How We Got In This Mess
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| Prohibitions And The War On Drugs |
| Next — Drug War Fails While Hypocrisy Rules by Penelope Purdy |
The fact that the Eighteenth Amendment is the only amendment to our Constitution that has ever been repealed because of the disastrous effects of Prohibition seems lost in today's world. The resolution to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment was proposed in Congress on February 20, 1933. In an extraordinarily short time, 36 states ratified the Twenty-first Amendment to repeal and it was certified by the Acting Secretary of State on December 5, 1933. Thus ended the Prohibition with regard to alcohol. But those puritanical souls who know better than we how to live our lives, and who would reform our morals by force of law, were only temporarily discouraged.
Would that our government could now act to undo the calamities of the War on Drugs within a year. And it is not the attempt by the government to control particular substances that has proven so horrendous, it is the many violations of our civil liberties that the government has found “necessary” to combat the problem that exists largely of the governments own making. From R.I.C.O. and asset forfeiture laws that allow, nay encourage prosecutors and U.S. Attorneys to finance themselves like Mexican bandits, to the largest prison population in the world, our drug war has been an unmitigated and incredibly expensive social disaster.
And the War on Drugs, with its destruction of civil liberties, has encouraged and made possible other large-scale social engineering efforts that are eating at the roots of our civilization.
Probably the best current example of a State-imposed, presumably unintended consequence is the War on Drugs, which has included many acts of war by the United States against other countries; as well as against its own citizens.
But perhaps the outcome of the War on Drugs was not unintended? As the following brief history demonstrates this “war” is racist in both conception and execution.
The 18th Amendment, passed under duress by ideologues from the temperance movement, a form of puritanism, banned “...the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors...” in the United States in 1919.
Prohibition then, as with the present War on Drugs, was notable for uneven enforcement, overwhelmed police forces, and corrupt public officials. Given the immense profits to be made, organized crime networks established powerful, murderous smuggling networks. Gangsters took over whole neighborhoods and gang-related murders were common. Speakeasies, selling bootleg, and often poisonous rotgut, were found nearly everywhere. Corruption among police and public officials was widespread. Also, in common with our current prohibition of many common substances, bootleg liquor killed or maimed many citizens.
It soon became apparent that Prohibition against alcohol was an unmitigated disaster and efforts to repeal the 18 th Amendment quickly began. However, it was quite apparent that the lawmakers of many states were either beholden to or simply fearful of the temperance lobby; or on the payroll of crime syndicates.
For those reasons, when Congress formally proposed the repeal of Prohibition on February 20, 1933 with the requisite two-thirds having voted in favor in each house, for the first and only time in our nation's history the method of state ratifying conventions rather than by state legislatures, provided for in Article V of the Constitution, was used. In a remarkably short time the 21 st Amendment repealed the 18 th on December 5, 1933.
Under the banner of a War on Drugs, today we have the same disastrous effects as the alcohol prohibition; with numerous
“drug cartels”
all over the world supplying America's seemingly insatiable drug appetite. It is also apparent that many government agencies are involved in the drug trade as well, just as they were in the prohibition against ethyl alcohol.
The first U.S. law that restricted the distribution and use of certain drugs was the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, although some local laws came as early as 1860. Prior to that citizens were free to use whatever drugs they were comfortable with. Presumably the purpose of these prohibitions is to protect the public from dangerous drugs. However, as with virtually all prohibitions, the results have been quite the opposite as Alice Salles in her January 18, 2017, review documents.
As the prohibition against alcohol was failing, in 1929 Harry Anslinger was appointed an assistant commissioner of the Department of Prohibition in Washington, D.C. But alcohol prohibition was clearly a disaster by then and on the way out.
Obviously this wasn't the place for an up-and-coming bureaucratic tyrant like Anslinger. So in 1930 he managed to get himself appointed commissioner of the newly created Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
Up until then Anslinger had said that cannabis was not a problem. It doesn't harm people, he explained, and “there is no more absurd fallacy” than the idea it makes people violent.
But when his new department needed a purpose he changed his mind and began a smear campaign using lies, faked research, and yellow journalism that even a modern politician might envy, to make marijuana and other drugs illegal.
