by
Daniel Horwitz
 |
| Daniel Horwitz |
As a longtime proponent of
the legalization and regulation of all drugs, I’ve never quite understood how
there can be near-universal consensus among Americans that prohibition of
alcohol was a disastrous public policy, while the fact that the very same social
ills have resulted from the prohibition of narcotics goes largely
unrecognized.
Sitting in attendance last
Saturday afternoon during a panel discussion of the documentary “
The House I Live In,” however, I was
pleasantly surprised by the panelists’ unanimous agreement that the War on
Drugs, too, has been a catastrophe.
“The War on Drugs has been a
diabolical, tragic failure,” said David Baker, a Federal Public Defender here in
Nashville. “It has failed the American people in a big
way,” added Mike Carpenter, Correctional Chief of Security at the Oklahoma
Department of Corrections. “Have we
responded to the problem effectively?
No. In that sense it’s absolutely
a failure,” noted Assistant U.S. Attorney Alex Little. “It’s clearly not working, and if that’s your
definition of failure, then it is one,” offered Kevin Sharp, District Court
Judge for the Middle District of Tennessee.
With a price tag of more than a
trillion dollars, millions incarcerated, hundreds of thousands killed and
countless families torn apart, one might reasonably expect that the staggering costs
of America’s
War on Drugs would at least have brought about comparable social benefits by
this point in time, given that it now continues into its fifth decade. If
any such benefits have been realized, though, they certainly aren't readily
identifiable. As Correctional Chief Carpenter correctly observed, both access
to drugs and overall rates of drug abuse have either increased or remained
unchanged since
PresidentNixon’s 1971 declaration of war, as have the pharmacological purity of
illegal narcotics and the harm that results from their use. Indeed, “if
anything, we've made the problem worse by making the drug trade so profitable that
we can't stop it,” he noted. And all this despite the fact that opening up
the drug market to legitimate businesses remains the single most powerful
weapon that we can deploy to stem the tide of violence and put drug cartels and
inner city gangs out of business for good.
(Why this wasn’t included among President Obama’s list of
23executive actions on gun violence reduction is completely beyond me.)
Stated differently: there is only one reason
why Jack Daniel's is thriving today while the Al Capones of the world have
ceased to exist, and that reason is called legalization.
Beyond agreeing that the War on
Drugs itself has failed, the panelists were also of the same mind in believing
that politicians across the board deserve the lion’s share of the blame for
perpetuating the problem.
Given the
widespread appeal of the so-called “tough on crime” mantra, of course, there clearly
must be something to this view.
It’s
hard to ignore, for example, the fact that our last three Presidents – all of
whom have acknowledged using illegal drugs themselves at one point or another –
each ratcheted up the drug war in various respects during their administrations,
and that even Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson (a longtime supporter of
ending the War on Drugs) noticeably tamped down his anti-Drug War message
during his own recent run for President.
At the local level, too, the message is largely the same.
The District Attorney who campaigns for lighter
sentences for drug dealers has yet to be elected anywhere, I suspect, and even
Nashville Mayor Karl Dean – himself a former Public Defender who knows better –
has hardly lifted a finger to stop the bleeding caused by our city’s localized Drug
War.
If John Bourque, a Police Sergeant
in Nashville’s central precinct who also attended the screening, is tuned in to
the fact that Nashville’s judges “see drug addicts with 100, 200, sometimes 300
drug charges on their rap sheet” rotating in and out of our city’s criminal
justice system, you can be certain that Mayor Dean is aware of the problem as
well.
Despite the panelists’ unanimous belief
that politicians represent the primary threat to drug reform, however, I just can’t
help but feel as though the right anti-Drug War message presents a perfect
opportunity for enterprising challengers on either side of the aisle.The
ovation that Ron Paul received from an ultra-conservative South Carolina audience after advocating for the legalization of heroin (and all other drugs) in June of 2011 should have been
instructive on this point, but portraying the drug war as an infringement upon
individual liberty definitely isn’t the only option available.
Given the devastating effects that the War on
Drugs has had on minority and low income communities, for example, an anti-Drug
War message should theoretically be very popular among social liberals. Indeed,
with a full half a million people – most of them poor minorities – currently behind
bars for non-violent drug offenses, ending the War on Drugs should properly be
considered the most pressing civil rights issue of our time, and it can’t be
long before Democratic primary challengers begin standing up and saying it.
Similarly, given both the staggering monetary
costs of the drug war ($30,000 per inmate per year) and the ever-increasing
degree to which this war has expanded government agencies from the DEA to the
ATF to the Coast Guard and so on down the line to every municipal police
department in the country, in theory advocates of fiscal conservatism and
limited-government should be sympathetic to the cause as well.
And for those who shy away from any political
ideology, at some point a variation of this one simple message should begin to carry
great weight: “The War on Drugs isn't working, and it’s costing you a huge amount
of money. The next time a politician professes his or her belief in being
‘tough on crime,’ then, you would do well to remember that this really means
being tough on your paycheck, without providing you any benefits in return.”
What voters don’t know about the
War on Drugs, of course, continues to be a huge problem as well, and it too represents
a major obstacle to reform.
That far
more harm is caused by the prohibition of drugs than by drug use itself is well
documented, for example, but for some reason the disconnect between the empirical
data and the electorate still has yet to be bridged.
Most Tennesseans are also presumably unaware
that our state arrests more than 18,000 people each year for simple possession
of marijuana alone, and that increasing access to drug treatment would be an
excellent way to conserve our resources.
(
The rampant police abuse that drug laws have engendered in Tennessee and elsewhere is a separate
problem.)
Nonetheless, I remain
optimistic that sooner or later an informed electorate will dramatically shift
the dialogue.
Fortunately, a particularly
good illustration of this point came from the final conversation of Saturday’s
panel:
“I don't know whether or not it
costs more to rehabilitate someone than to lock them in prison. I just
don't,” said Sergeant Bourque, who also mentioned that he most closely
identified with the Tea Party.
“We do,” responded the moderator.
“All the empirical evidence indicates that it’s cheaper to treat someone
than to incarcerate them.”
“Then we need to convince
someone to spend our money in the right place,” Sergeant Bourque responded,
followed immediately by a loud chorus of applause.
Exactly.
Daniel Horwitz is a third year law
student at Vanderbilt University Law School, where he is the Vice
President of Law Students for Social Justice. He can be contacted at
daniel.a.horwitz@vanderbilt.edu.
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