The War on Drugs: What's Keeping Us From Ending It?
- angelicawalker123
- Dec 10, 2015
- 10 min read
“He begged for his medicine. They handcuffed him when he was spitting blood... I don’t say he needed to be released, I say he needed to be alive.”
These are the last memories Tomilynn Harris, a member of the Allegheny County Jail Health Justice Project, has of her son Frank Smart. Frank died in January just eighteen hours after he was arrested for marijuana possession. ACJ staff denied him his seizure medication after he repeatedly asked for it. Once the seizures started, instead of taking Frank to the hospital, prison guards responded by handcuffing his writhing body.
“I never even got a call from the jail when he died,’” she said. “He was killed.” When Frank died, he left behind a heartbroken mother, as well as two children. Later, his charges were posthumously dropped.
Tomilynn is just one of millions of Americans that has been negatively affected by the War on Drugs. Along with many scholars, nonprofits, politicians, and fellow activists, she questions the effectiveness and morality of the laws and policies that she feels led to the death of her son.
When we begin to demonize people for nonviolent crimes like drug use, human lives are reduced to statistics. As expressed by Dr. Michael Kenney, an Associate Professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs specializing in the War on Drugs and terrorism, “a lot of the social costs in the war on drugs have more to do with our approach to drug prohibition than the drugs themselves.” If somebody is convicted for drug charges (and, unlike Frank, actually survives) they face a lifelong criminal record which will lead, according to a study by the Urban Institute, to a 55% chance of unemployment once their sentence is served - and possibly a future of more serious crimes due to this lack of work.
When we face addicts and recreational users with violence and contempt, we ignore the psychological and sociological factors that lead people to use illicit drugs, as well as any potential benefits these drugs may provide. Instead of treating the problems, we back people into a corner and create entirely new problems. “The thinking of the War on Drugs has always been... ‘Let's go after the supply and let's cut it off so much that that's going to increase prices, and therefore consumers will avoid using the drugs because they now have to pay more.’” Dr. Kenney explains, “But that's not how addiction and drug abuse work. These assumptions reflect a basic misunderstanding of the nature of drug addiction and drug abuse.”
When law enforcement begins to see the people as an enemy, the people begin to see law enforcement as an enemy - and then we have a cycle, and around and around it goes, wreaking havoc, confusion, violence, and hate in its path. Police and drug users, as well as others indirectly affected by the conflict, have been going back and forth on the issue since the War on Drugs began in the 1980s. Mass incarceration due to the War on Drugs has been called “The New Jim Crow” and condemned as one of the largest factors in the perpetuation of institutional racism.
“In terms of creating safer communities, I think it’s been a fiasco. I don’t think the War on Drugs has created safer communities -- I think it’s increased violence in many communities in the United States and in other countries all over the world. Overall, when we talk about the so-called ‘success of the War on Drugs’,” Dr. Kenney explains while gesturing air quotes, “it raises the important question, ‘What do we mean by success?’”
“The War on Drugs has been successful in the sense that we’ve captured a lot of drugs, we’ve arrested a lot of people, we’ve put them in jail for a long time - in some cases, like in Columbia, we’ve hunted them down and killed them. But, in terms of the outcomes - the price of drugs, the supply of drugs - it’s had very little impact.”
As a result of these and other factors, Americans are beginning to support drug legalization at numbers greater than ever before. Gallup Polls have shown that support for marijuana legalization has skyrocketed from 12% in 1969 to 51% in 2014, with numbers continuing to rise. Among younger voters, the rates are even higher -- 67% of 18 to 29 year old Americans believe marijuana should be completely legal. According to Pew, 69% of Americans believe alcohol is more harmful than marijuana and 67% believe the government should focus more on addiction treatment than prosecuting drug users. Although less widely tracked, support for legalization of harder drugs is also thought to be rising.
If so many Americans support legalization, why has the government yet to do anything about it? What’s holding us back? When gay marriage was legalized nationwide in 2015, only 55% of Americans supported it - are we only 4% away from marijuana legalization, or are “politics as usual” a stronger force than public opinion?
