Do you remember the War on Drugs?
It was Richard Nixon who thought up the idea back in 1971
and while Nixon was, contrary to the impression you might have received from
the typical Hollywood portrayal of the man, one of the better American
presidents, this was not one of his better ideas. The idea was that the American federal
government would commit a tremendous amount of resources and effort into
stomping out the international drug trade. They would treat the drug cartels as if they
were a hostile country that had attacked the United States. Other Western countries were expected to support
the “leader of the free world” in this effort and, to varying degrees, they
did. Fifty years have gone by and the
drug trade is still alive and kicking, even despite the constraints on
international travel over the last year and a half. The War on Drugs, in other words has been a total
failure.
This ought not to surprise us. When governments declare “war” on anything
other than another country, whether it be drugs, crime, terrorism, hate, or the
bat flu virus, the “enemy” is never defeated and the war goes on forever. This is because such “wars” are largely
excuses by governments to expand their powers, escape constitutional
limitations that irk them, and spend a lot of money and, therefore, governments
have no motivation to win.
The War on Drugs was a particularly inexcusable failure in
that it came only a few decades after the spectacular failure of Prohibition
and repeated all of its mistakes. In
both cases, by forbidding a particular trade, government merely made it more
profitable because those willing to take the risk of selling were able to
charge much more, and more dangerous for the general public, because those
undertaking such a venture were heavily armed, organized crime syndicates for
whom competition for the illegal trade and its high profit margins resembled
war in the literal sense of the word.
There was one significant difference between the War on
Drugs and Prohibition, however, one that ensured that the former, even though
the commodities involved were less popular, would be an even greater
failure.
Prohibition was the culmination of a movement that had been
building for about a century which had a clear, if misguided, vision. The Temperance movement was one of the
by-products of the nineteenth century North American revivalism that had grown
out of the eighteenth century Methodist movement. Ironically, considering that its name refers
to the Christian virtue that means “moderation” or “self-control”, it took the
moral stance that all consumption of alcoholic beverages is sinful, a further
irony considering that this is the moral position that is traditional to Islam,
not the one that is traditional to both Christianity and Judaism, which latter
is much more consistent with the literal meaning of the name of the
movement. This is, perhaps, only what
is to be expected from a movement led primarily by individuals who gloried in
their lack of theological education. The Temperance movement had the support
not only of religious zealots who took this stance, but of manufacturers who
thought, not without reason although there are equally strong counterarguments,
that it would make for a more industrious workforce, and of the feminist
movement, then in its first wave, the women’s suffragettes. Here in the Dominion of Canada, the
shorter-lived experiment in Prohibition was directly tied to giving women the
vote, as Stephen Leacock amusingly discussed in essays on both of those
historical blunders. However, whatever
might be said against Prohibition and the movement behind it, they were unambiguous
and clear. They were against the consumption of alcoholic
beverages and so, when they got their way, a law was passed – a constitutional
amendment in the case of the United States – forbidding all alcoholic beverages
and only alcoholic beverages.
The War on Drugs was pretty much the opposite of this. It did not begin with a grassroots movement
that built up momentum over a century – it started out by executive
proclamation from the highest office in the United States of America. It was not a clear and unambiguous moral
project. Confusion and complications
arise the moment one attempts to identify the enemy in this “war”.
What is a drug?
Is there a difference between the kind of drugs sold by a
drugstore (pharmacy) and those sold by a drug dealer?
The best answer to the first question is to say that a drug
is any substance that is non-essential (thus excluding food, water, and air)
that is deliberately consumed in one way or another for its effect on bodily
and/or mental functions.
