I wanted to write about this two weeks ago,when it broke. But it's not like it's any less true two weeks later. AP has the lowdown on just what a miserable failure the war on drugs has been, and it starts like this:
AP IMPACT: After 40 years, $1 trillion, US War on Drugs has failed to meet any of its goals
MARTHA MENDOZA
Associated Press Writer 9:02 PM PDT, May 13, 2010
MEXICO CITY (AP) - After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.
Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked.
"In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."
This week President Obama promised to "reduce drug use and the great damage it causes" with a new national policy that he said treats drug use more as a public health issue and focuses on prevention and treatment.
Nevertheless, his administration has increased spending on interdiction and law enforcement to record levels both in dollars and in percentage terms; this year, they account for $10 billion of his $15.5 billion drug-control budget.
Kerlikowske, who coordinates all federal anti-drug policies, says it will take time for the spending to match the rhetoric.
"Nothing happens overnight," he said. "We've never worked the drug problem holistically. We'll arrest the drug dealer, but we leave the addiction."
The war on drugs started with Nixon, they note:
In 1970, hippies were smoking pot and dropping acid. Soldiers were coming home from Vietnam hooked on heroin. Embattled President Richard M. Nixon seized on a new war he thought he could win.
"This nation faces a major crisis in terms of the increasing use of drugs, particularly among our young people," Nixon said as he signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. The following year, he said: "Public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive."
His first drug-fighting budget was $100 million. Now it's $15.1 billion, 31 times Nixon's amount even when adjusted for inflation.
But most significantly, AP went digging in the weeds to see where drug war money was spent, and found that we spent lots of money of stuff that just didn't work:
Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:
- $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico - and the violence along with it.
- $33 billion in marketing "Just Say No"-style messages to America's youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have "risen steadily" since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.
- $49 billion for law enforcement along America's borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.
- $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.
- $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.
At the same time, drug abuse is costing the nation in other ways. The Justice Department estimates the consequences of drug abuse - "an overburdened justice system, a strained health care system, lost productivity, and environmental destruction" - cost the United States $215 billion a year.
Now wait. Look at that last figure. All the other figures are TOTALS for the entire war on drugs. That last figure is an annual cost.
And how, exactly, do count the cost of destroying the entire civil society structure of a country like Columbia? Or Mexico? Or the fact that we could be next, if we don't change direction at a very fundamental level?
I don't want to dwell on the drug war itself for too long. Rather, I want to use it as an example to draw four broader lessons:
First, it's a reminder of just why it's a bad idea to automatically want to conflate morality and legality. It's not that they shouldn't be related, of course. But legislating morality has the potential to weaken both law and morality, and the drug war is Exhibit "A" in what it looks like when that happens. Morality is most influential when it is not imposed heavy-handedly. After all, it's supposed to be something that comes from within. Doing the right thing because of some sort of outside consequence--like getting caught and getting punished--that not really morality, and everyone knows it. So strong systems of punishment actually get in the way of morality being a strong factor in people's lives.
This is not to say that outside influences should be done away with. Morality can be encouraged. In fact, that's how humans normally do things. Parents encourage their children to think of others and not just themselves. They do it by example. And by praising altruistic acts. And by telling stories. And by creating environments in which morality naturally flourishes. The accumulation these sorts of soft influences nourishes the inner development of morality.
Second, it's a lesson in circular causation and multiple cause and effect. The belief that drug use can be stopped just by "getting tough" or by brainwashing kids to "just say no" or any other simplistic "silver bullet" methods without producing all sorts of other results as well is downright delusional. As I've written many times before, the capacity to think in terms of circular causation and multiple cause and effect, is a function of cognitive complexity understood through the lens of Shawn Rosenberg's 3-Level Typology of Adult Reasoning:
Sequential thinkers reason "by tracking the world," recognize regularities in sequences of events, but have no abstract understanding of cause and effect. The world they perceive is a world of appearances that has very little organization to it beyond the recurrence of sequences.
Linear thinkers understand cause and effect, limited to a one-direction, one-cause/one-effect model. The world they perceive has logical order and structure, but the structure is invariably hierarchical, causality flows top-down, and the world is divided neatly into cause and effect.
Systematic thinkers understand multi-faceted, multi-linear cause and effect, with mutual cause-and-effect relationships [including circular causality] between different elements. The world they perceive is primarily a world of systems and relationships, rather than objects.
This typology also makes it clear why those incapable of systematic thinking not only can't grasp why their solutions don't work, but also why they attack anyone who wants to take a systematic, multi-causal approach. If they can't grasp how a multi-causal approach reduces the problem, then it's only natural that should mistake it for condoning the problem, if not encouraging or even promoting it.
In fact, those capable of systematic thinking may disagree with each other about what the problem is. Some might say it's drug use, period. Others say that it's drug abuse, or addiction. But at least those capable of systematic thinking can carry on a productive, fact-based policy discourse, something that's totally missing from the drug policy debate today, as well as a wide range of other policy areas.
Third, it's a lesson in the importance of thinking about externalized costs. While drugs are certainly harmful to addicts, and potentially harmful to casual users, criminalization creates a vastly larger class of people who are harmed, beginning with those whose property is stolen to pay for the drug habits of addicts, and ending with whole countries--like Columbia and Mexico--whose civil societies lie in ruins as an externalized cost, not of drugs, but of the drug war.
Fourth, it's a reminder of just how badly conservative politics has failed. It's no accident that Nixon invented the War on Drugs. AP's story actually lets him off the hook. It wasn't just that "Nixon seized on a new war he thought he could win." It was a war that defined his political enemies--youth and minorities--as society's enemies. And this is the very heart of conservative politics down through the ages. It should come as no surprise that it is an enormously costly and miserable failure.
