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The Wasted War

The Cost of the ‘War On Drugs’—in Money, Effort & Lives

Written by D. Michael Taylor

Quick, name the unwinnable war that America is still engaged in that costs taxpayers a staggering $600 per second, kills nearly 15,000 Americans per year, and incarcerates over one million people annually, making us the country with the highest percentage of its population kept in captivity. A public relations war against a nebulous concept that has only flourished while we continue to pour money and manpower into its gaping maw. It’s the Drug War, and if war in general is good for absolutely nothing, this one is dramatically more so.

The War on Drugs has never been a war that was meant to be won. The Law of Unintended Consequences runs rampant through its history, as a sprawling global black market syndicate emerged to fill the void where a legal, regulated market should be. By grouping all illegal substances under the generic rubric of “drugs” and refusing to make any meaningful distinctions between them, absurdities abound. Take our shameful record of imprisoning a huge portion of our young African-American population merely for having weed on them. Over 10% of all black men aged 18-29 are in jail on drug-related charges. Compare that to the 1.5% of young white men in jail on similar charges.

Once mandatory sentencing went into effect in 1986, the average federal drug sentence for African-Americans went from being 11% higher than white people to 49% higher four years later. With a black president in office, it would seem to be high time (pun intended) to stop this disturbing practice. With a demented factory-like efficiency, we are churning low-level weed dealers in and out of our bloated prison system—and making them into hardened criminals along the way.

What drugs we’re ingesting in undiminished amounts will remain questionable, since there is zero oversight or quality control in their production. Recently released documents from the federal Drug Enforcement Agency showed that almost a third of all the cocaine being imported into the U.S. had levamisole in it as a cutting agent. Levamisole is a dangerous livestock deworming medicine that has already taken three lives and put dozens more in the hospital. Most party people are familiar with “bad pills” that came from god-knows-where and contain pollutants like speed, caffeine, heroin, or dangerous obscure chemicals meant to simulate a high instead of giving you a real one.

A recent piece in The Washington Post revealed that homegrown high-end quasi-legal marijuana crops from inside our borders are giving the Mexican cartels a run for their money and slowing their sales. How many billions have we wasted attempting to do the same thing with militia units and black helicopters? Increasing the quality of our weed supply with American-grown crops while crippling the Mexican murder/kidnapping industry would certainly be more effective at reducing the casualties of this war than decades of paramilitary waste and corruption.

Absurdities Abound

The absurdities of their Drug War, however, have reached their nadir in Afghanistan, where 90% of the world’s heroin is grown and cultivated in the poppy fields that have traditionally provided the only stable source of income for many Afghani tribes. A government analyst specializing in the region and studying the narcotics industry there spoke to noiZe on condition of anonymity. He told us that addressing opium production from a practical economic and political perspective instead of our knee-jerk law enforcement would save “billions of dollars and thousands of lives” in Afghanistan alone. He thinks we are in a unique position right now to steer the country in a better direction. “What we’re seeing now is total market saturation,” he said. “By some accounts, there is enough opium stockpiled in Afghanistan to supply the entire planet for two to five years. So, because the price of opium has crashed, and at the same time the global food crisis has spiked the price of crops like wheat and barley, farmers are finding they can make an equivalent income by growing legal crops.”

But not if we continue to raze their poppy fields and treat them all like drug kingpins. He also notes that “opiates are artificially restricted in the U.S. Drug companies can only produce, market, and sell so much here, so flooding the global market with opium won’t lower their cost or increase their availability.” In other words, if we stopped meddling with their poppy fields right now, it would have zero effect on the price, the supply or the demand for opiates. All of our ham-handed attempts to regulate that market only serve to piss off the people we claim to want to help. We spend billions of dollars and countless lives for nothing over there, and while stymieing any real progress for the Afghan people.

Why Are Some Drugs Illegal?