“When it comes to drug policy, decisions are often made without benefit of cold hard facts. Decisions are often made based on people's previous biases and predilections. I think we've seen this over and over again, and it helps us explain why we continue to pursue the War on Drugs even when the results haven't been as promising as what we would have liked.”
According to Dr. Kenney, one of the major reasons the federal government is still fighting the War on Drugs is the simple fact that, “people are pretty set in their ways.” Because “flip-flopping” is often seen as political suicide, it can be against elected officials’ interests to take new information into account. Despite overwhelming evidence suggesting the War’s negative effects, legislators remain convinced - or at least continue to say they’re convinced - that it’s working.
In reality, it’s clear that the War on Drugs has been a massive failure. Even without considering the social impacts of these policies, the basic concepts behind the War have failed to prove effective. Despite law enforcement arresting thousands of people and capturing tons of drugs, drug prices - both in small quantities and in bulk - have actually gone down since the 1980s. But still, “the fact remains that the US has pursued a drug prohibition approach for decades,” says Dr. Kenney, “Many of the people in power, particularly in Washington, at the national level, remain committed to drug prohibition.”
In addition to jumping through hoops to follow their party’s set agenda, another big force behind politicians’ lack of action towards legalization are corporate lobbyists. A 2014 Princeton University study by Gilens and Paige found that, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Before the legalization debate even begins to consider public opinion, it will have to get through huge lobbying efforts by the pharmaceutical and for-profit prison industries.
Of course, there is a certain amount of public support behind prohibition -- after all, 45% of America still agrees that recreational marijuana should be illegal, and these numbers are much higher for other drugs. The drug with the next-highest level of legalization support, Ibogaine, only has 17% support (with 38% of respondents undecided). The legalization of almost all other drugs, including cocaine, MDMA, heroin, methamphetamine, and LSD, is opposed by at least 79% of Americans. Before taking the public’s views as the gospel, it’s also important to consider exactly what drives the public’s views on drugs.
“John, what are you doing?” she asks as she finds her son ruffling through her purse.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing -- just shut up!” John shouts as he slaps his mother across the face and onto the ground. He steals her money, and runs out the door as she writhes around on the floor, begs and pleads him to stop, and cries. “This isn’t normal. But on meth, it is! METH: NOT EVEN ONCE,” concludes the narrator.
Other ads in the Montana Meth Project series include a young man threatening to kill his parents, a teenage girl prostituting her younger sister, and a guy continuing to smoke as his friend suffers an overdose less than a foot away from him. These award-winning are designed to feed off our emotions and make Americans, especially children, see meth as scary. They also have the added effect of making us see meth users as dirty, evil, and undeserving of any help or sympathy.
Perhaps a PSA narrating the terrifying tales of some of my meth-addicted friends would be a bit more realistic. I can see them now: “Coding for 50 hours straight on a diet of nothing but cheap pizza and water isn’t normal - but on meth, it is,” or maybe, “Studying 72 hours straight for your Bar Exam isn’t normal... oh wait, it is.”
Through my personal experience, I’ve met regular users of methamphetamine working as immigration lawyers, biology research assistants, chemistry PhD students, programmers, engineers, and more. Most were diagnosed with attention or anxiety orders and prescribed other amphetamines long before ever trying meth -- one transitioned to meth after his healthcare would no longer cover the $3600/year cost of his Vyvanse prescription. They keep to themselves, are careful not to commit any other crimes, and earn a living by contributing to society with legal work.
When I tell people how much time I’ve spent around meth, I am typically met with a mix of disgust, intimidation, and fear. Is it fair to stereotype my friends as the abusive, devious, and negligent users portrayed in these ads?
Just as numerous studies have shown that abstinence-only sex education leads to higher rates of teen pregnancy, completely ignoring the positive effects of drugs has a plethora of negative effects. While dramatic PSAs like the Montana Meth Project reaffirm the positions of kids who were likely never going to try drug in the first place, they also have the added effect of encouraging these kids to see users as evil and undeserving of help. The teens who are actually at risk of becoming addicted see these ads as laughable, and take them as a rebellious challenge.
