealers for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and breaking into homes to steal drugs and cash."

A 1998 report by the General Accounting Office notes, "Although profit was found to be a motive common to traditional and drug-related police corruption, New York City's Mollen Commission identified power and vigilante justice as two additional motives for drug-related police corruption."

In New Orleans, 11 police officers were convicted of accepting nearly $100,000 from undercover agents to protect a cocaine supply warehouse containing 286 pounds of cocaine. The undercover portion of the investigation was terminated when a witness was killed under orders from a New Orleans police officer.

A 1998 report by the General Accounting Office states, "The most commonly identified pattern of drug-related police corruption involved small groups of officers who protected and assisted each other in criminal activities, rather than the traditional patterns of non-drug-related police corruption that involved just a few isolated individuals or systemic corruption pervading an entire police department or precinct."

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