Because locking peaceful people in cages for victimless crimes is EVIL. Because drug prohibition makes drug abuse WORSE.
June 2021 marks 50 years since Richard Nixon declared “drug abuse” the United States’ “public enemy number one.” It is a grim anniversary that resonates not only in the United States but all over the world. The global drug war is an unmitigated human rights disaster, well-documented in painstaking detail. As U.S. domestic drug policy reform gains momentum, it is time the United States makes a concerted effort to de-escalate the failed, harmful, and disastrous global war on drugs.
EVIDENT FACTS:
The Drug War has not decreased drug use.
The Drug War has increased overdoses.
The Justice Department suggests 80% of violent crime is related to drug prohibition.
Americans spend almost DOUBLE the amount of money on illegal drugs than on personal VEHICLES.
America has about SEVEN times as many imprisoned citizens than comparable countries.
America has a lot more prisoners than China, a communist dictatorship with 3-4 times our population.
America has more prisoners in cages than Stalin put in the Gulags during the great terror.
Drug prohibition, just like alcohol prohibition did, creates criminals and fuels violent crime.
Drug prohibition incentives trafficking the most concentrated and dangerous drugs like fentanyl.
Incarcerating people for drug-related offenses has been shown to have little impact on substance misuse rates.
There are high rates of substance use within the criminal justice system. We lock peaceful citizens with a health problem in a cage with violent criminals who are regularly taking drugs.
Black Americans are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana charges than their white peers. In fact, black Americans make up nearly 30 percent of all drug-related arrests, despite accounting for only 12.5 percent of all substance users.
Black Americans are nearly six times more likely to be incarcerated for drug-related offenses than their white counterparts, despite equal substance usage rates
Since 1971, the war on drugs has cost the United States an estimated $1 trillion. In 2015, the federal government spent an estimated $9.2 million every day to incarcerate people charged with drug-related offenses—that’s more than $3.3 billion annually.
The drug war has destabilized countries. Gangs and cartels have assassinated presidential candidates in other countries and built entire militaries with armored vehicle and an airforce.
The destabilizing effect of the drug war on South and Central America is a major contributor to illegal immigration and the danger on our the southern border.
The United States FORCES other countries to adopt drug prohibition via threats to with-hold foreign aid and including it in important treaties and trade agreements.
The government cant even keep drugs out of jails and prisons. A place where they specifically designed a small concrete and steel cage, to prevent people from hiding things. The occupants have to no rights and can be stripped naked and searched without any warning or probable cause at anytime. If the government cannot even keep drugs out of this environment, how can we expect police to keep it out of the hands of free citizens.
Has the government been successful in eliminating or even significantly reducing the use of drugs in America? Since 1980 overdose deaths, a key indicator, has risen dramatically. It seems the more money the government spends on enforcing drug prohibition the more dangerous drug use and overdoses we get.
Drug Prohibition, just like alcohol prohibition in the past, increases crime dramatically. Criminal gangs and cartels gain control of a multi-hundred billion dollar per year industry. They use violence and intimidation exclusively to settle any and all disputes. This violence is a scourge on America and the drug money flowing out of America destabilizes entire countries around the world. The graph below shows a clear indication that prohibition drastically increases violent crime in America when implemented. The cartels control entire regions of countries, they assonate politicians who refuse their bribes, the build factories for armored vehicles and even have an air-force.
American spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on illicit drugs. Compare that to the what Americans spend on automobiles per year. Americans spend about $80 billion dollars per year on personal vehicles. America is spending many times more money on their drugs than on their cars. Take a second to consider all the people, marketing, expertise, labor, and other resources that go into the personal vehicle market. Now, imagine double those resources being put into the hands of violent criminals. That is the result of drug prohibition. When Alcohol prohibition was enacted in the U.S. the American mafia rose to become among the most powerful entities in world. Today the criminal gangs and cartels dwarf them in reach and influence. The cartels don't want to end prohibition, that would put them out of business.
Some would argue, "but the cartels and gangs wont just go away".
When was the last time someone in America bought alcohol from a gangster?
