“A WAR ON PEOPLE NOT ON
DRUGS”
By
The
“war on drugs” has been, is, and forever will be, a total and abject failure.
This is not a war on drugs, this is a war on people—our own people—our
children, our parents, ourselves.
I
joined the New Jersey State Police in 1964 and six years later joined their
narcotic bureau. I started working in narcotics at the beginning of the war on
drugs. The term “war on drugs” was coined and created by Richard Milhous Nixon
in 1968 when he was running for president. Mr. Nixon believed a “tough on
crime” platform would garner a lot of votes but if he could be in charge of a
war—wow! Of course as we all know, it worked. Mr. Nixon was elected President
and by 1970 he had convinced Congress to pass legislation giving massive
funding to any police department willing hire officers to fight his war on
drugs. To give you an idea of how large those grants were, in the
First,
we really didn’t have much of a problem with drugs in 1970 and what problem we
did have was basically with soft drugs, marijuana, hashish, LSD, psilocybin
(mushrooms), etc. Hard drugs such as methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin were
almost unheard of back then—certainly unheard of compared to what they are
today. Drugs were more a nuisance than a threat to our society. For instance,
in 1970 people were less likely to die as a result of the drug culture than
from falling down the stairs in their on homes or choking to death on food at
their own dinner tables. Second, back then neither we nor our bosses had any
idea of how to fight a war on drugs. Our bosses did know one thing though; they
knew how to keep that federal cash‑cow being milked in their personal
barnyard. To accomplish that they had to make the drug war appear to be an
absolute necessity. So early on we were encouraged to lie about most of our
statistics and lie we did. Because dealers were not on most street corners or
in all our schools—as they are now—we targeted our undercover officers on small
friendship groups of kids in college, in high school or in-between who were
“dipping and dabbing” in drugs—their term for experimentation.
So
we arrested people who were basically drug-users and charged them as
drug-dealers. We exaggerated the amount of drugs we seized by adding the weight
of any cutting agents we found (lactose, mannitol, starch, or sucrose) to the
weight of the illegal drug. So we might seize one ounce of cocaine and four
pounds of lactose—but somewhere between the location where we seized it and the
police laboratory it all magically became cocaine. We also the inflated the
worth of the drugs we seized by releasing the “estimated street value” of those
drugs to the media, which vastly elevated their importance. For instance in
1971 I was buying individual ounces of cocaine for fifteen hundred dollars each
but when we released the estimated street value of one ounce of cocaine to the
media it was closer to $20,000. Just ratchet it up a little and the drug war
would appear absolutely essential. The federal dollars would keep flowing to
our departments and our bosses would be happy. Who was to question our
estimates and if they did who would they come to with their questions? Us. We
could always justify them in some way.
However,
as the war on drugs ground on we no longer had to lie about its getting worse.
With each passing year of this continuing war, the “drug problem” has become
exponentially more dreadful—an unintended effect caused by the war itself. The
war publicized and aggrandized the use and sale of drugs and piqued the
interest of a large portion of the youth of our country. In many cases, the
drug culture portrayed in movies and on television seemed exciting and romantic
to American teenagers. Many poor young people in the centers of our larger cities
looked to the drug dealer as a role model—and the only way out of the poverty
and misery of the ghetto. The dealer was the one person in their communities
with the hot cars, hotter women, “money to burn,” and leisure time in which to
burn it.
In
the first years the vast majority of arrests we made were for using or
transporting marijuana, the drug that was easiest to interdict due to its sheer
bulk and the fact that police officers could actually detect the odor of the
drug if large amounts were being carried in the trunk of a vehicle they had
stopped on the highway. At that time the media equated marijuana with heroin
and cocaine; and the majority of the public hardly knew the difference between
one drug and another. Marijuana seizures were the first drug interdictions that
the police could count in the thousands of pounds but to the public drugs were
drugs and a thousand pounds was an awful lot of drugs—this also made the drug
problem appear much more important than it actually was at the time.
