From a law enforcement perspective, our responsibility is to disrupt, dismantle, and destroy drug trafficking enterprises. We must also reduce the demand for drugs... Here.
That's the most succinct statement of objectives I could find. So, have we met these objectives?
The world's most extensive study of the drug trade has just been published in the medical journal BMJ Open, providing the first "global snapshot" of four decades of the war on drugs. You can already guess the result. The war on drugs could not have been a bigger failure. To sum up their most important findings, the average purity of heroin and cocaine have increased, respectively, 60 percent and 11 percent between 1990 and 2007. Cannabis purity is up a whopping 161 percent over that same time. Not only are drugs way purer than ever, they're also way, way cheaper. Coke is on an 80 percent discount from 1990, heroin 81 percent, cannabis 86 percent. After a trillion dollars spent on the drug war, now is the greatest time in history to get high.
The new study only confirms what has been well-established for a decade at least, that trying to attack the drug supply is more or less pointless. The real question is demand, trying to mitigate its disastrous social consequences and treating the desire for drugs as a medical condition rather than as a moral failure.
But there's another question about demand that the research from BMJ Open poses. Why is there so much of it? No drug dealer ever worries about demand. Ever. The hunger for illegal drugs in America is assumed to be limitless. Why? One answer is that drugs feed a human despair that is equally limitless. And there is plenty of despair, no doubt. But the question becomes more complicated when you consider how many people are drugging themselves legally. In 2010 the CDC found that 48 percent of Americans used prescription drugs, 31 percent were taking two or more, and 11 percent were taking five or more. Two of the most common prescription drugs were stimulants, for adolescents, and anti-depressants, for middle-aged Americans.
Both the legal and illegal alteration of consciousness is at an all-time high. And it is quickly accelerating.
Read more: The War on Drugs Is Over. Drugs Won. - Esquire
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Since Richard Nixon declared war on drugs in 1971, the United States has followed down a policy path which dramatically increased the size of federal drug control agencies, the incarceration of non-violent drug offenders, and the penalties for drug use. These policies have done little to stop drug use while also leading to a higher incarceration rate than any other country in the world through the imprisonment of non-violent drug offenders. Drugs are winning.
The drug war has failed us, even worse; it has harmed our country through its draconian policies. The tide is currently swaying towards legalization of marijuana, but that will not be enough to undue this systemic harm. It is time to stop the war on drugs and replace its policies with ones which are less egregiously unjust.
Read more: Policymic
By any standard I can apply, the answer to the question, "Have we met the objectives of our drug war?" is a big ol' NO!
The damage to American society caused by the drug war is best summed up by Noam Chomsky:
“If you take a look at the incarceration rate in the United States, around 1980 it was approximately the same as the rest of developed society. By now, it’s out of sight — it’s five-to-ten times as high as the rest of wealthy societies.”
“It’s not based on crime,” Chomsky continued. “The device that was used to recriminalize the black population was drugs. The drug wars are fraud — a total fraud. They have nothing to do with drugs, the price of drugs doesn’t change. What the drug war has succeeded in doing is to criminalize the poor. And the poor in the United States happen to be overwhelming black and Latino.”
Chomsky then made his most explosive statement, claiming that the war on drugs is, in fact, “a race war.”
“It’s a race war. Almost entirely, from the first moment, the orders given to the police as to how to deal with drugs were, ‘You don’t go into the suburbs and arrest the white stockbroker sniffing coke in the evening, but you do go into the ghettos, and if a kid has a joint in his pocket, you put him in jail.’ So it starts with police action, not the police themselves, but the orders given to them.”
“Then there’s the sentencing, which is grotesquely disproportionate — then the highly punitive system instituted after, if anybody ever gets out of prison.” He claimed that “[p]rison’s only about one thing: punishment. They only learn one thing in prison, which is how to be a criminal…and the result is like reinstating Jim Crow.”
Read more: Raw Story
