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 Follow
the Money . . . Focus on America’s Failed War on Drugs
Prohibition Laws - Why they must go
by Shannon Floyd
The Drug War is itself an addiction for which our government
demands more money and more lives every year. The Drug War is
also itself a prison, a prison for which the foundation is laid
in prohibition, the concrete walls set high by mandatory minimum
sentences, and the barbed wire rigged by conspiracy laws which
allow the innocent to be sent away with the guilty and the violent.
We will tear this prison down and we will do that by working
together toward a saner solution. People need to care enough to
talk about this issue publicly. You no longer have to be a lunatic
or a martyr to use the words, “The Drug War isn’t working.”
It
is time to change the laws in our country that make some drugs/substances
illegal. I refer here to the Prohibition Laws. I use the terms
“drugs” and “substances” interchangeably because
the drugs come from plant substances which can be useful for many
purposes unrelated to intoxication (medicinal, spiritual, industrial,
etc.), but these uses are lost to us if we are denied the substances.
This
nation doesn’t have a drug problem—people have drug
problems. This nation has a problem with bad laws. The way people
deal with drug problems is through counseling, treatment, education,
and through living with hope and purpose. In contrast, the laws
now in place push people into addictive lifestyles by taking funding
away from positive government resources (such as education and
health care), and then criminalizing people for crossing arbitrary
governmental lines. We have a drug war on our hands alright, but
it is a war in which the American people were never consulted.
Declaring
War
How Did The War on Drugs Begin? Interestingly enough, the roots
of the Drug War were planted about 100 years ago, around the same
time that large corporations were coming into existence. When
Rockefeller and Carnegie and Mellon were amassing the most amazing
fortunes in America, a backlash was orchestrated against the poor,
mostly non-white workers who did the physical labor of the land,
and against the substances which formed a part of their culture.
The first substance to be outlawed in America was opium. That
prohibition was in San Francisco in 1875, and it was only illegal
if you were smoking it while Chinese (a classic case of racial
profiling). The railroads had been built and there wasn’t
another project of that scale in the works. There were too many
Chinese laborers in a bloated labor supply, and so they were targeted
with the first prohibition law.
Then,
during the ’30s, a national hysteria was stirred up against
Mexican immigrants in the Southwest. These people had come north
to work, and during the Depression became competitors for jobs
in a shrinking market and then for spaces in the soup kitchen
lines. And so tales began to spread about how Mexicans became
insane and thought they were bullfighters in a ring when they
smoked something called “marihuana”. (A note on the
word marihuana: Cannabis was described as a medicine in the medical
pharmacoepias —the lists of medicines—but no one had
ever heard of marihuana, and so that word became the vehicle for
making the substance illegal.) The Marihuana Tax Act was passed
through Congress with virtually no discussion or debate in 1937.
The short debate that did occur in the House of Representatives
included a bald-faced lie on the part of those pushing for the
bill. One representative asked what the American Medical Association
thought of The Marihuana Tax Act; a fellow congressman said that
the AMA supported it “one hundred percent.” In fact,
counsel for the AMA had expressly opposed the bill in committee
hearings, saying that cannabis was not a harmful substance, that
the hysteria around its use had been mostly raised by the media,
and that he wondered why the Federal Bureau of Narcotics had been
secretly putting together this bill for two years without soliciting
input from the largest association of physicians in the country.
The response from the committee chair ran along the lines of ‘If
you can’t say something nice, don’t come down here and
talk to us at all’. The story of this disastrously short
consideration and the deception in the House debate was not brought
forth for decades, and still most people do not know.
The
Harrison Tax Act—regulating doctors’ ability to prescribe
opiates and narcotics—had previously been passed in 1915.
Together, that law plus the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 gave the
U.S. Treasury the right to come between doctors and their patients,
and between people and their own pain management or cognitive
exploration.
Armed
with this new power, the U.S. Treasury sent their men—basically
IRS men—out to arrest people if they were caught prescribing
a narcotic to an addict, or if they were found in possession of
marihuana without the marihuana tax stamp. It was only years later,
after people had already been sent to prison for tax evasion,
that the substances themselves were made illegal.
It
is clear that the origins of the mess we call the “drug war”
were rooted in financial weapons and financial gain. This is still
the case today.
Who
Benefits from Making Certain Drugs Illegal?
1) Is it people with addictions? No, be-cause they can’t
get treatment. Treatment funding has dried up as money for more
and bigger prisons has increased tenfold.
