I was a victim of the War on Drugs
The War on Drugs and the consequences of its immorality had come home to me. One afternoon in 1993 I came home from work and discovered the back door had been kicked in. It was very scary. The police came and fortunately there was no one hiding in the house. I took an inventory of what was taken – some stereo equipment, a portable computer, a steam iron, and my jacket – items that were easily fenced.
What I was most upset about was my jacket. It used to be against my skin when I wore it, and I felt so vulnerable that someone had stolen something that was physically close to me. The intimacy of the close contact was violated.
I got the door repaired and my insurance covered my losses.
A few days later the police apprehended the burglar, thanks to an alert neighbor seeing another break-in. The burglar admitted breaking into my house and many others in order to steal things he could sell easily. He needed the money to buy expensive crack, as he was a crack addict.
What really made me upset was that this did not have to have happened at all. But, thanks to the immorality of the War on Drugs and its inevitable consequences, thousands of people around the world have suffered.
Immorality of the War on Drugs
What is the immorality of the War on Drugs? Fundamentally it is that your life is not your own, your body is not yours, and what you put in your body is not up to you.
Ask yourself these questions, and be honest with yourself:
- Who owns your life and your body? Is it you? Is it me? Is it your neighbor, a bureaucrat in Washington, DC, or Congress?
- Are you an end in yourself, an individual with your own dreams and aspirations, or are you the means to someone else’s end?
My answer is that everyone owns their own body, and what they put into their body is totally their decision and no one else’s; imposing the government’s notion of what goes in your body means that you are not an end in yourself, but belong to the government. I hope that is your answer too.
In 2020 I wrote to my elected “representatives” regarding the War on Drugs. Quoting from the response I received from Senator John Cornyn,
“Illegal drug abuse is a threat to the fabric of our nation, causing more than 30,000 deaths and billions of dollars in economic losses each year.”
This is reminiscent of President Nixon calling drug abuse “public enemy number one” in a speech.
Notwithstanding questioning the quoted statistics, my response, Senator Cornyn, is that you’ve got it all wrong about what is the threat. What IS a threat to the fabric of our nation is not the drugs, but the violation of our personal freedoms and the disastrous consequences of the Insane War on Drugs.
To understand a little of this, a review of a basic tenet of economics is in order.
Supply and Demand
If there is a demand for a product, someone will supply it. Name a product for which there is a demand – food, furniture, car, clothes – and there are companies and people willing to supply it. Why politicians (and many citizens) do not understand this fact of Economics 101 is beyond me.
In the same vein, if there is a demand for something illegal, someone will supply it, but in this case, there are consequences that would not exist if the product were legal. During Prohibition illegal liquor was available because of the demand, but the price was higher than it would have been if it were legal, the Mafia and crime bosses grew like wildfire, and, since they were outside the law, enforcement of their “territories” was done at the point of a gun with lots of trigger pulling.
In other words, the illicit nature of the drug trade has left it inextricably entwined with crime and violence, ensuring that these activities largely take place in a lawless realm where anything goes. Today we have drug cartels enforcing their territories, bribing law enforcement, and engendering political corruption.
In my personal case, because the price of illegal drugs was artificially high, the addict had to steal to economically support his habit.
Consequences of the War on Drugs
Without going into too much detail about some of the inevitable consequences, here is a short list of them.
1. First and foremost is the violation of your right to put in your body what you wish. That right follows directly from your right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The government should have no say at all in the matter.
2. Increased crime
“The first unintended consequence [of the drug control system] is a huge criminal black market that now thrives in order to get prohibited substances from producers to consumers. Whether driven by a ‘supply push’ or a ‘demand pull,’ the financial incentives to enter this market are enormous. There is no shortage of criminals competing to claw out a share of a market in which hundred-fold increases in price from production to retail are not uncommon.” See Chapter 5 of The Alternative World Drug Report for details.
3. SWAT teams and no-knock searches with their related deaths and destruction of property
These “dynamic entry” raids happen all the time – thousands every year – and use the element of surprise to effect seizures of the drugs (allegedly so the people with drugs don’t have time to flush the drugs down the toilet) and arrests of neighborhood drug dealers. But they have also led time and again to deaths which shouldn’t have happened, injuries, and wrecked property. When multimillion-dollar lawsuits are settled, it is usually at taxpayer expense.