There
have been many unintended consequences in the war on drugs. One of the
unintended consequences of the successful interdiction of large amounts of
marijuana was that it caused many marijuana dealers to switch to harder drugs
that were less detectable and far more profitable, pound for pound. Among those
drugs were heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. An even worse consequence was
that in a few short years the price of marijuana increased by 2,500 percent,
from $160 a pound to $4,000 a pound, causing many users to switch to harder
drugs, which were less detectable, more plentiful and were becoming ever
cheaper. The war on drugs actually increased drug usage and made it more likely
that those using soft drugs would choose harder drugs such as heroin and
cocaine.
Political
motivation has always been evident in many of the drug arrests made by police.
Holdovers from the “turn-on and drop-out” flower children of the late 1960s,
most of whom also protested the
By
three years into the war, we were actually arresting some real mid-level
dealers of other drugs, such as, the members of “The Breed” Motorcycle Gang who
were selling methamphetamine out of the
In
1977, seven years into the drug war, I kicked down a door in the
Then
in 1982 I was assigned to a deep cover investigation, living nearly two years
in
The “Heroin Price and Purity” chart was created by
the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and placed on their Internet
web site in what they called “The DEA Briefing Book 2001.” The chart depicts
the cost and purity of heroin—by year—from 1980 to 1999. The cost they are
talking about was the average cost that one heroin user had to pay to “get
high” one time and the purity they talk of was the average purity of one dose
of street level drugs, which the heroin user purchased. DEA started their chart
in 1980 but as I mentioned above I started buying heroin in 1970 so I can back
this chart up ten years.
In 1970, we purchased “tre-bags” of heroin so
called because they cost three dollars per bag. We bought them in multiples of
two, because a heroin user needed to shoot two of those bags to get high. Two
bags at $3 each, so in 1970 it cost $6 to get high. At that time the purity of
the product was only about 1.5 percent (purity means how much of the white or
brown powder contained in the small glassine envelopes was actually heroin).
After ten years of fighting the “drug war,” the purity had more than doubled
and the cost to get high had dipped to $3.90. And after thirty years of “drug
war” the price to “get off” on heroin had plummeted to 80 cents in 1980
equivalent dollars because the purity of heroin had increased by 25 times its
original level—then registering over 38 percent pure in street buys. By the
year 2000 the purity of heroin had become greater than 70 percent in
And we wonder why so many people are overdosing on
drugs today? Addicts do not consume more and more drugs each day until their
bodies can no longer take the poison so they die. They overdose because they
get what is known in the trade as a “Hot-Shot.” If for any reason the drug
dealer is distracted while mixing the nearly pure heroin he gets from another
country with the cutting agent he is using to dilute the drug before reselling
it he is left with a lumpy product. On that day, some of his clients are going
to be very angry because they get the part that contains mostly cutting agent
and they think the dealer tried to beat them out of their money. But another unlucky
group of his clients will get the part of the mix that contains mostly pure
heroin. When they cook up and inject the powder they think is 10 percent heroin
and it is really 80 or 90 percent heroin, they don’t get angry they get
dead—there is no second chance for them. That is why we are hearing of more and
more cases where 5, 10, even 20 people overdose in the same suburban town on
the same day. That is due to a bad mix. And these kids who are overdosing are
somebody’s children—they could be mine or yours.
Traditionally the worse the problem gets the more
police and money we throw into the mix. Local and State police were not the
only ones benefiting from the influx of “big bucks” being offered them to fight
the war on drugs. The Drug Enforcement Administration of the federal government
had 2,775 employees when it was created in 1972, to replace the old Bureau of
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. By 2005 DEA had quadrupled its staff to 10,894
but its budget, the money we give it to fight a failed war, had increased to 34
times the original amount—from $65 million in 1972 to over $2.1 Billion in
2006.
In 1980 we got a new man in the White House.
