
The Never-Ending War on Drugs: Where We Are Now and How to Stop The Madness
Newly-minted Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been busy.
Mr. Sessions has turned the attention of the Justice Department away from upholding civil rights, signaling an abrupt end to federal monitoring programs put in place by the Obama administration to force accountability onto police departments with laundry lists of racial abuses and officers with itchy trigger fingers.
This tactic, according to Mr. Sessions, has hampered the fragile morale of law enforcement outfits and “diminished their effectiveness.” In an amazing display of either Olympic-level mental gymnastics or unadulterated sadism, he has claimed that the decision to pull out of such monitoring programs is actually done out of an abundance of consideration for the targets of police violence:
…[T]o make the lives of people in particularly the poor communities, minority communities, live a safer, happier life so that they’re able to have their children outside and go to school in safety and they can go to the grocery store in safety and not be accosted by drug dealers and get caught in crossfires or have their children seduced into some gang.
And so, the “new” old target rears its ugly head: The War on Drugs.
Mr. Sessions has moved swiftly on this front, reviving mandatory minimum sentencing for federal drug crimes, rescinding the Obama-era DoJ memorandum ending the federal use of private prisons, stepping up efforts to seize money and property from suspected criminal elements, and demanding Congress eliminate restrictions prohibiting the use of federal funds to interfere with medical marijuana programs.
His most recent brilliant idea? Pledging to bring back D.A.R.E., the “Just Say No” anti-drug educational program of the 1980s that dragged police officers in front of classrooms to harangue students on the evils of drugs.
D.A.R.E has been roundly panned as ineffectual (and in some cases counterproductive) towards its stated aims of reducing drug use in young adults. The program did not see successful results until 2009 when, threatened by a lack of funding, it began incorporating evidence-based approaches that emphasized decision-making skills over anti-drug proselytizing after decades of resisting such pedagogical changes. Mr. Sessions, however, has already demonstrated a callous disregard for fickle things like “evidence” or “results”, praising the D.A.R.E of yesteryear as instrumental in curbing the drug epidemics of the past not by educating, but by reinforcing the cultural environment of shame surrounding drug use:
…It is not enough that dangerous drugs are illegal. We also have to make them unacceptable. We have to create a cultural climate that is hostile to drug abuse. We need to send a clear message. We must have Drug Abuse Resistance Education.
It is patently obvious that Mr. Sessions wishes to expand the authority of the police state, and does not wish to be outdone by President Trump, who began his term with the notorious Muslim Ban and executive orders promising a significant boost in the number of ICE agents and border patrol personnel. These moves fit a pattern foreshadowed by Trump’s tough-on-crime campaign rhetoric, furthering the ends of a criminal justice system that moralizes and criminalizes the conditions of poverty, prescribing punitive punishment as a means of keeping the underclass in check while imprisoning or deporting those undesirables that do not fit his vision of American greatness. President Trump‘s Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety, lead by Mr. Sessions, has been telegraphing its moves in service of such an authoritarian vision, gearing up to release a report next week that links marijuana to immigration and violent crime.
This is by no means a novel strategy. Former Nixon domestic affairs adviser and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman describes the drug war as an orchestrated moral panic with political — not rehabilitative — ends:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
The War on Drugs is but one cornerstone of a grand strategy of coercive control and political suppression, and by most accounts, it has failed miserably and expensively. Within the United States alone, the combined budgets of federal, state, and local anti-drug efforts total over $51 billion dollars annually, the majority of which is spent on enforcement strategies that reduce the existing supply of illicit substances rather than on preventative, demand-oriented measures like treatment or educational programs. Estimated rates of global spending regularly surpass the $100 billion dollar mark.
Despite these extraordinary expenditures, rates of drug consumption have stayed relatively static over the years:

While commutations late in Obama’s final term released some federal non-violent drug offenders, the rule of the day is still mass incarceration with an inherent racial bent. 1 in 5 incarcerated people are locked up for drug offenses, the majority of whom are black and hispanic. Arrests for controlled substances like marijuana are higher for black Americans, despite the fact that both whites and blacks use drugs at approximately the same rates. Similarly, drug and immigration offenders combined make up over 50% of the total federal prison population:

The failure of the drug war reverberates worldwide, overlapping with and compounding the failures of the War on Terror. South of the border, an uptick in cartel violence has provided border wall advocates with additional rhetorical ammunition. In Afghanistan, endless poppy fields continue to contribute to the global opium supply chain and the coffers of terrorist organizations. Columbia is once again the leading producer of coca and cocaine, supported by members of the populace who believe — like their Afghani counterparts — that production of the drug is a livelihood, not a criminal enterprise. Ever the one-trick pony, the international community has continually sought to use military force to intervene rather than supporting decriminalization efforts successfully modeled in places like Portugal and Uruguay.
There is more than a faint whisper of imperialism to the international drug trade that can be traced back to British efforts to flood the Chinese market with Indian opium during the mid-1700s, and the subsequent wars that lead to China’s “Century of Humiliation” at the hands of Western powers. China has since gone on to adopt some of the harshest anti-narcotics policies in the world, with punishment up to and including the death penalty.
Much like everywhere else, however, a heavy-handed approach has failed to stem the tide.

Here in the United States, the failure of the war on drugs has been punctuated by the exponentially rising death toll of the opioid epidemic, which just last year reached heretofore unseen levels:

The roots of the current crisis lie in a marketing blitz undertaken by pharmaceutical giant Purdue Pharma and others, which sung the praises of highly addictive synthetic opioids like OxyContin and Percocet in the treatment of long-term chronic pain syndromes. Despite only a weak scientific basis for this assertion and mountains of historical evidence about the negative long-term health consequences of traditional opiates (e.g., morphine), Purdue financed more that 20,000 pain-related educational programs and provided additional financial support to professional organizations like the American Pain Society, the American Academy of Pain Medicine, the Federation of State Medical Boards, as well as numerous pain patient advocacy and physician-centric groups. With the assistance of paid physician-spokespersons to downplay the addiction potential of these substances and assuage the medical community’s “opiophobia”, Purdue’s efforts paid off, as one by one, these very same groups lined up to press for greater identification and stronger treatment of chronic pain that included these powerful narcotic compounds.


The consequences of this aggressive strategy — and the resulting period of prescriptive exuberance for pain professionals — proved devastating for rural communities but immensely profitable for Purdue Pharma, who’s founding family has seen its fortunes swell along with the body count. Much of the initial rhetoric around the surge of OxyContin focused on the criminal element and attempted to paint the problem as isolated to small, impoverished mountain towns in Appalachia, giving rise to the nickname “hillbilly heroin” — a cynical snipe at communities struggling to deal with hopes and dreams on life support after decades of diminishing economic returns. (And although the problem appears particularly dire in places like West Virginia and Ohio, it is by no means isolated nor unique.)