These SWAT raids have expanded way beyond drugs, including alleged firearms regulation violations, along with associated tragedies. From 2010 to 2017 there have been at least 85 SWAT-caused deaths. Scores of others were maimed or wounded. Innocent people have been killed in attacks on wrong addresses. Sometimes the victims are the family dogs.
The article Door-Busting Drug Raids Leave a Trail of Blood is worth reading. Warning: the video as part of the article contains violence.
4. Civil asset forfeiture and the corresponding financial ruining of lives
The government at all levels seizes property without any accusations or trials. Initially this was to confiscate alleged drug money, but the original reason has long been forgotten. Tens of billions of dollars of money and property have been seized from 2001 through 2014.
The report Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture, 2nd Edition, by the Institute for Justice, describes the magnitude of this confiscation along with the concomitant destruction of innocent lives.
5. High incarceration rates
According to a Washington Post article, in 2016, more people were arrested over marijuana possession than for murder, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery — combined.
Furthermore, African Americans and whites use drugs at similar rates, but the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of whites (2015 data), causing one to wonder if the justice system for drug abuse is racist..
According to a 2004 U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) survey, Drug and Crime Facts, an estimated 17% of state prisoners and 18% of federal inmates reported that they committed the crimes for which they were then incarcerated in order to obtain money to buy drugs. Those who do commit crimes to obtain money for drugs are more likely to commit property crimes and drug offenses (trafficking) than they are violent crimes and public order offenses.
Without going into detail, there are many other unintended consequences.
- Draconian prison sentences for minor offenses
- Abuses by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
- Corruption and bribery of police and politicians
- Illogical classification of drugs by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)
- Increased spread of HIV through shared needles
- Increased drug use because addicts push it on youngsters to support their expensive habit
- Made a “victimless crime” a crime, thus undermining the very concept of “crime”
All of these drive home the point that the War on Drugs has been a total and unnecessary disaster.
The War on Drugs has not stopped drug use
Has it been a success? Sound statistics are hard to come by, but here are two data points.
- The National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics reported that “In 2018, 31.9 million, or 11.7% of the population over age 12 in the U.S. were current illegal drug users (had used within the previous month)”
- The National Survey on Drug Use and Health: 2018 reported that “In 2018, 43.5 million, or 15.9% of the U.S. population used marijuana.”
After almost 50 years, more than a trillion dollars, and thousands incarcerated or dead due to illicit drugs, there appears to be no end in sight.
Sadly, and unfathomably, there is no criterion of when the “war” is won.
Who likes the War on Drugs?
What is the solution? As with most entrenched policies of the government that shouldn’t exist in the first place, the War on Drugs has tentacles that reach into many areas, such as law enforcement, the FDA, the DEA, local police, etc., and there are many organizations within and outside of the government that benefit from this “war” and would dig in their heels to resist any changes.
Follow the money and follow the power to identify the beneficiaries of the War on Drugs. Here is a sample:
- the makers and distributors of America’s top-selling alcohol products
- police organizations
- the prison-industrial complex
- Big Pharma
- government employee associations.
The article Meet the Special Interests Keeping Marijuana Criminalized names names and gives details of organizations you would recognize.
Abolish the War on Drugs
The obvious solution to the problems caused by the War on Drugs is to get rid of it altogether. Knowing that it would not be easy to abolish the legislation and the associated agencies that have had almost a half-century life, in any event, here is a starter list for the desired end results.
- First is to declare that the War on Drugs is immoral because it violates people’s right to their own lives and to their own bodies.
- Second is to completely end the War on Drugs and abolish all related legislation, regulation, agencies, and budgets associated with it.
- Third is to pardon and release all non-violent “offenders” convicted of a drug offense and purge their conviction records.
Only then will the government return to its primary function of protecting our rights, rather than violating them.
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As you are probably aware, many discussions on this topic are sometimes unfriendly and contain logical fallacies. If you decide to leave a comment, or even outside of this post, if you decide to have a discussion, public or private, you might find it helpful to follow the suggestions on my post How to have a successful discussion.
Photo Credits
- Marijuana plant: Roberto Valdivia on Unsplash
- SWAT team: U.S. Army Materiel Command on Wikimedia