President Ronald Reagan told us we were doing a good job arresting people but
we were going about it the wrong way. “Think of it of an economics equation,”
he said. “You are working on the supply side arresting drug dealers when you
should be working on the demand side arresting drug users. If you arrest enough
users you will frighten them away and without users there will be no dealers.
At roughly the same time the politicians told the
cops, “Just do your job better. Arrest more people and we will back you up a
hundred percent. We will pass the harshest laws ever conceived (mandatory
minimums and ‘three strikes, you’re out’). ‘Lock them up and throw away the
key’ and our problem will be solved.” Well, lock them up we did—but our problem
was not solved. By 2004 we had quadrupled the yearly arrest figures of 1970, to
where we are now arresting 1.7 million nonviolent drug offenders each year—with
nearly half of those arrests for marijuana violations and because Mr. Reagan
said arrest users 88 percent of the marijuana arrests were for possession. I’m
throwing around a lot of numbers here and numbers out of context are
meaningless. Just how many are 1.7 million people? That number is larger than
the population of
More than a thousand people were arrested as a
result of my undercover work. I can’t tell you how many of those young folks
would have gone on to have a perfectly productive life had I not intervened but
I am sure the number is huge. We have a saying at LEAP, “You can get over an
addiction, but you will never get over a conviction.” A conviction will track
you every day of your life because it is on a computer. Every time you go to
get a job it is hanging over your head like a big ugly cloud.
You know, I could even live with that if it made a
bit of difference to lowering the incidence of death, disease, crime, and
addiction but it doesn’t. And the policies are so destructive. Think of all the
people you know personally who have ever used an illicit drug when they were
young—then put the drugs behind them and went on to lead a perfectly happy and
productive life. If you can’t think of any and I doubt that, I can name a few
for you. You remember the fellow who was in the news so much a few years
ago—the one who used to smoke but didn’t inhale? That’s right, President
William J. Clinton. But I don’t want to just pick on Democrats. We have a man
in the White House today who used illicit drugs, George W. Bush. And Vice
Presidents, Al Gore and Dan Quail, along with former speaker of the house, Newt
Gingrich used illicit drugs. The line is too long to enumerate but all those
folks have two things in common. They all used illicit drugs when young then
put them down and went on to become powerful politicians and once they got
there they all got selective amnesia. They forgot where they came from.
Suddenly they came to believe police have to arrest young people for doing
exactly what they did—in order to save them—and guarantee those arrested will
never achieve the levels of success of our current politicians.
And what have we accomplished with all our hard
work and monetary investment. On February 5, 1994, I clipped a photograph out
of the New York Times Newspaper. It caught my eye for several reasons. There
was no accompanying article, just the picture and that picture was buried on
page 23 of the newspaper. The event occurred in the Corona section of Queens, New
York, just down the street from where 17 years earlier I had made the largest
seizure of brown heroin—nineteen pounds. They did a little better than I did.
The caption relates, “police and federal authorities recovered 4,800 pounds of
cocaine, with an estimated street value of $350 million….”
Nearly two and a half tons of cocaine and according
to the paper of record, the New York Times, this seizure didn’t even
rate a single article—let alone being in the paper every day for a week. “How could
that be?” you might ask. How could we have degenerated to this point where the
seizure of tons of cocaine hardly matters? I’ll tell you how. It is because by
1994 the police were doing such a great job for us, regularly seizing tons of
not just cocaine but heroin. We were seizing so much and so often that the New
York Times apparently felt it couldn’t keep up by writing articles so they just
took to summarizing those multi-ton shipments. As they did in Joseph B.
Treaster’s July 15, 1994 article, “3 Arrested in Smuggling Cocaine Found in
And how has the war on drugs aided our children?
Has it reduced drug availability or use in our schools? “Monitoring the
Future 2002,” the largest government funded study ever done on the
behaviors, attitudes, and values of American secondary school students, college
students, and young adults, asserted that over a ten-year period, between 1991
and 2002, marijuana use among students in all school grades across the United
States increased. How much did it increase?—30 percent for twelfth graders; 65
percent for tenth graders; and for eighth graders, an 88 percent increase!
