Last week, William Bennett resigned from his position as the United States’s drug czar. Unfortunately, the drug war is not likely to fade away with him.
Over the past few years an increasing number of public figures in the U.S., from right-wing libertarians to liberal city mayors, have become proponents of some form of legalisation, citing chiefly the unmanageable cost of maintaining the drug war, the havoc it is wreaking on individual rights, and the impossibility of it achieving its goals.
In Canada, the voices of legalisation have always been much quieter, but as police forces across the country demand more resources and greater legal maneouvering (read: power to infringe on constitutional rights), opposition to the drug war enterprise will no doubt become more vocal.
The Drug Solution by Chester Mitchell, an Associate Professor of Law at Carleton University, challenges not just the inconsistencies of our drug policy and its fiscal costs, but the human costs which are being incurred.
Mitchell argues the need for a systematic approach to formulating a country’s drug policy based on science, justice, and cost-benefit social accounting — three measures which have long been absent from our drug policies.
The inconsistencies in drug policy, specifically with respect to a drug’s legal classification and its corresponding danger, are staggering. As Mitchell writes, “whether a drug is considered ‘hard’ or ‘soft,’ ‘medicinal’ or ‘abusive,’ addicting or benign is primarily determined by politics, no pharmacology.” The legal definition of a given drug is perhaps the least reliable testament of its pharmacological properties, as it is based on cultural bias and random historical circumstances.
In an added twist, now marketing especially determines the application and definition of a given drug. Mitchell uses the example of benzodiazepines: Dalmane is sold as a sleeping pill and Valium as a daytime tranquilizer, though there is nothing significantly different between them and they could be easily reversed.
“There’s nothing special about drugs,” said Mitchell in a recent interview. “Like any commodity in society there is competition for control over its marketing, its pricing and who has access to it.”
Mitchell points to the competition for control of sedatives among different professions. Alcohol, used today for recreational purposes, is a legal sedative controlled by large corporations with some competition from illegal distillers. Diazapam is controlled by the medical profession. Marijuana, an illegal “narcotic,” is controlled by small entrepreneurs, farmer and other illicit producers. In the past it has been used medicinally to alleviate symptoms of glaucoma, epilepsy, asthma and insomnia. Though there is no evidence to support that marijuana presents a greater danger for abuse than either alcohol or diazepam, it remains illegal, a Schedule 1 drug under U.S. federal law.
In 1938 and 1940, the U.S. and Canadian medical establishments gained control over a class of drugs for the purposes of prescription and treatment. Since then these lists have grown dramatically and economists estimate that by instituting such classifications the medical profession has been able to double its income.
As Mitchell writes: “Medical incentives likewise compel pharmaceutical producers to downplay similarities and highlight differences. If the inventors of Valium had reported that their new drug was very similar to alcohol they might have been denied both patent protection and regulatory approval.”
Inevitably such drug policies have also come to reflect the inherent cultural bias of North America and consequently promote interventionism in foreign countries. U.S. policy makers have recommended everything from direct military involvement to bombing crops with locusts. But when it comes to foreign affairs it’s business as usual.
“So you’re an American and you march into China. What do you want to do? You want to eradicate their drug use and replace it with yours, just like your religion, your clothes.”
Mitchell cites the increased exports of tobacco to new markets in Asia and Africa for American corporations. “The turnaround,” as Mitchell says, is when Latin America says we’re going to sell you cocaine and that’s a heinous crime. To understand that kind of hypocrisy you have to understand the depth of the culture that’s involved, because to have that kind of blindness you have to have grown up in a system that accepts this as a god-given right and everything else is perverted, foul and dirty. That’s the way cultures work.”
One proposal which was batted around the talkshow circuit last year was put forward by Ronald Seigel in his book Intoxication. Seigel suggested that the best solution to America’s drug crisis was the development of so-called “safe” psychoactive drugs. His thesis was that the use of drugs, or pursuit of intoxication was second nature to humans.
But neither his thesis nor his proposed solution are remarkably new. In The Natural Mind, Andrew Weil put forth the idea that it is human/animal nature to seek out mood-altering substances. AS Mitchell jokes, “at a very early age little children learn to hyperventilate and spin around.”
