Outline

I. Introduction

A. History of drugs, cross-cultural perspective

1. Opium wars (ACLU, 2020)

2. Since Nixon, the modern “war on drugs” (Pearl, 2018)

3. History of drug use in different societies (ACLU, 2020)

B. History of government intervention in the private lives of individuals via drug policy (ACLU, 2020); Baumbauer, 2012).

C. Effects of the war on drugs

1. Is it effective? Quantify the deaths related to the WOD, as well as the social entropy in communities, families, and within individuals (London, 2005; Pearl, 2018)

2. Criminalization distracting attention from more central concerns linked to capitalism, psychological wellbeing, and healthcare (ACLU, 2020; Coyne & Hall, 2017; London, 2005).

3. National sovereignty issues and global perspective (Coomber, Moyle, Belackova, et al., 2018; Von Hoffman, 2016).

II. Theoretical Discussion

A. Race, class, power perspectives (Netherland & Hansen, 2017; Putt, Payne & Milner 2005; Taylor, Buchanan & Aynes, 2016).

B. Government, public policy, global affairs (Coyne & Hall, 2017; Godlee & Hurley, 2016)

C. Criminalization, justice (ACLU, 2020; “America is At War,” n.d.; Farabee, Prendergast & Anglin, 1998).

D. Other sociological issues

1. Organized crime and terrorism (“America is at War,” n.d.; Coomber, Moyle, Belackova, V., et al., 2018; Pearl, 2018).

2. White collar crime (tobacco and pharmaceutical industries) (Netherland, & Hansen, 2017).

III. Literature Review

A. Balancing public health/safety with personal liberty/self-empowerment (ACLU, 2020; Payne & Hutton, 2017).

B. Alternate strategies, pilot projects

1. Cannabis law reform (ACLU, 2020; Coyne & Hall, 2018; Godlee,& Hurley, 2016).

2. Psychedelics (Coyne & Hall, 2018; Godlee,& Hurley, 2016)

IV. Discussion

V. Conclusions

A. The war on drugs is a human rights issue.

B. The war on drugs is illogical and empirically proven to be an illegitimate and ineffective strategy.

C. Drugs have been branded and arbitrarily classified as “socially acceptable” versus “criminal,” when drugs themselves are simply tools and can be considered useful.

D. Drug abuse is not a criminal issue.

Introduction

People like drugs. Drugs derived from plants, from coca and tobacco to ibogaine and opium, have been popular throughout the world, as has fermented and distilled alcoholic beverages. Altering human brain and body, drugs have a wide range of effects including pain relief, stimulation, and relaxation. Drugs have also been traded on the global commodities market for centuries, with the most infamous being opium and tobacco: both of which became so lucrative they led to political and military skirmishes. Government intervention in the drug trade is a new phenomenon, traceable to the Opium Wars first and then to the initial controls placed on chemical compounds as scientific research into their uses expanded in the late 19th and early 20th century. The first drug policy on the books in the United States was the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act (“America is At War,” n.d.). It was followed by a cascade of similar legislation that is collectively referred to as the War on Drugs.

Prohibition of alcohol can be viewed as the only battle the government of the United States admits to have losing in the War on Drugs. In spite of the failure of prohibition to quell public fears about the abuse of alcohol and the violence exhibited by some intoxicated or addicted individuals, the War on Drugs continued. The War on Drugs has enabled the rise of a powerful military-industrial complex, and is intimately entwined with non-state actors including terrorist organizations and other organized crime syndicates worldwide. Perpetuating the War on Drugs has become fundamental to the political and economic stability of nations around the world, which is why drug policy reform proves particularly thorny in spite of the fact that no research can substantiate its effectiveness. Quite the opposite: the War on Drugs has led to more lives lost, more crime, and more economic and social instability, than drug abuse or addiction has ever caused.

Fear of addiction, and fear of drugs, have become the propaganda fueling the War on Drugs, duping the public into supporting drug policies. The first cracks in the mirage appeared when several states and a handful of countries decided to decriminalize or legalize cannabis. Alcohol is illegal in more than a handful of nations around the world, including Libya, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh. Ironically, the United States views Muslim prohibitions on alcohol as being strident while enforcing an equally inhumane policy that criminally penalizes users of non-state-sanctioned drugs. Alcohol and opioids cause many more deaths—not to mention ruined lives—than the illegal drugs.