A 2002 drug survey by the
The answer is really not very complicated. When I
first worked undercover, I was hanging out with about 20 kids in front of a
bowling alley at a suburban strip-mall. They were not criminals. They didn’t
mistreat anyone, rob, or steal. And they were not drug dealers, at least not as
I identify the term. In the words of one of the more courageous Juvenile Court
Judges who later threw out many of these types of cases, “They were not selling
drugs they were simply accommodating friends.” What would happen was one night
“person A” got a chance to use his parents’ car so he could make the trip to
New York City to buy drugs for the whole group (at the beginning of the war one
had to go to a large city to buy drugs). The next night it might be “person B”
or “person C” who made the trip to the city. Whoever made the run, first went
to all the friends, took orders for what each wanted and collected enough money
from them to pay for the drugs they ordered. On returning from the city, the
individual doses of drugs were handed out to those who had ordered them. No
profit was made on the transactions. Most probably didn’t even earn enough to
pay for their gas.
Because I had befriended them, I could also buy
drugs from them in that manner. That after all is the job of an undercover
agent. It is not the romanticized work you see in the movies or on television.
Every war must have a spy and in the war on drugs the spy is the undercover
agent. You see, the drug culture may not involve victimless crimes but it does
involve consensual crimes. Both the seller and the buyer get something they
want from the transaction and neither is going to report the other party to the
police. That is why it is necessary to infiltrate that world with an undercover
agent who is willing to arrest any-and-all players, whether they are dealers or
users. The job of all undercover agents is to become the best friend and
closest confidant of the persons they are targeted against—so they can betray
them and send them to jail. And when they are through with each person they are
targeted against the next and the pattern repeats—friendship-betrayal-jail—over
and over, hundreds of times.
Now let’s get back to those kids in the parking
lot. None of them were 21 years old but they could and did sell me any kind of
illegal drugs you can name. However, they often came up to me and said, “Hey
Jack, we’re thirsty—will you go into the liquor store and buy us some beer? We
can’t buy beer.” They could get all the illegal drugs they wanted but couldn’t
buy beer. How can that be? The answer is so simple that it has apparently never
occurred to our drug czars. Beer and cigarettes are legal commodities and the
people who sell them are licensed to do so. Selling those drugs is the way they
make their livelihood and they will do whatever they can to protect those
licenses. I am not saying if drugs were legal that no children would be able to
get drugs. Nothing works perfectly. But no illicit drug dealer is going to
worry about checking your child’s birth certificate to see if he or she is old
enough to buy drugs—the street dealer only want to see one thing—“Show me the
money!” And once they’ve seen the money it doesn’t matter if the child is four
years old, he or she will be given the drugs. We know this because we have
recorded cases of exactly that happening.
So, how much money am I talking about here? Enough
money to bribe a cop? Enough to buy a judge or a politician? Enough to convince
legitimate bankers to wash that dirty money through their banks? In just the
banks of the Southern half of
I realized long ago that when uniformed officers
arrested a robber or rapist the rate for that particular crime went down. They
took someone off the streets that made our communities safer for everyone. But
when I arrested a drug dealer the crime rate didn’t go down. I was simply
creating a job opening for a long line of people more than willing to risk
arrest for those obscene profits. It was actually worse than that. I wasn’t
just creating a job opening, I was creating a safe job opening because it they
tried to get the job while the dealer was still on the corner he would probably
shoot them. I would suggest to you that whole armies of police cannot stop drug
trafficking when the profits are this immense.
Let
me summarize what I have said. After nearly four decades of fueling this war
with over a trillion dollars of our taxes and creating increasingly punitive
policies toward drug users, what are the results? Our court system is choked
with the escalating number of drug prosecutions and our quadrupled prison
population has made building prisons this nation's fastest growing industry;
with 2.2 million incarcerated today and another 1.7 million arrested every year
for nonviolent drug violations—more per capita than any country in the world.
