March 20, 2000

Over winter break, I used heroin for the first and, so far, last time. I'd just had my wisdom teeth taken out and the surgeon prescribed Percodan for the (excruciating!) pain. According to www.druglibrary.com, oxycodone - the main ingredient in Percodan - is only barely distinct, chemically speaking, from heroin. The two drugs share dependency potential and some adverse side effects. The same Web site says that Percodan's "high" isn't as intense as heroin's. But when a guy in a white coat has just spent two hours putting things that whir loudly in one's mouth, getting high isn't exactly at the top of the agenda.

So why don't I belong in jail? After all, our enlightened government has refused to relegalize marijuana even for medical purposes, despite that we've already got "medical heroin," "medical morphine," and "medical cocaine." Some prohibitionists - that is, people who think that our experiment with alcohol in the 1920s worked so well that we should keep applying it to weed - believe that the medical marijuana movement is a disguise for a more general relegalization movement. For the most part, they're right about that.

Washington legend has it that the elder George Bush once asked an unnamed senior policy adviser what it would take to permanently reduce drug use in the U.S. The adviser replied, "Either get rid of the Bill of Rights or legalize." By all accounts, we've gone with the former option. Every single trespass on Americans' civil liberties since World War II can, I think, be attributed to the drug war. For example, over 80% of telephone wiretaps provide evidence in drug cases. The current Los Angeles police scandal (horrifying in its own right) has diverted attention from last year's revelations about widespread wiretap abuse, prosecutor misconduct and misuse of the evidence gained thereby. Racial profiling, the practice of taking an individual's race into account when deciding how likely he is to have committed a crime, first came into the news because New Jersey police used it to catch drug couriers on the Jersey Pike. More recently, of course, we have revelations about the major U.S. television networks giving limited content control to a federal bureaucracy, in the name of fighting drugs.

Another alarming power is civil asset forfeiture, which allows law enforcement officials to seize your property without charging you with a crime. All they need to do is show that somewhere, somehow, the property they take might possibly have been involved with a crime. Police departments often get to keep a percentage of forfeited assets, and this has led to a rather disturbing upward trend in the total amount of assets seized. Innocent until proven guilty? There's a war on drugs to fight!

The facts point to an inescapable conclusion: the war on drugs cannot succeed unless the U.S. becomes a police state, nothing less. We learned this lesson after Prohibition in the 1920s, when the government's attempts to drive alcohol underground gave birth to organized crime and dangerous bathtub whiskey. The phrase "blind drunk" originated in those days, when drinking too much home-brewed wood alcohol led to brain damage and blindness. The same thing happens today, when users inject substances like Drano, baking powder, and rat poison along with heroin into their veins.

All of the arguments against Prohibition succeed equally well - perhaps even better - when applied to our current drug war. No one can deny that illicit drugs are part of our culture; even our president and who knows how many members of Congress did some toking up in college. So the common argument that alcohol's unique cultural role precludes a ban won't wash. Nor will the argument that drug use causes crime. In fact, two Florida criminologists write in a 1996 study that the drug war actually increases both property and violent crime through boosting drug prices, thus requiring addicts to scare up $200 instead of $10 a day. And how likely is it that University and College Park Liquor will shoot it out over the campus market? If they have a problem with one another they can go to court. Drug dealers don't have that option.

The same study points out that during Ronald Reagan's massive escalation of the war on drugs, average time served on a sentence for Florida state prisoners fell by almost 20 percent. (That is, a 10-year wait for parole suddenly became only 8 years.) That means that murderers and rapists are being set free to make room for guys like the proprietor of Simply Kind. When Florida ended mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders and halved its arrests of nonviolent drug users, the average sentence went back up to 43% of what the judge had originally handed down. The study notes similar figures in other states.

When a firm in a marketplace adheres to a really stupid policy, it has two choices: face the lost profits or disgruntled workers, or go sniveling to the government for protection. Stupid government policies don't have the first option. When a government policy fails, the most common proposed "fix" is: give it more money or more latitude to trample on Americans' civil liberties. The drug war is like that. Numerous bureaucracies have a vested interest in keeping it going - their budgets and prestige depend on it. The fact that it ruins lives and kills innocents are, well, mere facts - how much sympathy does a number get? Don't forget that the original reason for the disastrous 1993 Waco raid, in which innocent children burned to death in a fire the FBI now admits it may have set, was a trumped-up drug charge. And the Ruby Ridge siege, in which an FBI sniper killed a woman and her baby with a single bullet because... well, because he felt like it, came about because the state government wanted to seize Randy Weaver's property, and invented a marijuana charge to do it.

Civil liberties are like those colorful little pamphlets about venereal disease - no one pays attention to them unless he or she is in trouble. And because the drug war generally ruins the lives of the poor and politically unconnected, our political leaders' unwillingness to reconsider it shouldn't surprise anyone. But there is some hope. Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico has publicly advocated relegalization, and the success of medical marijuana initiatives around the country has led many Americans to wonder why marijuana is illegal at all (remarkably, there is not a single instance in U.S. medical history of a death directly attributed to marijuana use). In the words of the journalist Jacob Sullum, relegalization is now "discussable." It's about damn time.

Ananda