According to Alexander Cockburn's Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press, Anslinger's first campaign was primarily against marijuana. But he also conducted a moral crusade against certain kinds of users: dissidents, the counterculture, and especially immigrants and blacks; and claimed that the drug “can arouse in blacks and Hispanics a state of menacing fury or homicidal attack.”
Anslinger's hatred of jazz music motivated many of his targeted attacks. He linked marijuana with jazz and persecuted many black musicians, including Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. Louis Armstrong was arrested on drug charges, and Anslinger made sure his name was smeared in the press. He also hounded singer Billie Holliday until her death.
In Congress Anslinger testified that “[c]oloreds with big lips lure white women with jazz and marijuana.” And such blatant racism, although now more subtle, dominates drug law enforcement till this day.
There was little question that another Constitutional Amendment like the 18 th could somehow make its way to passage in order to outlaw marijuana and similar drugs. In those times they apparently paid slightly more attention to the Constitution than today. However, that did not mean they were above legal trickery.
Thus, in order to make marijuana illegal Harry Anslinger first helped draft, then campaigned, and lobbied for passage of the Uniform State Narcotic Act of 1934. The purpose of the act was to make the law uniform in various states with respect to controlling the sale and use of narcotic drugs, of which marijuana was included, and to give police power to enforce the law.
Helped by a radio broadcast by President Roosevelt, Anslinger then launched a successful nationwide media campaign declaring that marijuana caused temporary insanity. Advertisements featured young people smoking marijuana and then behaving recklessly, committing crimes, killing themselves and others, or dying from marijuana use. The 1936 movie Reefer Madness featured a highly exaggerated take on the use of marijuana. In this propaganda film a trio of drug dealers led innocent teenagers to become addicted to “reefer” cigarettes by holding wild parties with jazz music.
The Marihuana [sic] Tax Act of 1937, as drafted by Anslinger, followed. That act required anyone buying or selling marijuana to first purchase a tax stamp. But other laws made hemp and marijuana illegal so anyone buying a tax stamp was guilty of dealing and selling narcotics without a prescription. That act thus marks the beginning of a new prohibition, this time against any drug federal commissars dislike. A grave difference is that without Constitutional authority Congress and the various states have imposed a prohibition on various psychoactive drugs, many of which, like marijuana, have been used by humans for millennia.
World War II interrupted and for a time hemp, used for rope, fabrics, etc., became legal again due to military necessity after the Japanese occupied the Philippines.
After WW II general prosperity and the easy availability of alcohol limited the demand for psychotropic drugs. Also, Harry Anslinger finally retired in 1962 and in Leary v. United States in 1969 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Marihuana [sic] Tax Act.
Having largely subdued or destroyed the indigenous people within its boundaries, after about 1900 the United States turned more and more to imperial and colonial wars against various foreign countries for many reasons, but typically for profit.
Seemingly never willing to learn, or to honor treaties and promises, in 1965 the United States became involved, without a formal declaration of war, in a civil war between North and South Vietnam. The U.S. eventually lost that war, withdrawing all American ground forces in August 1973. But only after ~58,220 Americans were killed, approximately 304,000 wounded, with 153,000 cases serious enough to require hospitalization. Approximately 75,000 veterans were left severely disabled, and 1,526 are still listed as missing in action, out of the 2.7 million deployed. Although the percent of troops who died is similar to other wars, amputations or crippling wounds were 300% higher than in World War II. And this says nothing about the millions of Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian men, women, and children killed and maimed in this senseless war.
Following the withdrawal of American forces, North Vietnamese troops occupied Saigon, capital of South Vietnam in April 1975 and the country was reunited the following year.
Often poorly led and ill-equipped for conditions in Vietnam, by 1969 the morale and discipline of the U.S. ground forces in South Vietnam had so broken down that it was no longer a reliable fighting force, e. g., see Richard Boyle on GI revolts. Frontline troops were refusing duty, committing mutiny on platoon, company, and battalion levels, and often killing (fragging) their officers and noncoms. For relief, well over half the troops used the potent and easily available local marijuana, as well as other drugs.
By 1971, according to official estimates, 10-15% of the American troops were addicted to heroin and two congressmen released an explosive report on the growing heroin epidemic among U.S. servicemen in Vietnam.