Where will it end? The
And
despite all this money so ill spent, all these lives wasted, drug barons
continue growing richer every year, terrorists make fortunes on the trade, and
our citizens continue dying on our streets. The final outcome to this terrible
story is that today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier for
our children to get than they were 35 years ago when I first started buying
heroin on those streets. This represents the very definition of a failed public
policy. Will
Now
I am going to make a couple of suggestions that I hope will answer what I think
is your obvious question—“Is there anything that can be done to stop this
scourge on our nation and the world?” I believe there is.
I
am going to offer you a policy model I have been working on for some thirty
years. However, I am not presenting it to convince you of its worth as much as
to open your mind to the fact that workable alternatives to these failed drug
policies do exist.
The Benefits of Ending Drug Prohibition
The
first thing we must do is admit that most of the incidence of death, disease,
crime, and addiction, attributed to drug use are actually caused by drug
prohibition. Once we have done that we can stop the horrors associated with
that prohibition by removing the profit motive generated within the drug culture.
How
do we do that?—simple—we end drug prohibition! We legalize drugs! We
legalize all drugs—legalize them so we can regulate and control them and keep
them out of the hands of our children. “Ah…” I hear you saying, “But won’t
legalization cause everyone to use drugs? Won’t we become a drugged-out zombie
nation within a year?” The answer is NO! Drugs were not illegal in this country
until 1914 and we seemed to get through the first 200 years without that
occurring.
If
we look around the world, we have many fine examples of policies we could try.
Policies that show us drug use will not increase with legalization. In
Then
they conducted the same survey in the
Also,
thanks to the “zero tolerance” attitude fostered from years of prohibition, when
this punished child finally gets free from the lockup and wants to better their
condition by going back to school, the State tells him or her they can’t get a
government educational grant or loan for that schooling. However, in another
crazy paradox of fighting a war on drugs, if they were simply convicted of
murder or rape there would be no problem for them. Just apply for it and the
loan would be available.
In
this country, 41 percent of tenth graders have used marijuana. How can that be?
Twenty-eight percent where marijuana is virtually legal and 41 percent where
it’s the devil’s own weed—yet another unintended consequence of the war on
drugs. The researchers couldn’t square this fact in their minds so they went to
So
what would the outcomes of drug legalization entail?
The
first outcome would be that we wouldn’t have to arrest 1.7 million every year
for nonviolent drug offenses. Not arresting those 1.7 million people would be
very monetarily important to every person. Each year our local, state, and
federal governments spend 69 Billion dollars to interdict drugs at our
boarders and beyond; to arrest the dealers and users of the 90% of those drugs
that penetrate that sieve at the border; to prosecute those arrested; and to
warehouse those convicted of nonviolent drug violations—many for the rest of
their lives—to the tune of $26,000 per person, per year, nationally.
If
drugs were legal, we could also alleviate some of the more egregious forms of
institutionalized racism within our legal system. For those of you who don’t
believe this is the case let me suggest the problem is so bad that in order to
find more racist policies one would have to return to the centuries of slavery
in the
According to the 1998 Federal Household Survey:
·
Whites constitute 72% of all drug users in the
·
Blacks constitute 13.5% of all drug users in the
·
But 37% of those arrested for drug violations are
Black.
·
Over 42% of those in federal prisons for drug
violations are black.
·
African-Americans comprise almost 60% of those in
state prisons for drug felonies.[1]
According to
·
Of convicted defendants, 33% of whites received a
prison sentence and 51% of African-Americans received prison sentences.
·
In
·
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, a young
couple giving birth to a Black male baby today has an expectancy of
one-in-three that their child will serve time in prison
·
Disenfranchisement: Due to the fact that many state
laws say no one convicted of a felony can vote, the fact that nearly all drug
violations are felonies, and the fact that for drug felonies we arrest seven
times as many black men per capita as white men, 14% of the total voting
population of black men in the U.S. have lost their right to vote—In Texas 31%
of black men have lost their voting rights.
