How the War On Drugs Is Ending

One of the main reasons that public opinion has changed is the realization that our country's drug problem lies hardly at all with drug use, but mostly with drug enforcement and racial profiling. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) estimates that in 1998 10.6% of the US population over 12 years old had used any illicit drug in the past year, and that 8.6% of the US population over 12 had used marijuana in the past year. That means that over 80% of the drug "problem" is marijuana. Even taking into consideration the overlap that occurs with people who use marijuana and harder drugs, adding up the use of cocaine (1.7%), crack (0.4%), heroin (0.1%), and PCP (0.2%) we only get 2.4% of the whole population, still only about 23% of the "problem." Without marijuana, the drug problem drops from 23.1 million people to between 4.4 million and 5.2 million people. The foundation of the justification for a drug war is 18.7 million pot smokers.

As Mike Gray puts it in Drug Crazy: How we got into this mess and how we can get out, "If marijuana turns out to be a medical miracle instead of the Devil's handmaiden, public support for confiscating houses and sending nonmedical users to prison will quickly erode. And marijuana is the linchpin. Take reefer out of the equation and the number of illegal drug users instantly drops...and the drug war shrinks from a national crusade to a sideshow. To maintain the present [1998] $16 billion-a-year federal effort, the concept of medical marijuana must be defeated at all costs" (p. 174). As to the dangers of using marijuana, even Nixon's Schafer Commission found it to be roughly as intoxicating and dangerous as alcohol (The Schafer Commission, U.S. 1973), and the U.K.'s Wootten Report (1968) states, "The evidence of a link with violent crime is far stronger with alcohol than with the smoking of cannabis." "President Nixon dealt with this unwelcome news by sweeping it under the rug...but in Holland, where scientists and engineers are taken seriously, they simply followed the recommendations" (Gray, p. 166).

Not only does alcohol tend to be a more dangerous drug than cannabis, but it is also used to a far greater degree in the U.S. If we go back to our SAMHSA stats for 1998, we see that 64% of the population used alcohol in the last year, 51.7% in the last month! That's still about 5 and a half times more people than used marijuana in the last year.

The internet makes it much harder to miss facts like these, and that means we will likely continue to see movement toward decriminalization as we have in Oregon, California, and Arizona. In fact, after over a year of soliciting votes over the internet, Vote.com shows that 70% of the public is in favor of legalizing medical marijuana (Marijuana as Medicine?).

Medical marijuana and treating addiction as a medical condition are the leading edge of reforming drug policy because the public is becoming so sympathetic to these approaches, and also becoming convinced of their effectiveness. The fact that 75% of all criminal defendants in New York City test positive for drugs (along with the 70% success rate of court-ordered treatment) surely helped in July of 2000 to make New York "the first state to require that nearly all nonviolent criminals who are drug addicts be offered treatment instead of jail time" (The New York Times). Now that the facts are coming to light, we are likely to see this trend toward decriminalizing drug use continue (both for those using medical marijuana, and for drug addicts): treatment instead of punishment.

As for those who are selling drugs, history has shown that we ourselves are responsible for creating the violence many of them resort to. There could be no Al Capone without the Prohibition, and there could be no Pablo Escobar in Colombia without the War on Drugs. And even the small-time dealer is a product of current policy. Compare the following two quotes from Mike Gray's book:

"Before the Volstead Act [which provided the means to investigate and punish violators of the 18th amendment], said Mrs. Sabin [one of the key players in repealing Prohibition], her children had no access to alcohol. Now they could get it anywhere" (70).

"Prior to the Harrison Narcotics Act, if people wanted drugs they at least had to go to a drugstore. Now they can get anything they want from the neighbor's kid. It would seem that if Americans are to have any say at all in what their teenagers are exposed to, they will have to take the drug market out of the hands of the Tijuana Cartel and the Gangster Disciples, and put it back in the hands of doctors and pharmacists where it was before 1914" (198).

