Date: Sun, 9 Sep 2001 14:02:47 -0400 To: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com> From: Matthew Gaylor <freematt@coil.com> Subject: It Always Starts With Jesus (Or Allah, or insert your deity here ___ .) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed"Pubdate: Fri, 17 Aug 2001 Source: National Journal (US) Copyright: 2001 National Journal Group Inc Contact: feedback@nationaljournal.com Website: http://nationaljournal.com/njweekly/ Author: Carl M. Cannon
TEMPERING THE WAR
http://www3.oup.co.uk/phisci/hdb/Volume_52/Issue_03/520623.sgm.abs.html
It did not even start as a campaign against drugs, but as a holy crusade against saloons and alcoholic drink.
More than 100 years ago, the death of a mother became a rallying cry for the temperance movement. This woman, whose name is lost to posterity, came to harm not because alcohol was illegal, but because it was plentiful. She was not caught up in any cross fire between Al Capone and Eliot Ness. She was caught up in alcoholism. Her memory was kept alive by an Ohio preacher named Howard Hyde Russell, who became an early leader in the turn-of-the-century temperance movement.
In his memoirs, Russell related the incident that galvanized him into action:
"One of the Sunday-school boys was crying at my door and asked me to come.
"It's my mother," he sobbed. "She died with pneumonia. Only sick three days. Three of us left .... Father, little sister, and myself."
I took the street address ... and [found] the father intoxicated ... and there were three or four neighbor women with liquor upon their breath. Then I asked the boy, "Do you know what caused your mother's death? It was the drink. Are you ever going to drink, my boy?" I asked him.
"I'll never touch it," and the boy clenched his little hand as he said it.
I then made a solemn promise also: "I promise to go out to my brothers and sisters of the churches, regardless of their name and creed, and I will appeal to them to join their hearts and hands in a movement to destroy this murderous curse."
The outcome was the founding, in 1893, of the Ohio Anti- Saloon League. Two years later, the group went national, and Russell was chosen superintendent. This organization joined with others, including the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Prohibition Party, in lobbying Congress and the state legislatures to ban the manufacture and sale of alcohol.
Perhaps because these groups were dominated by women or clergymen, their fliers and literature tended to feature not images of female drinkers, but images of men whiling away their time and money in saloons while their children, wretched, lonely, or despairing, suffered at home or on the street.
Prohibition was repealed in 1933, 13 years after it began. But Herbert Hoover's description of it as "an experiment noble and far-reaching" still has resonance today.
It was during Prohibition that the government embraced a hard-hitting law enforcement model for dealing with illegal substances. And although alcohol was ultimately legalized again with the repeal of the 18th Amendment, narcotics were not. And so today, the nation still operates in Prohibition's shadow.
On the first day of the new school year, roughly 500,000 American children will head out the door without being seen off by their parents because their mothers or fathers-or both-are serving time in prison on drug charges.
Also that day, 142 Americans will die of drug overdoses or other causes related to their abuse of illegal drugs.
And if it is a typical day, another 1,500 will be arrested and charged with selling or possessing narcotics. Roughly $110 million in taxpayer money will be spent-on just that one day-to incarcerate those defendants or to arrest others, to treat drug addicts, and to try to prevent young people from abusing drugs.
According to the estimates of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, American consumers will spend another $100 million to purchase cocaine, as they do every day of the year.
Those are fearful costs for society, and those on every side of the drug debate desperately want to lower them. There is, however, no real consensus on how to do so. And a nation divided so widely on so much else-spanning cultural, geographical, demographic, and political lines-appears to be moving, fittingly enough, in two directions at once.
On the one hand, a New Temperance movement has brought "mandatory minimums" to federal sentencing for illegal drugs and "zero-tolerance" policies to public schools and federal housing projects. The movement has introduced drug testing to the workplace, while raising the minimum drinking age to 21 and lowering the drinking-and-driving blood alcohol limit to a strict new level, .08 percent.