On October 27, 1970, Congress passed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 that, among other things, categorized controlled substances based on the government's evaluation of the medicinal use and potential for addiction of these substances. This act was a continuation of drug prohibition policies begun by Anslinger in 1930.
With a military on the verge of collapse, and civil discontent with the Vietnam War increasing, President Nixon needed a new bugbear to divert public attention. In 1971 he declared drug abuse to be “public enemy number one.” And in 1973 the Drug Enforcement Administration was created to replace the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
In a 1994 interview with Dan Baum for Harper's Magazine, John Ehrlichman, counsel and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, stated the following about the War on Drugs:
“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.”
Drug laws are still being used to subjugate blacks. Approximately 1.5 million men and women, inordinately young black males, are arrested each year on drug charges, primarily for possession of marijuana (a drug known to be safer than aspirin and peanuts), at a current cost of some $51 billion a year. Primarily as a result of the War on Drugs the United States now has roughly 7 million people under control of the courts, either incarcerated (~2.2 million) or on parole or probation, far and away the largest number in the world.
Today, more people die or are sickened by prescription drugs than illegal ones each year. That is particularly true of prescribed opioids, created by Big Pharma to provide a replacement for morphine, long used effectively and cheaply for pain control. Ironically, in the states that have now legalized marijuana despite federal laws against it, deaths from opioid overdoses are reportedly down some 25%. This is consistent with the unintended consequences of virtually all government-imposed prohibitions.
Because the drug prohibition attempts to end the supply of commodities that the public desires the inevitable result is an artificial increase in price. With inflated prices, incentives to provide the desired drugs are also increased despite the laws, and crime flourishes to the great detriment of public safety. In addition, the purity of illegal drugs and; hence, their danger to the public is increased. And any tabulation of the criminal acts committed by our government battling drug use would shame Torquemada.
Unfortunately, the justice system is oriented towards enforcing crimes with the most severe penalties, not justice. Thus, the common response of government when criminal activity increases, as it inevitably does with prohibitions, is to make the criminal penalties ever more draconian. As public funding for enforcement is limited, lesser crimes then receive less attention, and the community policing necessary for a stable and safe society decreases.
The most damaging result of the current War on Drugs is the loss of civil liberties. In attempting the impossible task of enforcing the drug prohibition, law enforcement has introduced “no knock” search warrants (if they even bother to get a warrant), special weapons and tactics (SWAT) teams on a massive scale, and stop and frisk procedures, among other tactics of tyranny.
To make matters even worse, civil forfeiture laws have been passed allowing police to seize property based on the suspicion that the person was involved in criminal activity, i.e., dealing drugs, without pretense of due process or proof. The rationale is that by harming citizens economically while helping law enforcement financially, criminal activity will be hampered. Law enforcement agencies are then allowed to use these seized proceeds to combat unlawful activity, directly converting value obtained from items presumed to have been used to support illegal activities for law enforcement purposes.
Apparently the legislatures and the justice system are unfamiliar with the federal Constitution as the Fourth Amendment states unequivocally that: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...” and further reinforced by the Fifth Amendment clause that no person shall “...be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
One result are riots and looting by blacks, who have been subjugated, persecuted, and now left with few honest options to survive in large measure as a result of the failed War on Drugs.
Since the War on Drugs began in 1972, street drugs are far more widely available now, crimes, often invented by the drug warriors and of very dubious constitutionality, have made our streets less safe, given us by far the largest prison population on the planet, destroyed millions of lives, particularly black males, and cost an estimated $1 trillion. In the process our civil liberties have been virtually destroyed.
Preserving public safety does not mean making criminals out of citizens who use a substance. It does mean ensuring the substance is of known purity and quantity (dosage). What exists now is a crazy quilt of “legal” and illegal drugs in which legal opioids are killing and addicting more people than the illegal ones.
Demonstrations by other countries make it painfully clear that public safety would be much better served by leaving the use of any and all drugs up to the individual while governments worked to insure the purity and efficacy of drugs. Science, not draconian control, embezzlement, and incarceration works more effectively.
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| Prohibitions And The War On Drugs |
| Next — Drug War Fails While Hypocrisy Rules by Penelope Purdy |