2) Is it kids? No. Assuming that what’s best for kids is
to keep developing bodies and minds pure, we have a system in
which it is easier for them to get an unregulated substance than
a regulated one. And regarding the danger to kids: if a young
person of 16 or 18 or 20 experiments with different intoxicants,
do we, as a culture, really believe this is more dangerous than
the current “cure” for such behavior? Currently we pull
such young people out of society, threaten them for years through
probation, and put them into a jail cell with violent criminals.
3) Is it citizens who benefit? Not if you figure that most people
want a peaceful society to live in. Society is more violent with
a system of substance prohibition (choosing to make some things
illegal) than without it. Look at a graph such as the one on www.prohibitionhasfailed.com
and you will see that the murder rate in this country spiked during
Alcohol Prohibition (1920-33) and fell when it ended. It rose
again with the updated and upgraded Drug War of the ’80s.
4) Do taxpayers benefit? Not in the least. The federal government
now spends $20 billion per year on the Failed Drug War. If you
count state, local and indirect costs, that number shoots up to
about $50 billion per year, not counting the billions that are
starting to go to support a drug war in Colombia and elsewhere
in South America. This is money that is lost forever and can never
be used to care for our elderly, educate our kids, build our roads,
or revamp our health care system.
Clearly,
Substance Prohibition, i.e. making certain substances illegal,
is not benefiting those it claims to benefit. Professor Noam Chomsky
says that if something is not achieving its stated goal, and yet
it continues, it must be achieving an unstated goal. So I ask
again: who benefits from making certain drugs/substances illegal?
1) The prison industry
2) Law enforcement agencies
3) The military complex
4) The pharmaceutical industry
5) Alcohol & tobacco industries
6) Drug testing & enforced treatment industries
7) Banks (through money laundering)
8) Agricultural chemical companies (eradication efforts)
9) Oil, gas & timber industries (due to hemp prohibition)
10) All corporations who use prison labor and the stock market
(which contains vast amounts of fast-moving, untracked cash).
For
the above groups, the primary result of the drug war is profit.
For you and me, the primary result of the drug war is the threat
of incarceration and loss of social services. For the world in
general, the primary result of the drug war—as with any war—is
destruction. That is what wars do: destroy the “enemy”
and whatever else gets in the way.
That
“whatever else” is called collateral damage in military
terminology. And let us be very clear that, although only a metaphorical
war when declared in 1974 by President Nixon, this war has become
very real. The drug war destroys families, communities, economies,
social infrastructure, and the environment.
Personal
Collateral Damage—One of Many Millions
I was alerted early to the dangers of Drug Prohibition. My father
went to prison under a prohibition law when I was eleven years
old, and these drug laws form a part of a larger continuum in
an American story that circles around the issues of peace and
war and civil disobedience.
A
decorated fighter pilot and the youngest captain in the Marine
Corps of his day, my father grew up learning about God and country
from the Baptist church and the John Birch society. He went to
Vietnam in 1968 thinking he was saving the ideals of democracy
and freedom. But in Vietnam, he found divisions that made no sense,
a people who sought American-style independence, and a war in
which high-tech bomb-dropping left no room for ideals of civilian
immunity. When a cockpit injury left him convalescing in Japan,
he confronted the reality of modern warfare in the Nagasaki museum.
My
mother had protested the Vietnam War as early as 1965 and in some
ways must have been deeply relieved when her soldier husband quit
the Marine Corps soon after I was born in 1969. But what followed
was years of unease, unrest, and financial and emotional upheaval,
as my father traveled the country organizing actions and speaking
on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and my mother struggled
to raise two babies more or less on her own.
The
first time my father went to prison, it was 1972. Hearts and Minds,
a documentary about the war in Vietnam in which he spoke about
his experiences, had just been released, and he and a dozen others
blocked the entrance to Tinker AFB with their bodies. I wrote
my first letters to my father in jail. Barred from Tinker for
life, my dad was not present when my sister gave birth there to
his first grandchild.
The
second time my father went to prison, it was 1980. He had a farm
in Oklahoma, was building a house with his hands and living in
a tent. He had gone to town to pick up supplies for himself, his
partner, and their week-old son. When he came back, he was met
by a group of men with guns who barred him access to his home.
The arresting DEA agent was another veteran he knew. The man knocked
him down while the others watched, and every time my father got
up, saying, “I’m not resisting!” he was knocked
down again. He’d been growing marijuana on his land and some
friend or acquaintance had turned him in.
What
I find sobering (take that however you wish) is how lucky I was.
The parent imprisoned was not, for me, my main support in childhood,
and he wasn’t handed a 99 year sentence to serve like others
who have been convicted since this war heated up. Millions of
children have now lost parents and grandparents to prison, and
how many others have seen spouses, siblings and good friends locked
away?