Literature Review

Scholarly databases contain over a million entries related to the war on drugs, covering perspectives linked to psychology, sociology, public health, history, and the law. Of these, none provide tangible support for the war on drugs or recommend its perpetuation as evidence-based or pragmatic policy. Almost without exception too, major research organizations and academic institutions decry the war on drugs and point out its failure in quantitative terms. Writing for Harvard Law Today, London (2005) mentions the more than 500,000 individuals serving time in prison for nonviolent drug offenses. Imprisonment as a response to drug-related offenses has led to a humanitarian crisis. An anonymously written article published on a Stanford University domain indicates why America—and the world—is losing the war on drugs by pointing out effects on the children of those who are serving time in prison and the reverberations within the global economy (“America is At War,” n.d.). Thus, the literature shows that the War on Drugs is more responsible for breaking apart families and communities than the drugs themselves. The Center for American Progress (Pearl, 2018) likewise refers to the “disastrous effects” of current drug policy, advocating for widespread reform of drug laws on human rights and social justice grounds (p. 1).

Major themes emerging in the scholarly literature include the deleterious effect of the War on Drugs on racial disparities including income disparity, criminal justice disparity, and also healthcare and political status disparities. Other themes include a loud and substantial cry from the healthcare industries, calling for the decriminalization of drugs and addiction in order to provide effective interventions and better educate the public. The literature also directly discusses the economics of the drug trade, and the financial implications of the war on drugs versus ending the war on drugs. A deeper historical and political analysis shows that the war on drugs is linked to the war on terror.

Racial disparity is one of the reasons why the war on drugs has become a far bigger problem than drug abuse ever was; another is the fact that the war on drugs deliberately, overtly, and disgustingly draws valuable financial resources away from effective healthcare, instead interjecting those funds into the criminal justice and military sectors. For those more fiscally attuned, Pearl (2018) points out the economic ramifications of the war on drugs: “Since 1971, the war on drugs has cost the United States an estimated $1 trillion,” (p. 1). Researchers also take care to connect the war on drugs to the opioid epidemic in order to demonstrate that the legal status of a drug has zero effect on whether that drug will become abused, without even needing to mention the deleterious effects of other widely used legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco. A review of literature also highlights some of the progressive interventions being used domestically and around the world to subvert, supplant, or supplement current drug policies. For instance, in Australia and New Zealand, research is being done on how to redefine drug-related offenses (Payne & Hutton, 2017). One eleven-nation meta-analysis of data reveals the need to reframe drug policy based on supply-side market forces and a process of decriminalization (Coomber, Moyle, Belackova, et al., 2018). Benson, Kim, Rasmussen, et al. (2006) use Florida crime data to show that drug enforcement—not drug trafficking or drug use itself—plays a causal role in property crime.

Recent literature on the ineffectiveness of the war on drugs capitalizes on the hypocrisies evident in the opioid epidemic, currently raging in the United States and ironically paralleled by the opium trade-fueled Islamist terrorist regimes. Using unique methodologies focusing on the proliferation of pharmaceutical opioids in the United States, Netherland & Hansen (2017) “trace a separate system for categorizing and disciplining drug use among Whites,” not altogether dissimilar from the racial tensions that emerged when different penalties were given to crack cocaine offenses versus powder cocaine (p. 217). The opioid epidemic reflects the inability of the war on drugs to tackle the root problem of addiction, while perpetuating the false belief that there is a difference between legal and illegal drug addiction. A path less trodden in the literature connects drug policy to intersections of power, leading researchers like Muehlmann (2018) to notice a link between gender and discriminatory criminalization of specific classes of drugs with men of color suffering the burden of problems—leading to dismantled families and communities even while whites receive an abundance of media attention related to the woes of the opioid epidemic.

Another theme emerging in the literature on the War on Drugs relates to decriminalization as sensible public health policy. The criminal justice system is not equipped to handle the mental health factors contributing to drug abuse; the editorial staff of prestigious publications like The British Medical Journal (Godlee & Hurley, 2016) say “doctors should lead calls for drug policy reform” in order to save lives and improve the quality of life for countless millions around the world (p. 1). Perhaps the only cogent arguments against full-scale global legalization cite, albeit incorrectly, the correlations between drug abuse and criminal behavior—as well as the correlations between drug trafficking and legitimate, violent criminal behavior. Historically, the arguments in favor of a War on Drugs, also referred to in the literature as drug prohibition (Taylor, Buchanan & Ayres, 2016) showcases the deleterious effects of drug abuse on communities, particularly on communities of color around the world (Putt, Payne & Milner, 2005). The bulk of literature in the social sciences shows that the correlations between drug abuse, drug trafficking, and violent behaviors is not direct or causal at all, and are far too complex to be dealt with in a binary manner in which drugs are classified as illegal or legal based on how they are used.

