The War on Drugs

Ethical Issues in Criminal Justice CRJ530

Abstract

Are we winning the war on drugs? Like many of you answering this particular question I would have to say “NO.” Let’s face it the drug use among teens appears to be increasing. During the Clinton administration he faced fierce criticism for his early drug policy decisions, and he responded by proposing new funding and a new director for drug war programs. Concern about teen drug use is the result of reports such as the University of Michigan's annual survey of drug use among eighth, 10th, and 12th grade students. According to the survey, adolescents were more likely to use drugs - particularly marijuana - in 1995 than they were in 1992, the last year of the Bush administration. Indeed, there appears to have been a steady increase in reported teen drug use and in other drug use indicators since then President Clinton took office. However, the president's critics had savaged him for this increase, his drug policies and - above all - his failure to criticize drug use. After all, he is known as the president that “didn’t inhale.”
The damage the "War on Drugs" has done to our society is already far greater than most of us know. It is a National Tragedy that may take generations to heal. Our failure to act quickly and responsibly by educating ourselves and our neighbors while taking a strong political stand in opposition to this war will only lead to further erosions of our way of life. Several years ago I remembering watching Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, flanked by several law enforcement officials, announced that the United States had smashed a major drug trafficking ring with tentacles extending into Colombia, Mexico and cities across the United States. In all, the operation netted 130 arrests, $17 million in cash and 6 tons of cocaine. "The most sophisticated and the most well-coordinated effort that I've ever seen," said one U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration official (The Detroit News 1996). The bust was on all the major network news and on National Public Radio and in many of the nation's newspapers. Unfortunately, the reports offered very little to the reader. What it failed to note, for instance, is that operations of this sort are fairly routine. If one tune into their local news stations they will noticed that hardly a year will go by, in fact, that the government does not hold a news conference to announce that it has pulled off the most sophisticated and well-coordinated drug bust ever. Yet somehow the drugs keep pouring into the country. No matter how many traffickers are arrested, no matter how many tons of powder is seized, there's rarely a ripple on the street. Certainly the operation announced by Reno caused no dip in supplies. Few stories bothered to point this out, however. That's hardly surprising, for few subjects in recent years have been as misreported and misunderstood as the war on drugs. Before they (the reporters) attend the next such news conference, reporters would do well to read Dan Baum's "Smoke and Mirrors." An interesting history of the drug war from 1968, when President Richard Nixon first declared it, to the firing of Jocelyn Elders in 1993, "Smoke and Mirrors" provides a look at how we got into this quagmire. As Baum shows, the war on drugs has been costly not only in national treasure an estimated $120 billion spent during the Bush years alone--but also in the violence done to our courts, our cities and our civil liberties. And we have little to show for it.
Along the way, Baum makes a compelling point that it is not crack, cocaine or heroin that sustains the drug war, but marijuana. If it weren't for pot, he notes, "there wouldn't be 11 million regular users of illegal drugs in the United States, there would be 2 million"--the number of chronic users of hard drugs (The Detroit News 1996). Since such a group is too small to justify the upkeep of a vast war machine, Baum writes, the drug warriors have insisted on keeping marijuana criminalized, thereby magnifying the scope of the problem. Of the 1.1 million Americans arrested in 1990, Baum notes, 264,000 were arrested for simple marijuana possession. From helicopter raids on marijuana farms in Northern California to the investigation of High Times magazine for running ads for marijuana seeds to the denial of pot to patients with glaucoma and AIDS, Baum shows that "marijuana madness" is alive and well in the nation's capital. However, this insight comes at a good time. In anticipation of the upcoming election, Republicans in Congress are trying desperately to make an issue of Bill Clinton's drug record. U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) had asserted that the president has been AWOL on the drug issue, causing drug use to soar. According to government surveys, however, the only real increase has been in adolescent marijuana use--a cause for concern, perhaps, but hardly the national crisis the Republicans are claiming. As Baum notes, the real drug crisis is the continuing high level of crack, cocaine and heroin addiction in the inner city--a problem about which neither Democrats nor Republicans have any fresh ideas. But the argument that former president Clinton’s administration is responsible for current drug use trends is unconvincing. According to the University of Michigan survey, increases in marijuana use among eighth graders began in 1991, while George Bush (Republican) was in office. LSD use increased even earlier. As Lloyd Johnston, a principal investigator in the survey, notes, the trends in teen drug use "don't map" with the change in presidential administration (The Detroit News). It should also be remembered that marijuana use among high school seniors dropped steadily for years after 1978 - a shift that took place during the Carter presidency. If presidential rhetoric were key to drug use patterns, this shift wouldn't have occurred: Mr. Carter's administration was more receptive to arguments for decriminalizing marijuana use than any in recent history. And if presidential policy and rhetoric explained teen drug use, the Clinton administration's notable hostility to cigarettes should have produced reductions in teen smoking. Teen smoking has risen nevertheless. It's doubtful that most kids surrounded by their peers in a basement on Friday night will say no to smoking dope because of the president's sound bite. Rather, drug use appears to decrease and increase in cycles, perhaps as generations of youngsters who have gained hard experience about the drawbacks of drug use are replaced by others innocent of drugs' bad effects. If surveys and statistics show anything, it is that drug use is a complex social phenomenon. The current political posturing is likely to distract from understanding how to change this phenomenon. There is ample evidence, for instance, that trying to intercept drug traffic outside U.S. borders is a waste of time and money, but the Clinton administration did, however, increase such efforts anyway as part of its new, get-tough image. Sadly, enough our current administration hasn’t faired any better. The so called “war on drugs” has Americans against themselves, making them mistrust, fear and wage war against their fellow citizens: What better way to destroy the gains blacks were making through the Civil Rights movement than to flood the ghettos with drugs which addict thousands of users, offering the allure for "quick" money and escape from poverty, while simultaneously creating divisions and violent "turf wars" between ghetto gangs? All this while creating the political justifications and judicial sanctions for increasingly police "crack downs," arresting, incarcerating (killing when necessary) and ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of black men, their families and their communities. The latest round in the drug war suggests the same old Washington addiction: trumpet a problem, don't understand it, spend money on it - and then hope no one will care that it hasn't gone away.

References

Banks, C. (2004). Criminal Justice Ethics. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage

The Detroit News (1996). Drug High: Retrieved June 9, 2007, from htttp://www.lycaeum.org/drugwar/dnews