The mandatory minimums, coupled with other law-and-order legislation, such as "three strikes and you're out" and "truth in sentencing," have resulted in a higher percentage of Americans being placed behind bars than at any time in U.S. history.
Of the estimated 2 million Americans in prisons and jails, as many as 460,000 are there for drug offenses.
Sue Rusche, executive director of National Families in Action, the nation's pre-eminent anti-drug activist group, makes no apologies for those numbers.
She says that the incarceration figure, embraced by the legalization community, is exaggerated, because it includes arrestees in local jails, many of whom will be released quickly or never charged.
The number of Americans in federal and state prison for drug offenses is under 300,000, Rusche says. The "vast majority" of those serving time, she adds, were dealing-not merely using-drugs, and thus were causing great damage to society. "Those who say the true harm being done is the number of people being incarcerated are relaying a false message. Drugs themselves hurt people," Rusche says. "Addictive drugs change the brain and change behavior in ways that cause great harm. More than half of those arrested for violent crimes are high on drugs or alcohol at the time.... This is the kind of harm the (legalization advocates) don't like to talk about."
Nevertheless, those who advocate a softer line have also had recent successes.
In four states-Arizona, California, Colorado, and Nevada-the burgeoning and well-funded legalization movement has underwritten successful efforts to pass ballot-box questions allowing for the use of "medical" marijuana.
One of those states, California, followed up on this success by last year passing Proposition 36, requiring the state's criminal justice system to offer defendants charged with nonviolent drug possession a place in a treatment program instead of prison. Under this law, hundreds of California addicts-actor Robert Downey Jr. among them-have already been diverted into medical, instead of penal, facilities.
This spring, a tragedy in Peru gave powerful ammunition to the drug war's critics, some of whom believe that the current approach is doing more harm than the drugs themselves. As proof, they point to the April 20 incident, in which a Peruvian military jet, acting in concert with U.S. drug control agents, downed a Cessna, killing Baptist missionary Veronica Bowers and her daughter, in the mistaken belief that they were smuggling drugs.
One didn't have to be a proponent of drug legalization to see that shoot-down as a metaphor for the drug war: The incompetence south of the border and the arrogance north of the border collided to produce the tragedy.
"We shouldn't be surprised that this occurred," says Bill Masters, the libertarian-leaning sheriff from Telluride, Colo., who has written a book critical of the enforcement approach to drugs. "Mad as hell, maybe, but not surprised. After all, we are in a war, a war on drugs. And during times of war, innocent people get in the way."
Collateral Damage
Until an unrepentant Timothy McVeigh stigmatized the phrase, the deaths of innocents in combat were known in military parlance as "collateral damage." The downing of the Baptists' plane was a spectacular example, but many liberals-and not a few conservatives-insist that the collateral damage from the drug war piles up every day in the nation's prisons, jails, morgues, and hospitals, as well as in the inner-city housing projects that on some days seem bereft of young men-men who've gone off to prison or died in gun battles over their precious drug turf.
The litany of human suffering, whether it be a mother and child cut down in the skies over Peru, or a family sundered by drug violence in Anacostia-or Fairfax-has led Washington, and the 50 states, to again question, as they do periodically, how much collateral damage is too much.
"I've been a lawman 34 years. I think our national drug strategy, that has spanned both Democratic and Republican Administrations, has been a total failure," proclaims Norm Stamper, a former police chief in Seattle. "If I were king for a day and was going to learn from history, I would, in fact, decriminalize drug possession."
Similar sentiments, although still a minority, have oozed out all over this summer.
Peter Schrag, writing in the liberal magazine The American Prospect, called the drug legalization movement the "sagebrush rebellion of the Left." Actually, such doubts are being voiced all across the political spectrum.
In politics, libertarian Republican Gov. Gary E. Johnson of New Mexico has picked up the legalization torch carried for years by liberal Kurt Schmoke, a Democrat and former mayor of Baltimore. In the media, the respected, market-conservative Economist of London renewed its call for legalization, a call made two decades ago by the staunchly conservative National Review, while left-leaning Rolling Stone magazine carried brief essays or interviews from Stamper and 34 other prominent leaders in politics and the arts-almost all of whom want drug treatment emphasized over criminal prosecutions.