With regards to developing “safe” drugs, Siegal’s proposal is hopelessly unrealistic, says Mitchell. “Finding a harmless non-addictive stimulant or psychoactive drug is like finding a flammable fluid that you can’t ignite. It’s a contradiction in terms, you can’t do it.”
What can be done, however, is make the use of a given drug safer than not. The form of intake may be altered, it could be eaten instead of smoked, taken in its natural form, etc. And perhaps more importantly, the social context in which a drug is used can be changed to make it conducive to safer use.
Rather than foster xenophobic attitudes of prohibition, society must learn to “integrate its safe use into the culture in order to minimize the harm. The problem comes when you take something like coca, refine it into a pure white powder and put it into a society that doesn’t have any customs for dealing with” — a situation Mitchell describes as “ingredients for disaster.”
The situation of which Mitchell speaks is readily apparent. Whereas cocaine is used in South America among indigenous peoples for the alleviation of fatigue, hunger and for various rituals, its use and marketing in North America are increasingly problematic. Purely a recreational drug, cocaine has been endowed with a multitude of myths, as being a signifier of a certain upwardly mobile lifestyle, and even supposedly increasing sex drive. The illegality of cocaine, and the high demand for it have produced conditions in which purity goes down as price rises. The development of more volatile, “homemade” drugs like “crack” cancan be traced to the underground economics of the drug trade: a quicker hit, highly addictive, and cheap. It is no surprise that the drug war has failed to stem either demand or supply.
But even legalisation of drugs presents the problem of regulation: does the government then assume control of the drug trade?
“Giving responsibility to the government can be very dangerous,” admits Mitchell. “It’s a bit like the arguments against obscenity. Pornography may have a negative impact on society, though it’s not clear, but giving the government the power to censor this stuff is more damaging than the actual porn. We constantly lose sight of that. We think of the government as some costless intervenor, but no, it is very costly.”
This “costless” intervenor is currently erecting an immense system of informants, strategists, counselors and undercover cops which, as Mitchell writes, “creates a warlike atmosphere conducive to the abuse of human rights.” The side-effects of such measures have been seen in Colombia where, according to the Village Voice, increased powers of arrest and seizure granted to the police have coincided suspiciously with the disappearance of over 100 members of the labour party.
Besides the failings of law enforcement, Mitchell points out that the other main component of the anti-drug program, education, has become little more than an exercise in propaganda. Mitchell is opposed to the allocation of any more money towards education, especially tax revenue derived from the use of certain drugs.
Presently, Ontario’s mandatory drug education plan starts in grade school, and while there are some positive steps, starting their education with tobacco and alcohol — the drugs with which children are most familiar — it appears to be little more than a demonstration of positive and negative reinforcement.
“What seems to be happening, when children learn about drugs, although what they’re learning is not necessarily accurate or complete, it doesn’t seem to change their attitudes. Particularly because students aren’t uniform, some of them are fully convinced they’re never going to use tobacco, whereas you also have the profile of the student who is most likely to become a smoker. They are the least likely to respond to what their parents or teachers are telling them.”
The biggest fault in the anti-drug education campaign is the bewildering reliance on slogans to discourage use: Dead On Drugs, Drug Free America, Just Say No — Mitchell, appropriately enough, likens them to commercial advertisements.
“Slogans don’t prompt one to think. Like a Coca-Cola slogan, the idea is not so much to sell people Coke because they’re already drinking a phenomenal amount. Rather, it’s to make them feel good about being Coke drinkers. The slogans in each case are doing the same thing, that is, make people feel intolerant about drugs. It’s not to teach them anything but to reinforce their prejudices.”
Unfortunately, Mitchell notes, the debate will really heat up when people begin taking the words to heart.
“What happens if a teacher reads my book, reads the sources I’ve quoted and becomes convinced radical reform of the drug laws is necessary? And then they teach students that marijuana is no more dangerous than tobacco. Then parents come pounding into the school saying you’ve got to fire this teacher. It’s like the creation-evolution debate where the state is stepping in and saying this is the official science.
“There’s all sorts of potential for a witch hunt.”