716 people per 100,000 are jailed in America. Compare that to any other country, its INSANE how many people we have locked in cages in the land of the free. We have more prisoners than COMMUNIST DICTATORSHIP China and they have almost FOUR TIMES our population.
We have more people locked-up than Stalin had in the Gulags at the peak of his terror.
When you criminalize drugs, you encourage the sale and distribution of the most concentrated and powerful and dangerous drugs. Logistically a criminal wants to transport the minimal amount of the most addictive substance to the most people. In the free market, you must provide a value to your customer, in the black market you must avoid detection from authorities while transporting the highest value and most potent substance.
The strongest voice against the rising tide of addiction came from nationalist circles in mainland China itself, which feared the opium trade would cause a decline in the self-esteem of the Chinese people and which saw the opium trade as directly threatening China’s ability to resist foreign influence and aggression.
U.S. Congress, in its earliest law-enforcement legislation on narcotics, imposes a tax on smokable opium and morphine in 1895.
Soon after injectable heroin addiction rose dramatically causing congress to then ban heroin, beginning a never ending cycle of authoritarian action causing drug abuse to get worse which causes more authoritarian action.
Its important to keep in mind that while smoking opium is dangerous and should not be encouraged, its about 8 times weaker than heroin in potency. Although the words sound scary and there is a high potential for abuse, it can be argued tolerating social opium use would had been preferable to heroin abuse.
In 1931, Henry Smith Williams walked into Harry Anslinger’s Washington, D.C., office to plead for his brother’s life. Anslinger and his agents had locked up every drug user they could find, including Williams’s brother, Edgar. Williams was a doctor and had written extensively on the need for humane treatment of addicts. He had spoken vehemently against Anslinger’s brutal tactics, but, confronted by the man himself — slicked back black hair, with a falcon-like visage, a thick neck, and an imposing frame — Williams was suddenly deflated. He half-heartedly made a few points about his brother not deserving such treatment; then he left. After he was out the door, Anslinger mocked him, calling him hysterical. “Doctors,” he said knowingly, “cannot treat addicts even if they wish to.” He called instead for “tough judges not afraid to throw killer-pushers into prison and throw away the key.”
With this unforgiving mentality, Anslinger ruled over the Federal Narcotics Bureau (a precursor to the DEA) for more than three decades — a formative period that shaped the United States’ drug policy for years to come.
During the early parts of his career, Anslinger seemed little concerned about marijuana, known by most as cannabis. But when Prohibition ended, it looked as though Anslinger might be out of a job, so he sought a new threat to the American way, essentially manufacturing a drug war.
In order to ensure a promising future for his bureau, “he needed more,” Hari writes. Marijuana was Anslinger’s golden ticket. He used his office to trumpet the association between weed and violence, so that it could be criminalized. “You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother,” he was known to have said. McWilliams explains that in this effort, “Anslinger appealed to many organizations whose members were predominantly white Protestant.”
From the beginning, Anslinger conflated drug use, race, and music. “Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men,” he was quoted as saying. “There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.”
Anslinger found several cases where people had committed violent offenses purportedly while high, and presented them to Congress. The case that seemed to seal the deal was that of Victor Licata, a young Italian man who had hacked his family to death. Anslinger consulted 30 doctors to confirm his claim that weed was linked to violent crime. Of those, 29 said there was no connection, so he peddled the message of the one dissenting doctor to anyone who would listen.
Anslinger’s appeal to fear appeared to be working. Articles proclaiming the dangers of pot ran in papers all across the country. It was during this time that anti-drug zealots swapped the term “cannabis” for “marihuana” or “marijuana,” hoping that the Spanish word would conjure anti-Mexican sentiment. Newspapers, whether they believed it or not, went along for the ride, running headlines like “Murders Due to ‘Killer Drug’ Marihuana Sweeping the United States.” Anslinger’s efforts culminated in the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937, which effectively made marijuana illegal.
In 1971, Nixon declared his “war on drugs.” His aide and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman later revealed the effort’s nefarious motivations in Harper’s:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people … 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.