On Capitol Hill, Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., has been joined by a Republican House member from his delegation named Jim Ramstad in trying to divert some of the federal money going to interdiction in Colombia to drug treatment at home. "Our priorities have been misplaced as a nation, when we're spending only 16 percent of our funding on treatment," says Ramstad, himself a recovering alcoholic. "That's not working!"
Frank K. Martin, a prominent defense lawyer from Columbus, Ga., who has represented many defendants in drug cases but who also served as his city's mayor for four years, echoes that view. "I don't know what the answer is, but I do know this: The money and effort we've spent on this has not produced the result we had hoped for-which is lowering drug use in society," Martin says. "What the police told me [as mayor], and what they tell me now, is that as soon as you send [a dealer] to jail, someone else takes their place. The reason they do it is the money."
Those who want to de-emphasize law enforcement and interdiction make several other points. Consider five of them:
1 Financial burden to taxpayers. Currently, the Bush Administration's budget request for drug control efforts-contained in 50-odd programs and agencies-totals $19.2 billion for fiscal 2002. The states, which collectively have 21 percent of their prison population locked up for drug offenses, spend an equivalent amount. (In federal prison, that figure is approaching 60 percent.)
2 Additional street crime because drugs are illegal. Thousands of Americans are incarcerated each year because they steal or commit other crimes to finance their addictions. According to Justice Department surveys of inmates, this cohort comprises some 14 percent of those in prison on nondrug offenses.
3 Painful side effects of wholesale incarceration. This includes losses of productivity to the economy, unrealized tax revenues to the Treasury, and, most poignantly, the hundreds of thousands of young children being raised by relatives, many of them on public assistance, instead of by their own parents. No government agency even keeps track of such children, something President Bush has sought to address. His current budget earmarks $67 million for this purpose. "I propose to encourage mentoring programs for children of prisoners," Bush says, "as well as programs that, when possible, help to mend broken families." Inmate support groups laud Bush for this proposal, but believe the best thing government could do for those kids would be to lock up fewer of their parents.
4 Dealers' power over the market. Drug traffickers are not taxed. County health inspectors do not inspect their manufacturing plants. The Food and Drug Administration puts no government seal of approval on bottles of Ecstasy to ensure that consumers are getting the real thing. "The current strategy is one in which the type, price, purity, and potency of illicit drugs, as well as the participants in the business, are largely determined by drug dealers," observes Ethan A. Nadelmann, executive director of the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation, an organization that favors legalizing marijuana and easing up on prosecutions for other drugs.
5 Increased health risks of drugs. Legalization advocates believe that a government more concerned about the health of addicts than about putting their suppliers behind bars could save thousands of lives each year. Needle exchanges, for instance, could sharply curb the spread of infectious diseases, including hepatitis and HIV, among the population using intravenous drugs.
The Government Responds
The calls for decriminalization and legalization frustrate and irritate those leading the government's fight against drugs. First of all, top federal officials haven't claimed in the past 20 years, if ever, that America can arrest its way out of this problem. They point out, quite correctly, that an emphasis on "demand reduction" has been a growing part of the federal anti- drug effort for at least two decades. Second, it is simply inaccurate to suggest-as the critically acclaimed movie Traffic recently did-that the top minds combating drug use are bereft of ideas on what to do next.
In truth, there is a flurry of activity this year, ranging from the drug czar's office in Washington to the labs at the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Bethesda, Md., to the jungles of southern Colombia. Anti-narcotics officials believe that all these efforts will ultimately pay dividends.
At the 17th Street offices of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, officials point with cautious optimism to studies showing that the number of heroin addicts in this country has stabilized at around 900,000-and say that number should drop even lower because of new methadone protocols.
These officials also point to other studies showing that the number of chronic cocaine users has fallen from a peak of 3.8 million in 1988 to around 3.3 million in 2000 and the number of "occasional" users has dropped from 6 million to about 2 million.