Using that answer as our account of the meaning of the word
drug, the answer to the second question must be no. There can be distinctions made between the
two categories of drugs but there is no essential differences. One distinction is between medicinal and
recreational use. Those who use drugs
medicinally do so for a therapeutic purpose such as the alleviation of pain,
the treatment of an injury, or the curing of a disease. Those who use drugs recreationally do so
for the experience they produce, usually a kind of euphoria called a
“high”. This distinction correlates
with that between pharmaceutical drugs and illegal narcotics but the
correlation is not exact nor is the
distinction absolute. Many people use
prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceutical medicine for recreational
purposes and narcotics often have medicinal functions (opioids and cocaine are
pain killers, for example). Ultimately,
the distinction between pharmaceutical drugs and narcotics is that the former
are legal, even if their use is sometimes limited by government (some can only
be purchased with a physician’s prescription), and the latter are not.
The obviously artificial nature of this distinction is a
large part of the case that many make for the legalization of narcotics. This is not the only case that can be made
from this, however. Someone who thinks
that the goal of the War on Drugs – the elimination of the drug trade, the
bondage of addiction, and the ruin of lives that goes along with these – to be
a good one, even if he may think the “War” itself to be ill-advised, doomed to
failure, the cause of more evils than it prevents, and an excuse for government
aggrandizement – could argue that efforts to keep people, especially children,
from falling prey to the lure of drugs, are contradicted by the presence of the
legal pharmaceutical industry, that advertises its products on billboards,
radio, television, and the internet, which advertising conveys, in essence, the
same message as illegal drug pushers, i.e., use our product and your suffering
will cease and you will find happiness.
Related to the above point about the contradictory
mixed-messages being sent by the legal pharmaceutical industry and those
fighting the War on (illegal) Drugs, is the fact that the fifty years since Nixon
declared the latter have also seen a massive rise in the number of young
children being prescribed dangerous mind-altering stimulants such as
methylphenidate and amphetamine. Oddly,
these have been prescribed for diagnoses of hyperactivity, which is
characterized by the inability to stay still and focus due to excess energy,
something one would think ought to be the last thing in the world to be treated
by stimulants (amphetamine is the drug that is sold on the street as “speed”). Some have
posited a link between the rise in medicating children in this way and the new
phenomenon of school shootings which popped up in the same period, just
as others have
noted a similar correlation between mind-altering medication and mass shootings
in general. Whatever the truth may
be with regards to such allegations – Politifact maintains that the first is
false, which is a strong if not infallible indicator that it is in fact mostly
true - it can certainly be said that this new propensity for prescribing
stimulants to children, which looks suspiciously like the
result of the takeover of public education by radical feminists who bullied the
medical profession into treating the condition of being a normal young boy as
pathological, sends a message that contradicts that of those waging the War
on Drugs.
Given the massive contradictions we have just seen between
the legal and tolerated advertisement campaigns of the huge pharmaceutical
industry and the recent fad of prescribing stimulants to children on the one
hand and the War on the Drugs on the other, it can hardly be surprising that the
latter turned out to be something less than a success.
When the War on Drugs began, the main drugs that were
regarded as problematic were substances that occur naturally in the coca plant
and certain kinds of hemp and poppies.
Experimental synthetic drugs were gaining popularity however – the 1960s
saw the LSD craze – and this indication that the use and abuse of recreational
drugs was becoming a bigger problem as were turning to newer, more dangerous
substances, was likely what inspired the Nixon administration to launch the war
to begin with. Surely, however, the radical shift in the
cultural climate towards the major drugs of fifty years ago has to be chalked
up as a major loss in that war.
Today, the use of marijuana, the most widely used of the
drugs obtainable from hemp, is depicted as normal, non-problematic, and even
commendatory on television and the movies.
The drug itself is now
generally depicted in popular culture as being harmless and benign. The most dangerous of its known harmful
effects are seldom if ever discussed.
Increasingly, popular culture has been trying to normalize cocaine use
as well.
This shift in cultural attitude wrought by the entertainment
media has begun to manifest itself politically. Here in Canada, the Liberal government kept
Captain Airhead’s election promise of 2015 and legalized marijuana. There have been some indications, that they
are considering doing the same for harder drugs such as cocaine. There are growing movements for similar
legalization south of the border.