During the eighties, Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign was paired with race-based media hysteria about crack. Over the course of the next 20 years, the number of drug offenders in U.S. prisons multiplied twelvefold. This draconian mantle was picked up by George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton and remained the status quo.
Donald Trump and his appointment of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, Anslinger’s legacy appears alive and well. This administration has attempted to block the legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, urged police to be tough on drug crime, and called for harsher sentencing. As Sessions said in 2016, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana.”
WHO BENEFITS FROM THE DRUG WAR AND WHY HASNT IT ENDED
A sensible person … might wonder why we criminalize the use of cocaine and heroin, not to mention marijuana, while we tolerate and even celebrate alcohol consumption. Of course, we learned long ago that prohibition of alcohol was bound to fail. So a sensible person might propose that we consider ending prohibition of drugs like marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, which pose much less threat to the public safety than alcohol, or at least reduce harsh penalties for their use. But sensible people have had little influence over the nation’s drug policies.
A major beneficiary, of course, is the U.S. government, which has used the drug war as a pretext to shred the Bill of Rights and claim vast new powers over the American people. That the drug war would lead to the depredation of civil liberties and the erosion of the rule of law was inevitable, given that there is simply no way for the government to effectively enforce its drug laws while abiding by the Constitution.
Largess from asset forfeitures and federal grants allows local police departments to augment their salaries, expand payrolls, and purchase sophisticated surveillance equipment, high-powered weaponry, and other menacing-looking paramilitary gear. Indeed, the militarization of America’s police departments over the last 35 years has largely been a function of the drug war.
Here's an interesting factoid about contemporary policing: In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did.
Yes, "the police are now taking more assets than the criminals," but this isn't exactly right: The FBI also tracks property losses from larceny and theft, in addition to plain ol' burglary. If you add up all the property stolen in 2014, from burglary, theft, motor vehicle theft and other means, you arrive at roughly $12.3 billion, according to the FBI. That's more than double the federal asset forfeiture haul.
One other point: Those asset forfeiture deposit amounts are not necessarily the best indicator of a rise in the use of forfeiture. "In a given year, one or two high-dollar cases may produce unusually large amounts of money — with a portion going back to victims — thereby telling a noisy story of year-to-year activity levels," the Institute for Justice explains. A big chunk of that 2014 deposit, for instance, was the $1.7 billion Bernie Madoff judgment, most of which flowed back to the victims.
For that reason, the net assets of the funds are usually seen as a more stable indicator — those numbers show how much money is left over in the funds each year after the federal government takes care of various obligations, like payments to victims. Since this number can reflect monies taken over multiple calendar years, it's less comparable to the annual burglary statistics.
Still, even this more stable indicator hit $4.5 billion in 2014, according to the Institute for Justice — higher again than the burglary losses that year.
One final caveat is that these are only the federal totals and don't reflect how much property is seized by state and local police each year. Reliable data for all 50 states is unavailable, but the Institute of Justice found that the total asset forfeiture haul for 14 states topped $250 million in 2013. The grand 50-state total would probably be much higher.
Another major beneficiary of the drug war is the banking system, which takes in hundreds of billions of dollars annually from narcotics traffickers. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) describes money laundering as “the method by which criminals disguise the illegal origins of their wealth and protect their asset bases in order to avoid suspicion of law enforcement agencies and to prevent leaving a trail of incriminating evidence.”
Money laundering is more than just an opportunity for greedy bankers to collect fat commissions. The huge amount of cash churned up by the illegal drug trade has become a vital source of liquidity for the rickety fractional-reserve banking system. UNODC’s director, Antonio Maria Costa, told the British newspaper the Observer in late 2009 that proceeds from the illicit drug trade were “the only liquid investment capital” available to many banks on the brink of collapse. In fact, “a majority of the $352 billion of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”
The CIA has long been involved in drug trafficking. This conflux of the intelligence netherworld and the narcotics-trafficking underworld has been written about by a variety of credible journalists and scholars. The reports usually involve the CIA working with drug traffickers, providing them assistance in return for intelligence and material support. Alfred C. McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, writes,
In most cases, the CIA’s role involved various forms of complicity, tolerance or studied ignorance about the trade, not any direct culpability in the actual trafficking … the CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection. In sum, the CIA’s role in the Southeast Asian heroin trade involved indirect complicity rather than direct culpability.