1936 gave us Reefer Madness. 1987 scrambled things up with This Is Your Brain On Drugs. The mid-2000’s taught us how to be Above the Influence with its famous Dog ad, where the talking dog says, “You're not the same when you smoke weed. I miss my friend.” Government-funded public service announcements contribute to the public’s lack of knowledge of the real dynamics of drug use and addiction. The dramatized characters depicted in these ads fuel intense stigma and hate towards people who use drugs (regardless of their individual circumstances). They refuse to address the various reasons that people turn the drugs, and instead only mention the (oftentimes rare) negative outcomes. Obviously, it would be extremely problematic to actually encourage people to use drugs - or drink alcohol, or smoke cigarettes - but people who suggest these are the only two options are creating a false dichotomy.
Likewise, the negative public opinions created by this propaganda is a leading factor in the prolonging of drug prohibition. For decades, we were told that marijuana is extremely harmful without any real research to back these claims. Within less than a decade of medical marijuana research being given more funding and discovering how much it can help people with a wide range of problems, the country is suddenly waking up to the benefits of not only medical marijuana, but across-the-board legalization.
Last year, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease published the results of the first LSD study that the Food and Drug Administration has approved since the 1960s, when LSD became banned and began getting rapidly attacked by the government via public service announcements. LSD was used in combination with psychotherapy to help relieve the anxiety in patients suffering from terminal illness. The results? There was, “a clear linear relationship between visit and state anxiety for the experimental dose group, whereas no such relationship exists for the active placebo group... Even controlling for multiplicity, the reductions in state anxiety were statistically significant 2 months after two experimental sessions of LSD-assisted psychotherapy.”
After a 50-year blackout of LSD research, the very first study approved showed promising results. Public Service Announcements play a huge part in the government indoctrination of the public, and lead to a serious lack of academic research, and thus, a perpetuation of this cycle. Marijuana, LSD, MDMA, and even methamphetamine all have the possibility of helping certain populations in a variety of ways, but without the public opinion needed to fuel FDA approval and grant funding for innovative research projects, we may never know what these drugs are capable of. Likewise, beneficial drugs will remain illegal due to decades-old misinformed stigma.
When my friend set out to buy weed on a busy Friday night at Pitt, it took him less than two minutes on Towers Patio to find a dealer. He saw another friend walking by, and asked if he had a connect; this friend then pointed at a young man walking out of Tower B and replied, “the weed guy’s right over there, do you want me to go get him?” A Pitt Police officer was less than 60 feet away as they made the deal.
It’s clear that marijuana use has been normalized in college campuses, so why do we still victimize it when considering certain populations, like African Americans in low-income neighborhoods? Why do we deny it from people with health issues who “choose to play by the rules”? Why do we allow marijuana charges to stay on criminal records for life, even in states where its use has since been legalized, and even as certain convicts have received presidential pardons for the very same crime?
In addition to marijuana use, harder drugs are also often “just a part of the college experience.” In a 2008 study by the University of Kentucky, 34% of students reported illegal use of prescription stimulants - three times the rate of the normal population. When was the last time we arrested a Pitt student for abusing Adderall?
These inconsistencies extend outside of the college student population and into the complexities of race, class, and mental health status. Why is a black man almost six times as likely to be charged with a drug crime than a white man, despite the fact that whites are more likely to have tried virtually all drugs -- including marijuana, cocaine, LSD, opiates, benzos, quaaludes, inhalants, and meth -- than blacks? Why is it that possession and sale of crack cocaine -- one of the few drugs that blacks happen to use more often -- is prosecuted 18 times (today, after reform in 2010 brought it down from 100 times) harder than powder cocaine?
The reasoning between these discrepancies are simple: the War on Drugs was never designed to keep us safe, it was created to bring us down.
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