The truth is, we create a powerful market for drugs (and all the violence that accompanies them) by outlawing them. Dr. John Marks, M.B.Ch.B (Edinburgh), M.R.C. Psych. (London) discovered through his work giving drug rations to addicts that not only did crime go down dramatically, but so did the incidence of new users (DRCNet). "What Marks realized was that the demand curve for forbidden fruit is not linear -- it's U-shaped. If drugs and alcohol are too freely available -- or if they're prohibited -- you increase consumption. 'Free markets promote use; prohibitions pedal use...'" (Gray, 159).

Gray also shows a graph from the FBI at the end of his book that shows the U.S. murder rate (homicides per 100,000) since 1900. As soon as Prohibition ended the rate dropped from just below 10 to 5 within ten years. In 1965 it was below 4 and climbed all the way up almost to 10 again by 1975. It has briefly been below 8 since then but averages out around 9 (p. 200). All of this (Capone and Escobar's rise to power, the Volstead and Harrison Acts making drugs more accessible to kids, Dr. Marks' U-shaped demand curve, and the FBI graph of the murder rate) gives us a broad range of examples of how we create the pusher and the violence when we create the market by being the first ones to introduce force to the issue. Nevermind the absurdity of consensual crimes in a free society, we make it profitable to trade in drugs by creating a black market. Punishing the seller just raises the stakes, increases the violence, and increases the pay. "The income of the drug barons is greater than the American defense budget. With this financial power they can suborn the institutions of the State and, if the State resists...they can purchase the firepower to outgun it" (former Colombian high court judge Gomez Hurtado as quoted in Gray, 190).

We have been fighting the war on drugs longer than any other war in our history, and we are losing. When the Harrison Narcotics Act passed in 1914, $150,000 was allocated for drug enforcement. By 1996 we were spending that much every 3 minutes. "In the attempt to make America drug-free, the taxpayers laid out over $300 billion dollars in the last fifteen years alone. To put that in perspective, we went to the moon for less than a third of that amount" (Gray, 55, 188). (Visit the Drug War Clock for the latest stats.)

And what have we achieved spending all this money? "Worldwide coca cultivation rose to a new record, 214,800 hectares in 1995, exceeding 1992's high of 211,700 hectares" ( International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, March 1996). "Despite current antidrug efforts, hundreds of tons of cocaine enter the US every year by land, air, and sea. Even the 100 metric tons or so of cocaine that the USG typically seizes annually have little discernible effect on price or availability. The combination of strong demand and extraordinary profits continue to make the United States the cocaine trade's foremost single market, for the time being at least" (International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, March 1997). Observing nearly 100 years of prohibition history in the U.S., the success of decriminalization in other countries, and remembering Dr. Marks' U-shaped curve, we see that cocaine trade will go down as we stop punishing people for using it.

But this will be a gradual process of course, and the first step is simply honest education about drug use to remove the stigma and mystique which have caused us to declare a war on drugs, and which also themselves drive up the drug trade:

"Apparently, the one surefire way to cut down on drug use is to give people the facts and let them use their own judgment. In 1914, just before drug and alcohol prohibition began, both drugs and alcohol were in general disfavor and their use was declining among all segments of the population. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 forced manufacturers to list ingredients on product labels, and when people found out what was in some of those home remedies, the use of narcotics dropped by a third -- the largest single decrease ever -- and that was before the Prohibition. The most successful antidrug crusade in history was the one waged against tobacco over the last thirty years, a campaign that avoided prohibition altogether. The tool was education, and it proved far more formidable than coercion. California cut smoking 40 percent in a single decade by using cigarette taxes to finance antismoking ads" (Gray, 194).

The war on drugs is ending, and when it ends, it will end not with a bang, and not even with a whimper, but with a sigh of tedium followed by relief that we no longer have to continue the unnecessary drama of drug enforcement.

For more information, please visit the links below

Signs of a Thaw in the War on Drugs
January 21, 2001 article in The New York Times by James C. McKinley, Jr.