Meanwhile, the increase in the use of more dangerous
synthetic drugs has had all sorts of ill social effects. The synthetic opioid fentanyl, for example,
while technically a legal painkiller if prescribed, has led, through its
recreational misuse, to an alarming increase in deaths by opioid overdose. This is due to such factors as the small
amount needed to produce a lethal overdose and its being mixed with other
drugs, especially heroin. The opioid crisis in Canada began early in
2016. This was shortly after the
premiership of Captain Airhead began. Draw your own conclusions about that.
Another disturbing trend has to do with methamphetamine. Methamphetamine, like its cousin amphetamine
mentioned above, is a synthetic substance derived from the naturally occurring Chinese
medicine ephedrine. Ephedrine used to be
marketed as a weight-loss supplement and can still be found, in small doses, in
some decongestants although a synthetic form is more commonly used. Fifty years ago, the biggest problem with
methamphetamine was its abuse in pill form, especially by long distance truck
drivers who used it for its fatigue combating properties. In recent decades, however, the crystalized
version of the drug, which is used in much the same way as crack cocaine, has
been increasingly replacing the latter as the hard drug of choice, especially
among younger recreational drug users. There are a number of explanations for this,
among them that crystal meth produces a longer lasting high than crack – hours as
opposed to minutes, and that it can be homemade from the synthetic ephedrine in
over-the-counter decongestants. The reason this switch is of concern to the
general public is because of the effects crystal meth produces in its
users. It has the tendency to induce
paranoia. Consequently, as younger drug
users have turned to crystal meth as their drug of preference, we have seen the
rise of the brand new phenomenon of people walking down the street, minding
their own business, and being verbally and physically assaulted, in some cases
murdered, by complete strangers for no reason outside of the assailant’s
drug-addled mind. Isn’t progress grand?
When we consider how much worse the drug situation is today
than at the beginning of the War on Drugs – and much more could be said about
it than the highlights given above – the behaviour of our governments over the
last year or so appears that much more irresponsible.
For one thing, the insane, totalitarian, lockdowns they imposed,
starting early last year, in order to slow the spread of the bat flu virus,
have caused substance abuse, addiction and overdoses to skyrocket. This was a completely predictable consequence
of the loneliness and cabin fever generated by this prolonged, artificial,
social isolation as well as the loss of jobs, businesses and savings. The
authorities acknowledge that overdoses and other drug-related problems have
gotten much worse over the last year and a half, but they place the blame
on the virus rather than on the wrongness of their actions in response to the
virus.
Then there is the way in which our governments have been
sending the biggest contradictory message to that of the War on Drugs to date this
year. Much effort was devoted in the
War on Drugs in trying to keep children from getting involved with drugs in the
first place by persuading them to resist pressure from their peers, i.e., other
children trying to talk them into taking drugs (the message applied to other
situations in which children pressure other children into doing something wrong
as well, of course). This year,
however, we have seen a top down effort, led by governments, but also involving
media companies – news, entertainment and social – aimed at pressuring all of
us into taking the latest products of the pharmaceutical industry, and then
pressuring everyone else (our peers) into doing so as well. How, exactly, do we expect to have any
credibility in the future, when we tell kids to resist the pressure to try
marijuana, heroin, crack, ecstasy, crystal meth or the like, when we are now
telling them that they, and everybody else, needs to shut up with their
objections and reasonable questions and take an experimental new form of
vaccine, despite the ill-effects, both those that are already known and the
long-term ones that we might not know about yet, that provides an inferior
immunity to that which contracting the virus provides, against a virus which
the vast majority of people survive and which poses only the most minimal of
risks to the young and healthy?
Up until now, Western governments have been fighting Nixon’s
War on Drugs with LBJ’s tactics. Had
they truly been committed to defeating this industry they would have gone after
the pharmaceutical industry and all the legal dope pushers in the medical
profession. Now it would appear that
they have raised the white flag and surrendered altogether.