What are “drugs” exactly? How did a concept and activity as old as mankind become manipulated, along with our emotions and fears, into something much more sinister than reality dictates? How are children supposed to make informed choices about their extracurricular activities when all they are told is “Just say no”? Once they puff on that first joint and don’t see anything bad happening to them, they’re likely to assume that all drugs have gotten a bad rap, which may lead them to experiment with things that could actually prove dangerous. At the same time, legal substances such as the massive amounts of amphetamines that we pump into our children when they can’t focus at school are given a stamp of approval, mixing the message even further. How do Adderall and Vicodin get a pass while ecstasy and marijuana are demonized? Children aren’t stupid; they figure this kind of hypocritical bullshit out very quickly.

How dangerous are drugs, when you really look at the numbers? All illicit drugs combined killed less people in 2006 than the following causes of death did individually: tobacco, poor diet, car crashes, and suicide. Not just by a little bit, but by whopping margins. Also, both alcohol and prescription drugs killed more people than illicit drugs that year, four times more and two times more, respectively. This is most certainly not due to a lack of supply or demand: Nearly 10% of Americans use illegal substances.

This leaves some pretty big questions unanswered. Why have we wasted almost $40 billion this year alone, in the middle of a crippling recession, on this senseless war? Three out of four people who use illegal drugs use marijuana, which accounts for zero deaths in any given year. Why are we throwing them all in jail? Why do we divert precious law enforcement resources to bust up harmless parties in major cities where most people seem to be having a good time safely? Why do we attempt to brainwash people with ineffective advertising funded by taxpayer dollars that has been proven time and time again to actually increase drug use instead of curb it?

There are signs of hope. Recent reports have shown that California’s marijuana trade could benefit the faltering state to the tune of $1.4 billion in revenue if they went ahead and started officially regulating the drug. It could also have environmental benefits, as it would curb and organize some of the reckless illegal farming that occurs now. Much like the reality of gay marriage in some states dispels the myths about the dangers it supposedly represented to the institution, the quasi-legal medical marijuana industry that has sprung up in states like California and New Mexico hasn’t led to wild orgies, the classic anti-weed propaganda film Reefer Madness notwithstanding. Perhaps the drug warriors were right about one thing, though, marijuana probably is the gateway drug. The gateway out of the Drug War.

More and more, Americans seem to be giving up on the idea that drugs, as a concept, are some sort of existential evil that must be eradicated. With adults back in the White House, the Obama Justice Department. announced earlier this year that it would not prosecute medical marijuana distributors who comply with state laws. They also announced that the term “The War on Drugs” would not be used any longer, which is an important symbolic first step to ending the madness of this wasted war.

Reader Comments

What a terribly biased, uninformed and immature article this is. The writer seems to think that death is the only POTENTIAL negative consequence of habitual drug use; I’m sorry, but I’d love to introduce you to the huge number of my friends who have found drug use to increase their depression, get in the way of their work and productivity, and negatively affect their self-esteem, not to mention the affect drug use has had on maintaining stable relationships or developing healthy coping mechanisms.

There’s no doubt that some people can (and do) use drugs responsibly. But to imagine that death is the only potential consequence for people who don’t know how to use substances responsibly… I’m sorry, it’s just naive.

- GMB

By GMB on 11-16-2009

American Drug War is an excellent documentary that describes everything that you discussed.  If only monies were allocated to treatment of addicts instead of conviction and incarceration think of the lives and funds that could be saved.  As a resident of California I can only hope pot is decriminalized and regulated thereby bringing in countless revenue dollars.  Murderers and rapists run free yet people who smoke weed are busted? Stop the insanity!

By Christine Embon (aka Nurse) on 11-21-2009

As a mexican we saw this war with no benefits for us, instead a increase of violence to control a huge market, my own point of view its that this war should be over with a really good regulation of both justice systems USA and Mexico, as in other drugs (tobacco, alcohol) a good stake of taxes can be raise, and also stiff penalties of all that drug related felonies, at least 50% higher this could improve the relationships to take drugs responsible, in this way we can have a more relaxed relationship to the ones that use drugs in the same way that alcohol and tobacco its used, its all about tolerance.

By Antonio Sánchez on 11-25-2009

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