For example, approaches taken by legal scholars point out that the criminal justice system’s current tactics fail to yield any statistically significant decreases in recidivism or in drug abuse patterns (Farabee, Prendergast & Anglin, 1998). Coerced drug treatment programs offered in prison or to offenders serving alternative sentences like parole fail to address the underlying social justice and psychological problems of drug abuse, resulting in a “revolving prison door,” (Harrison, 2001, p. 462). The so-called revolving door costs taxpayers an exorbitant amount of money without solving any public health or public safety problems (“America is At War,” n.d.; London, 2005; Pearl, 2018; Taylor, Buchanan & Ayres, 2016). The literature reveals a nearly unanimous vote against the War on Drugs. Few scholars have weighed in on possible solutions, with Taylor, Buchanan & Ayres (2016) leading the more radical discussions on legalization and more sensible approaches that dispel common myths and misunderstanding about drug use and abuse. Best, Irving & Albertson (2016) offer a refreshing and new point of view from the field of psychology and addiction, noting that “identity change” may be the key to unraveling some of the complex knots preventing the emergence of truly workable drug policies (p. 1). The identity change referred to in the research encompasses subcultural, cultural, and individual identity in relation to drug use status.

Finally, a growing body of evidence supports full-scale drug policy reform as sensible international policy. Uruguay’s landmark decision to legalize drugs, starting with cannabis, spearheaded a revolution in the ways other countries considered how to change their domestic policies to become better aligned with human rights and social justice goals (Von Hoffman, 2016). The conversation on drug policy reform remains in its infancy, though, and has given rise to considerable “turbulence,” based in part by the fact that even seemingly liberal policies such as those related to cannabis decriminalization are still rooted in “arbitrary notions, moral dogma and fallacious evidence base,” (p. 452). Those arbitrary notions have to do with the false dichotomies between alcohol and other legal drugs, versus psychedelics, cocaine, and other drugs that are used recreationally and which if made legal could also be made safer through open dialogue and product testing.

A series of scathing research reports from the world’s biggest think tanks like the CATO Institute (Coyne & Hall, 2017) and the Center for American Progress (London, 2005), not to mention the ACLU (2020), draw direct and provable connections between the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. If the War on Drugs has failed so miserably, and continues to cost loss of life, dignity, and livelihood, then there can be no real reason to keep it in place. A handful of studies, including those conducted by Harvard (London, 2005) and also published in the Stanford Law Review (Bambauer, 2012) indicate that the way forward may indeed be to invoke the constitution, the Fourth Amendment in particular because of the privacy clause. Drug policy may need to be turned totally upside-down, in order to demonstrate that using drugs is a fundamental human right.

Discussion

Based on the review of literature, the foundations for future global drug policy reform may start with reframing drug use, essentially aligning drugs with alcohol in the public mind’s eye. Economics perspectives, such as those developed in research by Benson, Kim, Rasmussen, et al. (1992), and more recently by Coomber, Moyle, Belackova, et al., (2018) prove especially helpful in laying out a blueprint for a reasonable, feasibly implemented decriminalization or legalization policy. The moral and ethical underpinnings of such a radical new policy have been made abundantly clear in the litany of scholarly literature showing that the War on Drugs is directly related to rising crime rates, prison overcrowding, racial injustice, income disparity, and mental illness. Public perceptions of drugs are based on myths, lies that cannot even be substantiated by the wide range of studies showing that the current drug treatment and criminal rehabilitation models do not work. If anything, the War on Drugs has caused far more social, economic, and political problems than all the drugs, drug abusers, and criminal drug traffickers combined.

Future research should focus more squarely on the causal links between the War on Drugs, organized crime, and terrorism, much of which is funded through black market activity. In the meantime, social scientists have contributed to the database of research on various aspects of drug policy. One area of concern relates to diverting drug users, abusers, and addicts away from criminal justice programs and towards social work or mental health services, as needed. Taking it a step further is necessary if such a method is to truly work, though, given that drug addiction is itself a thorny issue that has yet to be resolved with anything remotely resembling a magic bullet. Recent forays into whether or not psychedelics can alleviate the root causes of addiction may reveal some clues, but until that time, social scientists need to focus on how to alter drug policy so that law enforcement is not penalizing people for what they do in the privacy of their own homes. Legislating recreational drug use amounts to little more than a different type of prohibition.

The failure of the prohibition of alcohol, and the way alcohol prohibition directly led to the proliferation of organized crime via a black market in alcohol, should have left a trail of breadcrumbs for policymakers. Unfortunately, policy has built itself upon a bedrock of propaganda and misinformation. Much of that propaganda and misinformation was fueled by racist ideology and the fears so easily fermented in the general public. The fact that mind-altering substances such as alcohol have been tolerated in spite of their well-known bad effects on behavior, safety, and health shows that the public can still come to view other drugs in the same light. Drugs, like alcohol, are potentially dangerous, but they are also potentially useful and pleasurable. These substances certainly have no reason to be scorned outright, and there is a growing body of evidence to support this—not to mention a dearth of published papers that demonstrate otherwise. The inherent dangers of drug use need to be treated solemnly, as are the dangers embedded in alcohol and tobacco use, of driving cars, and also of using prescription drugs. If Americans remain hell bent on the right to bear automatic weapons, certainly they can also be made to see that the right to do drugs could be considered a matter of personal privacy and basic liberty (ACLU, 2020). A simple public relations campaign strategy could overturn public opinion in just a generation or two, just as it dismantled the heavy-handed tobacco industry lobby.