The
issue behind prohibition is not and never has been one of personal
or societal health. The most dangerous substances are legal. The
most dangerous substances, alcohol and tobacco and many pharmaceuticals,
kill a combined total of about 800,000 a year as opposed to 15,000
killed by illegal drugs.
All
of us struggle with different forms of addiction or unhealthy
consumption. My father—more than some, less than others—is
a mass of chemical dependencies. Of the fluid and smoky cocktail
that regularly goes into his body, it is the cigarettes that cause
him to cough in the night. Tobacco could be the primary cause
of death for any number of my loved ones.
But
do I wish cigarettes were illegal? Absolutely not! Do you cure
someone of a headache by hitting them with a hammer? I’ve
talked to my dad about his smoking, and to my mother who nearly
died of a stroke two years ago, and now I let it rest. I respect
their choices for their bodies, their lives. This is a hard thing
to do when you love someone, but it is necessary. Otherwise your
concern becomes just another jail, sometimes metaphorically, sometimes
literally.
If
Not Prohibition, Then What?
The only law that ever made a dent in the problem of addiction
was not a prohibition law at all. It was the Pure Food and Drug
Act of 1906. People who had unknowingly become addicted to the
cocaine, opium, and morphine in the many “patent medicines”
(mostly rural white women) during the late 19th c., could suddenly
see right on the label what ingredients were in their favorite
tonics, and use dropped precipitously.
That
is an historical example of what we now need:
• We need truth in advertising (who remembers the tobacco
executives swearing before Congress that nicotine was not addictive?);
• We need real drug education which encompasses all drugs
and gives complete, factual information about possible effects
and side effects (see www.mamas.org);
• And we need a reallocation of our resources toward the
Constructive (parks, schools, social services, living wage jobs)
and away from the Destructive (guns, bombs, slave wages, and prisons).
My
dad doesn’t talk much about prison and I don’t ask.
I know enough of what it meant. He missed the first nine months
of his son’s life, came out 25 pounds thinner (the result
of a long fast), and to this day dislikes East Coast mafia types.
But we do talk politics. And he has come to see, as I have, that
the Drug War is a powerful political issue, an immense mechanism
of social control and economic profiteering.
The
base issues of fear and greed have been with us before and will
be again. All we can do is address the current incarnation of
social and economic and racial and environmental injustice. These
things all come together in the prohibition laws.
Watching
carefully for the past twenty years, I have seen the environment
sacrificed, the educational system underfunded, African-Americans
and Latinos jailed at rates up to 17 times higher than whites,
and the Constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties of every U.S.
citizen suffer under policies which are differentially enforced,
ineffective when enforced, and which are used to justify numerous
and far more serious sins.
It
is important to make these connections between the movement to
end substance prohibition and the movements seeking to defend
women’s rights, civil rights, workers’ rights, and the
right to clean air and water. We cannot let them commercialize
and then criminalize our culture and our environment any longer.
Only a small sector of the population, generally those at the
top of the corporate ladder, are being well served by current
laws, and a very broad range of purposes and people will be served
by changing this wrong-headed and brutally destructive policy.
Breaking
the Silence
The only thing holding us back from having a sane drug policy,
and a more successful and peaceful society, is the silence we
now share between us. It is as if we all collude in this madness.
We are not talking enough about the destruction being wrought
in our names and with our tax dollars, under the flag of the War
on Drugs. We must begin a conversation among our families, our
neighbors, our faith communities, our business communities and
our governmental communities that tells the history and faces
facts about the War on Drugs.
When
we wave away the smoke from the guns of government and corporate-sponsored
propaganda, and simply look around us, we can see clearly how
out of balance is the scale that weighs the costs and the benefits
of prohibition. We can see how out of balance are the scales of
justice, with one million people in prison for drug offenses today.
We can see how out of balance are energy policies which refuse
to consider the impact of outlawing hemp, one of the most environmentally
useful substances on the planet. We can see how out of balance
are environmental policies which poison the most fragile and diverse
of ecosystems with thousands of tons of toxic herbicides. We can
see how out of balance are laws that tear apart families in the
name of family values.
Once
we start to see clearly, we will take the next step . . . and
the next. It will not take long then to repeal these laws. When
that happens, the peace, the energy, and the resources that we
will feed back into our daily lives rather than into a war machine
will truly add much to the common good.
Shannon
Floyd is working to create a forum, the Common Good Drug Policy
Forum, to discuss the issues and difficulties of the Failed War
on Drugs. She serves on the steering committees of two peace activist
groups focused on South America, the Peace in Colombia Action
Group (local) and the Colombia Action Network (national). Shannon
lives in NE Portland and works as administrative director of a
political consulting firm that addresses a variety of progressive
social and environmental causes. She can be reached at shannonkfloyd@yahoo.com
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