Peter Dale Scott, a retired professor and the author of many books including Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, and Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina, believes McCoy understates the extent of CIA involvment. Scott believes rather than being passively drawn into “drug alliances,” the CIA actively engages in narcotics trafficking in pursuit of certain “national-security” objectives and to finance “off-the-books” operations. Scott writes, “Far from considering drug networks their enemy, U.S. intelligence organizations have made them an essential ally in the covert expansion of American influence abroad.”
Robert Parry’s Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press, & “Project Truth” and Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair’s Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press are two well-researched books supporting Scott’s contention. And perhaps most notable is the reporting of the late Gary Webb. His “Dark Alliance” series published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 sparked a firestorm of controversy by asserting the CIA had engaged in cocaine smuggling as part of its covert operations supporting the Nicaraguan Contras. Though Webb was criticized at the time and driven out of the mainstream press for his investigative journalism, much of what he reported in the series was validated later by an inspector general’s investigation of the CIA.
The war on drugs has created shared interests for the world’s largest banks, drug cartels, and the U.S. intelligence apparatus. As the economist Michel Chossudovsky writes,
This trade can only prosper if the main actors involved in narcotics have “political friends in high places.” Legal and illegal undertakings are increasingly intertwined, the dividing line between “businesspeople” and criminals is blurred. In turn, the relationship among criminals, politicians and members of the intelligence establishment has tainted the structures of the state and the role of its institutions.
The drug war is not about squashing narcotics trafficking, nor is it about protecting Americans from the ravages of drug addiction. The ugly truth is the war on drugs is one of America’s most lucrative industries, funding police salaries and supporting the country’s vast prison system. It is apparently also propping up a bankrupt financial system and reportedly providing the spooks at Langley with cash to finance their black ops.
The Prison-Industrial Complex
At its core, the prison industrial complex refers to the ways in which government and industry look to policing, incarceration and surveillance as solutions to socioeconomic and sociopolitical problems. Put another way, it’s a symbiotic relationship between police departments, court systems, probation offices, transportation companies, food service providers, and many others; all of which ultimately benefit from maintaining incarceration. In theory, the goal of the justice system is just that: justice. However, the prison industry is deeply rooted in slavery and has, some argue, modernized state-sponsored slave labor.
The United States has shown a commitment to mass incarceration even as reform measures look to slow incarceration rates.
Incarceration rates exploded during the 1990s and into the 2000s. One major factor for the sudden boom in prison populations was the use of mandatory minimum sentencing. As a result, the United States built a new prison every 10 days from 1990 to 2005. All told, America opened 544 new correctional facilities in 15 years.
The correlation between incarceration rates and profit are clear. From 1980 to 1994, private prisons saw a rise in profits from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Subsequent incarceration rates during the 1990s and 2000s only fueled an already profitable industry. The prison industrial complex has become an integral part of the United States economy. This makes it hard to adjust policies that reduce incarceration and cut ties with private prisons.
If corporations are making money off of a prisoner’s cheap labor, then why would they release the prisoner at the earliest date possible?
Injustice becomes the norm, people turn into numbers, and lives morph into statistics, as they have in recent years as the Prison Industrial Complex has morphed into the Private Prison Industrial Complex. At best, the privatization of prisons serves as a feeble attempt to be more cost-effective. At worst, and quite regularly, it sells out integrity and morality in exchange for the maximization of profits.
Without much oversight, private prisons exploit prisoners by forcing them to manufacture goods in exchange for only a few cents an hour. Incentivized by the need to keep jail cells full and the pockets of company executives even fuller, privatized prisons thrive off of the mass incarceration of individuals, both guilty and innocent.
Federal legislation enacted in the 1970s upon which the “War on Drugs” was built, contributed to the emergence of mass incarceration. Drug War policies introduced punitive criminal sanctions to combat drug use and sale instead of prevention and treatment, which substantially increased drug arrests (Mitchell & Caudy, 2015) as well as state and federal drug law sentencing rates that led to longer prison terms.
