End urban violence? End the drug war!

"War is the health of the state.''

Randolph Bourne

CNN and the Chicago Sun-Times are doing stories on Chicago's deadly streets. It's time once again to remember the main reason why the streets are so deadly, why there is so much gun violence, why brave police officers and little children die every day: the war on drugs.



Ah, yes, the war on drugs. The goddamned, fucking, obscene, fascistic, priggish, hypocritical, fruitless, wasteful and unconstitutional war on drugs, actually a war on people who choose to traffic in and consume certain unapproved drugs.

Drug war and big govt.

Maintained by lies and violence, it is one of the cornerstones of big government, funding all manner of surveillance technologies and invasions of privacy.

It created a black market, and you know what that means: criminals and violence. We proved that right here in Chicago in the 1920s. Until recently, the city was famous for little else.

MANY more people have died in the war on drugs (5,000-10,000/year, according to an estimate by Milton Friedman) than Al Capone or Frank Nitti ever killed – and they didn’t kill children!

You do remember the war on drugs, don't you?

It’s the “other war,” the one we’ve forgotten about, because we have this REAL war that Bush and his cronies started.

Multiple wars

If you‘re a politician, it’s good to have multiple wars going, real and metaphorical, because then people forget about all but the most recent one you started. And all wars make politicians and government very, very important.

Marijuana (cannabis sativa) has been consumed by human beings for thousands of years. It has numerous medical benefits and (unlike aspirin or alcohol) no known toxic dose; the hemp plant has a host of environmentally-friendly uses (fuel, fiber, etc.). Nevertheless, it’s been illegal since 1937, and heroin and opium for many decades before that.

But the war on drugs really cranked up (no pun intended) under President Reagan, who continued Nixon's "law and order" theme (translation: hassle nonwhite minorities), with a vengeance.

The result: today America, the land of the free, has a larger proportion of its citizens in prison than any other country. Fully 60% of the people in federal prisons are there on drug charges. The government continues to arrest over three quarters of a million Americans each year for marijuana crimes, wrecking lives and families in the process, not to mention denying the medical benefits of marijuana to sick people.

Disproportionate impact

A headline in the Chicago Tribune (6/21/07) notes that the war on drugs has a disproportionate impact on inner-city blacks and Hispanics, because they’re the ones conducting the open-air urban markets, whereas in the suburbs, drug dealing is much more discreet.

What else is new?

Duh! You know what? I have known that factoid for perhaps 10 years, maybe more. With a minimal time investment, I could track down research that has proven this over and over again. Maybe even a front-page story in the Trib itself.

OF COURSE the disproportionate impact on minorities is a natural byproduct of drug wars, which are always political in nature and designed to make life miserable for minorities: opium prohibition made life miserable for Oriental immigrants; marijuana prohibition, for Hispanics…and for other marginal, hassle-able groups like blacks, musicians, and others who had nothing to contribute to the growth of capitalism, but whose persecution allowed racist politicians to appear to be “tough on crime.”

Lack of economic opportunity makes drug dealing an irresistibly lucrative option for many people, most of them, unfortunately, people of color.

There’s nothing new to say on the war on drugs. Hundreds of billions wasted, and no decline in drug use – and no end in sight, despite repeated findings, mentioned once again in the article, that drug treatment is more effective than criminalization.

Drags on

The drug war drags on, despite the facts that marijuana has many proven benefits, and a huge portion of the risk associated with the use of heroin stems from the illegality, which practically guarantees the possibility of dirty needles and overdose.

Want to lower health care costs? End the war on drugs. I haven't noticed gangsters shooting it out over alcohol distribution rights (in Chicago, it all comes peacefully, from the Mayor's office). Think of the cost of gunshot wounds and overdoses. Both often require heroic, expensive measures for people who can't afford them.

Heroin is not a very dangerous drug. How is a daily maintenance shot (or some coca or opium tea, for that matter) so different from a daily prayer or swim? There have been – and still are – many high-functioning users of illegal drugs. As a jazz musician, I find it outrageous, unconscionable, and un-American that so many artists’ lives were ruined not by drug use alone, but by prohibition and its dangers.

Fact of life

Now several generations have grown up with the drug war as a fact of life, an immovable given. I find this amazing, because I thought the hippies’ social liberalism would to some degree become mainstream -- that by this time, at least marijuana would have been decriminalized, with other drugs under consideration.

But no. Not one inch of progress where it really counts: ending this damned $40-billion-a-year (drug enforcement is BIG business), unconstitutional obscenity. Organized efforts like the Drug Policy Alliance and NORML continue their thankless work, barely stemming the tide of ever tougher measures. Meaningful change is happening slowly, at the State level.

No guts

Is there not one politician at the national level who has the guts to speak out?

I don’t think so. I think I know why the liberalism of the hippies did not result in a liberalization of drug policy.

I have come to understand that in the same age cohort as the hippies is an equal number of busy-body control freaks who are also completely plastic people. These are the ones who choose to become politicians (perhaps because they can’t hold real jobs), who start their insane wars, then continue them, no matter the cost, because they can’t bear to be wrong.

Then they start more wars, real and metaphorical, to distract people's attention from the failures of their wars and other policies, to give politicians even more to do, and to make government very, very important.

Vile consequences

Severe, crushing, and disproportionate impact on minorities is only one of the vile consequences of the drug war. Others include:

--asset forfeiture (seizing Americans' property on nearly the suspicion of a crime);

--threats to free speech (e.g., the government's threat to arrest any doctor who even mentions medical marijuana to a patient);

--gross violations of privacy, including the very kind of unwarranted search and seizure techniques (e.g., breaking down doors and entering violently without warning or evidence of a crime) that drove our Founders to revolution;

--enormously destructive and disruptive interference in the economies of other countries.

No one wants kids using -- or adults abusing -- drugs. But there are viable and constructive alternatives to a policy that is clearly not working.

Other government programs are stupid, wasteful and pointless. The drug war is all of these -- and evil. It is arbitrary morality, maintained by lies and enforced by violence. It is government at its worst.

Drug war death

As I noted, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once estimated that the drug war results in 5,000 to 10,000 violent deaths each year. It’s worth repeating. Some of that blood is on the hands of every politician who defends this disastrous policy.

There are costs of prohibition in addition to the explosion of violent crime: the clogging of the courts, the overcrowding of the prisons, and the corruption of law enforcement personnel, not to mention their diversion from the pursuit of real criminals and terrorists.

Tiny, incremental steps are being made in liberalization, and I financially support some of the organizations that are making them. Some states have legalized medical marijuana, in defiance of federal law.

But what is really necessary is for the national government to step out of drug policy entirely. It's not in the Constitution, and the states and the people (see the Ninth and Tenth Amendments) can decide these things for themselves.

Drug use is a personal, moral, medical, cultural, and social issue. It has no place on the federal government's agenda.

Marches and vigils are inspiring, but they will not stop the shooting and killing, in our cities and on our borders. That requires politicians with courage. Like the centaur, such a creature does not exist.