They cite breakthroughs, as documented in National Institutes of Health studies, on understanding how cocaine cravings manifest themselves over time-the first step in developing an elusive medication to assist cocaine addicts in breaking their habits. The same office is helping underwrite a $185 million ad campaign that operates on two prevention tracks, one aimed at kids, the other at parents. Both tracks draw from the most up-to-date social science on what works in drug education and what doesn't work.
In the same vein, D.A.R.E., the anti-drug program pioneered in schools by the Los Angeles Police Department, is currently revamping and modernizing its entire curriculum. With the assistance of a generous grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and with help from social scientists at NIH and the University of Akron, in Ohio, D.A.R.E. is mothballing its outmoded "Just Say No" approach. Instead, D.A.R.E. will test the efficacy of its new message in a huge, five-year-old controlled experiment that is the most ambitious study of drug education ever undertaken.
Even the take-no-prisoners U.S. drug interdiction efforts so out of style among academics and journalists are the source of some optimism in the drug czar's office. Officials there say that U.S. drug agents now seize some 200 metric tons of cocaine annually on the high seas, at ports around the world, or at the border. "It is not as easy to move drugs around as you might think," says Robert Brown, acting head of the drug office's supply reduction unit. "There are a finite number of places that are beyond government control that have sufficient labor and materials [to produce cocaine]. That's why we've got to help the Colombians extend their sovereign control over the rest of their country."
In an interview with four National Journal reporters, Dr. Donald R. Vereen, deputy director of that office, added: "It's very easy to throw up your hands, but this is a very complicated issue that defies a single solution. I've talked to these [legalization] people.They leave out whole dimensions of the problem. Where's the evidence [that legalization] will lessen the problem? What's it based on? Where's the data?"
Drug control officials, whether they are traditional law- and-order types or New Temperance advocates such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving, are circling back to the logic of Prohibition, which sought to keep alcohol out of people's hands. In so doing, they may be on more solid historical ground than is generally known.
Implicit in everything said by proponents of legalization is this underlying proposition: The drug war does more harm to society than do the drugs themselves. Prohibition was a failure, they say; so is the war on drugs. This is a tempting proposition, because if it is true, the path government must take becomes clearer. The problem is that, despite all the current human carnage, this is a hard case to make. Addictive drugs, including alcohol, ruin people's health, destroy lives, and kill, even without the added complication of being illegal. And if users could obtain drugs more easily, at less risk, for less money, and without stigma, the most basic principles of economics and human behavior suggest that drug use would rise by a lot.
This, really, is the lesson of Prohibition. Sure, it was a failure in some ways. It helped finance an already entrenched crime underworld. It bred cynicism among the electorate, which figured that the well connected could get good booze anytime they wanted. It made lawbreakers out of millions of otherwise law- abiding Americans, and it antagonized millions of other would-be social drinkers who didn't break the law but who missed having wine with dinner, or a beer with their ball game, or a brandy at bedtime.
But about two decades ago, a new crop of historians began looking more critically at Prohibition-and began to notice things. One was that organized crime was already well established in America by 1920, without any help from Prohibition. Another was that Prohibition almost certainly lowered the consumption of alcohol significantly. Thus, in one basic way, Prohibition was a success. Its purpose had been to lessen drinking-and that's exactly what it did.
"Alcohol consumption dropped during Prohibition dramatically," said history professor K. Austin Kerr, an Ohio State University expert on Prohibition. "In the early years, it dropped by as much as 50 percent, perhaps more. Later in the 1920s, consumption increased, but it was still much lower than before Prohibition. In fact, per capita consumption of the drinking-age population did not return to pre-Prohibition levels until the 1970s. It took a long time for markets to recover."