Reactionary enforcement-based responses to the crisis have produced increased regulatory scrutiny of medical professionals and “pill mill” pain clinics, leading to an overall restriction in the flow and supply of narcotics to even the neediest of patients. Desperate to stave off the effects of withdrawal and keep their pain at bay, scores of chronic pain patients have turned to cheaper street-level alternatives like heroin and fentanyl — opioids that are often synthesized in shady drug laboratories and frequently cut with a myriad of unknown substances, both licit and illicit. One small West Virginian city experienced 26 heroin overdoses in a matter of hours.
Fentanyl has been particularly insidious. Used as an anesthetic agent and up to 100 times more powerful than morphine, it is now regularly passed off as OxyContin. Due to its low cost and relative ease of production, it has been used to increase the potency of psychoactive stimulants like cocaine and MDMA, creating a combination that can prove far deadlier than either substance on its own. Carfentanil — an even stronger chemical cousin of fentanyl used primarily as an animal tranquilizer — has been discovered in batches of heroin, contributing to over 300 deaths in Ohio.
Who is to blame for the influx of these harmful drugs? U.S. law enforcement officials point the finger at Chinese exporters looking to make a killing, so to speak. Purdue Pharma has not escaped entirely unscathed, being hit by back-to-back lawsuits. Despite this, it is obvious to most observers that the blame game is just another way to avoid dealing with the core failings of the War on Drugs.
Drugs are ubiquitous in modern societies, and efforts to criminalize and restrict their use often serves to bolster the power of the state rather than treat the root causes of drug abuse — economic precarity, the erosion of the social safety net, and the destruction of the modern family unit at the hands of political and market forces. All are contributing factors to a persistent syndrome of widespread social dysfunction that, in turn, drives people to abuse drugs and, in some cases, commit suicide.
Commenting on their in-depth look into white working class “deaths of despair”, economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton make the antecedent causes stark:
Deaths of despair have been accompanied by reduced labor force participation, reduced marriage rates, increases in reports of poor health and poor mental health…
…If you go back to the early ’70s when you had the so-called blue-collar aristocrats, those jobs have slowly crumbled away and many more men are finding themselves in a much more hostile labor market with lower wages, lower quality and less permanent jobs. That’s made it harder for them to get married. They don’t get to know their own kids. There’s a lot of social dysfunction building up over time. There’s a sense that these people have lost this sense of status and belonging. And these are classic preconditions for suicide.
…People, either quickly with a gun or slowly with drugs and alcohol, are killing themselves.
A new approach is necessary to combat the social ills caused by drugs, one that treats the problems associated with drug use and abuse as a public health issue and trades punishment for harm reduction as a guiding principle.

Harm reduction strategies emphasize the agency and rights of people who use drugs, treating them as human beings first and drug users second, destigmatizing substance abuse while providing users with the tools they need to receive help when (and if) they need it. Proven interventions include community-based health clinics, needle swaps to limit the spread of blood-borne illnesses, methadone maintenance programs for opioid withdrawal, and overdose prevention training.
Harm reduction policies and interventions must be coupled with attempts to decriminalize and legalize drugs of abuse, starting with marijuana. And there are reasons to believe that such a combination of tactics would be more successful at moderating the adverse social effects of the drug trade than enforcement-based approaches have been.
Recent polling indicates that public opinion has shifted dramatically in favor of marijuana legalization — a shift lead largely by millennials and Gen Xers:

Even the New York Times is hopping on the bandwagon, framing marijuana legalization as the only sensible path forward, informed by the strikingly similar failure of alcohol prohibition efforts during the 1920s:
It took 13 years for the United States to come to its senses and end Prohibition, 13 years in which people kept drinking, otherwise law-abiding citizens became criminals and crime syndicates arose and flourished. It has been more than 40 years since Congress passed the current ban on marijuana, inflicting great harm on society just to prohibit a substance far less dangerous than alcohol.
The federal government should repeal the ban on marijuana.
Part of this attitudinal shift is undoubtedly due to a successful push for legalization, beginning in Colorado, that has since spread across the country. To date, 29 states and the District of Columbia have implemented laws legalizing marijuana for medical or recreational purposes, many attracted to the idea of using marijuana sales as a lucrative source of new tax revenue, thus enabling cash-strapped states to balance their budgets while retaining or expanding valuable public services. Since legalizing pot for recreational use in 2012, Colorado has surpassed $1 billion dollars in marijuana sales, netting $200 million dollars for the state’s coffers. That money is being allocated to programs that fight homelessness, create housing programs for the needy, and target opioid affected communities. Washington, too, has crushed the $1 billion dollar mark, raking in $250 million that has been earmarked for substance abuse programs, community health care services, and helping the state pay its portion of Medicaid.
States that have legalized recreational use more recently are experiencing similar revenue boons. Oregon, which legalized recreational use just last year, brought in $60.2 million, beating initial estimates by a factor of six. Alaska has earned itself $1.2 million since recreational sales began last October while Nevada generated $500,000 in its first four days.
Contrary to the panicked exhortations of anti-drug organizations, the sky hasn’t fallen — local emergency rooms aren’t being inundated by waves of paranoid stoners and drug tourists, and traffic deaths in legal states have gone down, not up.
In fact, new research suggests that the availability of legal weed may play a role in combatting the opioid epidemic. States with medical marijuana laws in place saw significant declines in both opioid use and overdoses, rates of which continued to decrease over time. States with medical marijuana laws also saw drops in Medicaid prescription drug spending for anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, and anti-nausea drugs, suggesting that patients and physicians are utilizing marijuana as an alternative to powerful (and expensive) pharmaceuticals for these debilitating conditions. If legalized nationwide, this trend could potentially save taxpayers over $1 billion dollars annually.
This has caused somewhat of a stir among the ranks of Big Pharma, fearful of ceding profits to a budding industry and state tax rolls. Part of the panic stems from the fact that pharmaceutical companies spend untold sums on research and development to produce synthetic drugs derived from the active compounds found in pot — money down the drain if these drugs are forced to compete with the plant itself. Increasingly concerned about the growing body of positive results demonstrating marijuana’s therapeutic viability and desperate to maintain the status quo, Purdue Pharma and other drug manufacturers have lined up to bankroll non-profit anti-drug advocacy groups that draw a hard-line on marijuana while remaining relatively muted about prescription drug abuse and the opioid crisis. Most recently, Insys Therapeutics — the primary producer of a fast-acting version of fentanyl, as well as synthetic marijuana-based drugs used as anti-nausea medications — donated $500,000 to a group leading the charge against recreational legalization in Arizona, all the while whining to the SEC about marijuana “significantly reduc[ing]…our ability to generate revenue and our business prospects.”
It is the bottom line that is of utmost importance to the pharmaceutical industry, and it is this relentless profit motive that enables the War on Drugs to continue. Profit for weapons manufacturers who supply drug enforcement outfits worldwide with military-grade equipment to combat cartels and organized crime in the name of prevention. Profit for the private prison industry that warehouses black and brown non-violent drug offenders rather than treating the epidemics of poverty, homelessness, and substance abuse in their communities. Profit for politicians who earn fundraising dollars and win campaigns by positioning themselves as tough on drugs and crime while offering little in the way of harm reduction-based rehabilitative solutions. Drug manufacturers have sought to capitalize on this last element much like any other corporate entity in a post-Citizen’s United world, employing an army of lobbyists, spending millions to dismantle legislative attempts to control the flow of opioids, and donating heavily to political figures that would champion pro-opioid policies.

The War on Drugs as it stands today acts as an extension of the War on Terror and the permanent war economy established post-9/11, both of which serve to control the citizenry, keeping them isolated and sick with fear, while padding the wallets of the rich and powerful. As it succeeds in those ends, the American people watch, horrified, as their communities slowly cannibalize themselves — family members, friends, and loved ones, out of work or underpaid, sick and struggling to make ends meet, turn to drugs to cope, only to end up in prison for a minor offense or dead from a preventable overdose.
Telling opiate addicts and chronic pain patients to drop dead so that municipalities can save money serves only to remind people of the dehumanizing brutality of bureaucratic systems, ostensibly there to promote the public welfare yet reliant on a rhetoric of austerity, ignorant or unconcerned with the irony of using personal accountability as a moral cudgel during a time of massive inequality.
But no amount of personal accountability will solve the opioid crisis. Neither will reviving D.A.R.E., continuing to moralize and police drug use in a skewed fashion, pointing the finger solely at unsavory criminal elements and advocating all-out war on Mexican drug cartels while ignoring the predation of a very different sort of cabal— the pharmaceutical industry, replete with its political sycophants and wealthy enablers. Repeating past mistakes and expecting different results is the Einsteinian definition of insanity, and allowing things to continue as they are is neither a just, acceptable, nor compassionate strategy.
There is another way.
If we have the courage to reject the old ways of thinking about drugs in our society, we can reclaim some measure of agency over our own lives and the lives of our communities. Instead of just saying “no” over and over again, we can say “yes” to an ethic that views substance use not as intolerable aberration or moral blight, but as within the range of ordinary human experience. We can open our doors and our arms to those who need help instead of throwing them in prison cells or leaving them to die.
We can begin to move towards a model that emphasizes preventative treatment over preventative control, empathy over shame, justice over punishment, and humanity over profit.
We can finally begin to heal.