In
1993, under
Effective
Control and Regulation
The
Another important point about governmental
production of opium was address by the Senlis Council, a European drug-policy
research institution, which according to New York Times writer, Maia
Szalavitz, has proposed this “truly winning solution”:
[T]he developing world is experiencing a severe shortage of
opium-derived pain medications, according to the World Health Organization.
Developing countries are home to 80 percent of the world's population, but they
consume just 6 percent of the medical opioids. In those countries, most people
with cancer, AIDS and other painful conditions live and die in agony.
The
The World Health Organization has said that opioids are "absolutely
necessary" for treating severe pain. Senlis estimates that meeting the
global need for pain medications would require 10,000 tons of opium a year -
more than twice
Because farmers
aren't the ones who make the big bucks in the illegal drug trade, purchasing
their poppies at competitive rates should be possible. But even if we paid
exactly what the drug lords do, the entire crop would cost only about $600
million—less than the $780 million the
The Senlis Council has come up with a sensible
policy that will assist drug producing nations with their loss of income after
drug prohibition has ended, while creating better conditions for millions of
suffers of chronic pain.
A
Compassionate Treatment Policy
Distribute free maintenance doses of drugs to any
adult requesting them. This is the most important point, the one that actually
removes the profit motive. This sounds radical but it really isn’t. We have
been giving drugs to addicted people for over 25 years, in what is called the
methadone maintenance programs.
The trouble with the methadone maintenance programs
is that methadone is about ten times more potent than heroin and about ten
times more addictive than heroin. There is a reason we call it “methadone
maintenance.” For the most part those who start it will be maintained on it
forever. Those problems are avoided by treating heroin addiction with heroin.
Can giving free drugs to addicted people help end
those addictions? The answer is YES! In both Switzerland and Holland, heroin
addicted people have been treated for years by setting up clinics around the
country where they were allowed to come in and inject government heroin up to
three times a day, using clean needles, under medical supervision. But there
are also social workers there, educators and job specialists, trying to wean
their clients off heroin. They saw the addicts three times every day of the
year and they quickly became trusted friends. We know how much power a friend
has in modifying someone’s behavior—certainly a lot more than a judge has when
ordering that person to rehabilitation. With the heroin-assisted programs, they
also offer drug substitution programs, such as methadone and buprenorphine.
The outcomes of those policies are nothing short of
amazing. In
This tremendous decrease in incidence of
expected new heroin users was masked by “a stable prevalence rate” of current
users, which up till now no one bothered to look beyond. When addicted people
wake up in the morning they have only one thought, “Where will I get my fix?”
If they know where they might score, the next thought is, “How do I pay for it?”
And if they also have money for the drugs then their next thoughts are, “When I
go down there is the dealer going to sell me talcum powder and cheat me out of
my money? Is he going to beat me up, steal my money and my drugs?” Or worse,
“Is he going to sell me a ‘hot-shot’ and end my life?” Because of these
thoughts the addicted person’s life is in constant chaos every waking hour. But
in
That is the answer to the drug problem. Give people
hope for the future and they will leave drugs behind. Albert Einstein had this
to say about prohibition:
“The
prestige of government has undoubtedly been lowered considerably by the
Prohibition law. For nothing is more destructive of respect for the government
and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced. It
is an open secret that the dangerous increase of crime in this country is
closely connected with this.”
Albert Einstein 1921. Talking about our prohibition—No. Einstein was talking about the prohibition our grandmothers and grandfathers had the good sense to do away with in 1933. Alcohol prohibition.
There is little difference between alcohol
prohibition and drug prohibition but what difference exists made things better
under alcohol prohibition. For with alcohol prohibition we didn’t arrest users,
only sellers and distributors. The drive to arrest drug-users came with the
Reagan Administration. So now, we enforce a policy that says we have to arrest
our children in order to save them. “Save our children—stamp out prohibition!”