This is not a small point. If consumption of alcohol decreased, so did an array of diseases and pathologies, ranging from cirrhosis of the liver to traffic deaths caused by drunken driving. "The advocates of the legalization of drugs are too simplistic when they say, 'Prohibition did not work.' Prohibition was a political and cultural failure, but prohibition in fact reduced the consumption of alcoholic beverages dramatically," Kerr says. "There is lots of evidence [that Prohibition] resulted in less spousal abuse, lower hospital admission rates for alcohol-related diseases, and all the rest of it."
Thus, the Prohibition movement brought America two realities, not one. It helped fuel a harsh enforcement culture, as well as a violent bootlegging one-and both have, as their logical legacy, today's drug war, including the April tragedy over the Amazon River. At the same time, Prohibition lowered the rate of drinking, and in the process, diminished all of the harmful behaviors associated with alcohol abuse.
Do No Harm
According to those who treat drug addicts, the movie Traffic, for all its critically acclaimed nuance, glossed over a very important point.
In the film, the drug czar's daughter is doing just peachy-making straight A's, starring on her high school sports teams, cheerfully doing volunteer work-except that she has this one little problem: She's addicted to heroin. Hollywood itself has had some visible examples in the past year of actors and producers who do brilliant work while negotiating the needs of a drug habit. But those in treatment say that is not typical.
This has never been made public, but back in the 1980s, a well-known federal anti-narcotics official was caught in the exact same nightmare that Michael Douglas's character faces in Traffic. He discovered his only child was a drug addict. "It doesn't usually happen like it did with that kid in the movie," this official said last week. "That's the rare exception. These drugs tend to hurt you. Usually, you become dysfunctional." After this drug control official's 14-year-old was enrolled in an intensive 12-step residential program, he volunteered to speak to other parents whose children were recently enrolled in the program. "I'd do the new-parent rap, and describe what my kid had gone through, what their kids were going to go through, what was ahead for them. And at the end of it, I'd say, 'Oh, by the way, I'm DEA.' Half of 'em would pass out-from relief. They thought if it happened to me, it could happen to anyone."
Drugs do indeed inflict harm. And the need to reduce the demand for drugs is something agreed on by all sides in the debate over drug control policy. Many other areas of agreement can be found. Decriminalization advocates, for example, concede that if drug use were to spike dramatically in the event drugs were legalized, the benefits of legalization would be undermined- and that the nation's 16,000 annual overdose deaths would probably increase. On the other hand, it was White House deputy drug czar Vereen who used the phrase harm reduction to describe an optimum U.S. goal for its policy toward drugs.
Drug war critics use harm reduction to describe a set of proposed policies ranging from designated, government-financed needle exchanges to informal agreements in which local police forces assure young users that if they rush overdose victims to the hospital or call an ambulance, they won't be charged with a crime.
"If the police policy is to arrest everyone there, what is the chance they will call the police?" says legalization proponent Nadelmann. "Cities that have done this have cut drug overdose deaths in half. That's what we mean by harm reduction."
In the absence of such a new approach, the various actors in the drug drama are sometimes forced to play roles they don't always believe in-with sad results. Certainly that was the case for the two CIA-contract pilots in the cockpit of their Citation surveillance jet on the morning of April 20. As the two men, who have not been identified by the government but are referred to as "Bob" and "Tony" on the tape, try to converse with the Peruvian pilot in the fighter plane and their respective air-control towers, the language barrier, the obvious anxiety of the Peruvians, and the fact that they are talking over one another all convey a sense of confusion-and impending disaster.
"This is bullshit," Bob remarks to Tony in the Citation jet. He is starting to doubt that the Cessna is a drug plane.
A few minutes later, he adds softly, "I think we're making a big mistake."
"I agree with you," Tony replies.
But as they sit in their cockpit, these American narcotics agents do not change their course; nor do the Peruvians. They, and their nations, are swept up in something that they suspect isn't working, but that they don't know how to stop. After the Cessna is down, but before he knows American missionaries are inside, Bob mutters a single word.
"God," he says.
In many drug treatment programs, that word is used as a solution. But on this day it was used, as it often is in the drug wars, as an oath and a lament-and a prayer.
Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. ---
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