While black men make up less than 6% of the U.S. population (U.S. Census Bureau, 2014), they supply nearly 39% of the adult, male prison population, and they are imprisoned at a rate six times higher (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2013). Also, they are at a 7% higher risk to be incarcerated sometime during their lifetime than their white, non-Hispanic counterparts (Petit & Western, 2004). This is particularly concerning for the 52% of state and 63% of federal inmates who reported being parents with minor children, resulting in approximately 810, 000 incarcerated fathers and mothers who are leaving more than 1.7 million children without one or both of their parents each year (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2010). In 2006, fathers made up 92% of incarcerated parents, a disproportionate number of which were black men (Glaze & Marushcak, 2008).
The removal of fathers disrupts families and weakens social networks within communities. During incarceration, financial and childcare responsibilities that had been previously shared must be shouldered by the other parent or caregiver and place pressure on extended kin and social networks. With more than half of black incarcerated fathers reportedly living with and being the primary financial providers for their children before their incarceration (Glaze & Maruschak, 2008), the loss of income decreases the family’s overall income, leaving their children more vulnerable to poverty (Schwartz-Soicher, Geller & Garfinkel, 2011).
Black children are seven and a half times more likely than white children to have a parent in prison (Glaze & Maruschak, 2008) and face a greater risk of homelessness due to paternal incarceration (Wakefield & Wildeman, 2014), making them vulnerable to a host of social and emotional problems (Murray & Farrington, 2008; Western & Wildeman, 2009; Wilbur, Marani, Appugliese, Woods, Cabral & Frank, 2007; Barnhill, 1996; Wolf, 2006). Research also indicates that incarceration weakens the bonds between parents and their children, creating insecure attachment, decreased cognitive abilities, and weak peer relationships (Parke & Clarke-Stewart, 2001).
The Top Five Special Interest Groups Lobbying To Keep Marijuana Illegal
1.) Police Unions: Police departments across the country have become dependent on federal drug war grants to finance their budget. In March, we published a story revealing that a police union lobbyist in California coordinated the effort to defeat Prop 19, a ballot measure in 2010 to legalize marijuana, while helping his police department clients collect tens of millions in federal marijuana-eradication grants. And it’s not just in California. Federal lobbying disclosures show that other police union lobbyists have pushed for stiffer penalties for marijuana-related crimes nationwide.
2.) Private Prisons Corporations: Private prison corporations make millions by incarcerating people who have been imprisoned for drug crimes, including marijuana. As Republic Report’s Matt Stoller noted last year, Corrections Corporation of America, one of the largest for-profit prison companies, revealed in a regulatory filing that continuing the drug war is part in parcel to their business strategy. Prison companies have spent millions bankrolling pro-drug war politicians and have used secretive front groups, like the American Legislative Exchange Council, to pass harsh sentencing requirements for drug crimes.
3.) Alcohol and Beer Companies: Fearing competition for the dollars Americans spend on leisure, alcohol and tobacco interests have lobbied to keep marijuana out of reach. For instance, the California Beer & Beverage Distributors contributed campaign contributions to a committee set up to prevent marijuana from being legalized and taxed.
4.) Pharmaceutical Corporations: Like the sin industries listed above, pharmaceutical interests would like to keep marijuana illegal so American don’t have the option of cheap medical alternatives to their products. Howard Wooldridge, a retired police officer who now lobbies the government to relax marijuana prohibition laws, told Republic Report that next to police unions, the “second biggest opponent on Capitol Hill is big PhRMA” because marijuana can replace “everything from Advil to Vicodin and other expensive pills.”
5.) Prison Guard Unions: Prison guard unions have a vested interest in keeping people behind bars just like for-profit prison companies. In 2008, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association spent a whopping $1 million to defeat a measure that would have “reduced sentences and parole times for nonviolent drug offenders while emphasizing drug treatment over prison.”
This blog is a combination of original writing and writings of other people from sources provided below.
SOURCES