The research against the War on Drugs seems so conclusive that it begs the question as to why the War on Drugs has been able to to continue for so long. Conspiracy theories aside, research demonstrates a few nefarious links between those who gain (financially or otherwise) from the War on Drugs and those who lose. Those who gain include the global military-industrial complex, which enforces antiquarian drug laws throughout the world and in some countries more than others. The flip side is that the black market drug trade has enabled the rise of massive non-state actors, global terrorist networks and organized crime syndicates that serve as proxy governments in many parts of the world. Mexico would, for example, be far better off legalizing all drugs in order to take power from organized crime syndicates and place it back into the hands of the people. The ancient and modern opium trade routes that traverse the planet have only been reinforced and made far more profitable by the war on drugs. Waging a war on drugs and a war on terror simultaneously feeds into the global military-industrial complex, which in turn saps financial and human resources from meaningful activities including scholarly inquiry and scientific research.

Racial disparities in drug policy enforcement and drug scheduling is another cause for concern. The research shows that non-whites bear an excessive burden, being more likely to be arrested, convicted, and sentenced to prison for drug offenses in the United States and also in many other countries (Payne & Hutton, 2017). Prison overcrowding is a major human rights concern in the United States, and is also a problem that can be neatly resolved by reforming drug policy. Even before legalization, it should be easy to divert non-violent drug offenders into community-based mental health and personal development programs that empower people to rebuild their lives and become more engaged in their work and in society. Drug use needs to be reconsidered and reframed.

When the discussion shifts towards a rights-based policy, it becomes more possible to envision a workable strategy. The Constitution’s Fourth Amendment covers the right to privacy, which can easily be shown to extend to areas previously taboo such as human sexuality and reproduction. Similarly, the Fourth Amendment prohibits unlawful penetrations of the government into the private affairs of individuals. If a person chooses to use drugs, without harming another person, then there is no legal justification to punish that person at all. Many drug users understand the risks involved with taking drugs, and educate themselves through the information found online or via word of mouth. Drug prohibition also precipitates another glaring public health problem, which is related to the safety of drugs. If drugs were legal, then recreational drug users would have no fear of fentanyl and other potentially deadly substances contaminating their supply. Legalized cocaine would empower Andean farmers to make a living wage without fear for their lives, just as legalized opium might enable the regrowth of localized economies throughout Central Asia. The notion may seem farfetched, even outlandish, to many people, but changing minds should not be overly difficult due to the unequivocal nature of the ample body of evidence supporting an end to prohibition.

Conclusion

When considering the future for drug policy reform, it may be important to consider the issue from a constitutional perspective to underscore the importance of privacy. After all, drug use is a private matter—a matter of choice, just like abortion. Drug policy can perhaps be better reframed so that government no longer intrudes on an individual’s lifestyle but instead promotes public health proactively through widespread public education and awareness campaigns that help individuals use drugs responsibly. The goal of drug policy has never been to eliminate mind-altering substances from the marketplace; if that were the case, there would be no 21st Amendment. Prohibition of all drugs would be the federal mandate, and the government of the United States would enforce such laws as fully as they are in places like Saudi Arabia. If the goal of drug policy is to achieve maximum public safety, then policymakers and taxpayers need to accept that some people will abuse drugs. Just as the public came to accept that alcohol and tobacco are substances that are potentially dangerous while still allowing them to be recreational and lucrative commodities, the public can also come to recognize the value of all other drugs and not just cannabis.

Drug policy reform also offers hope for global peace movements. Terrorist organizations and other organized crime syndicates fund themselves in part via the illegal drug trade—a market that those nefarious leaders control and manipulate. With liberal drug policy reform, the marketplace becomes freer, open to capitalists with a vested interest in keeping their customers healthy and alive. The government would also have a greater degree of control over how mental and physical health services are promoted and provided, and researchers would be able to invest in studies showing how to promote safety and judicious use. Economically, the legalization of cannabis has benefitted taxpayers in several American states and it is easy to see why legalizing all drugs could prove beneficial.

Criminal justice, in the meantime, would find that the resources liberated through drug policy reform are harnessed and used to prevent real crimes against humanity, from domestic violence and abuse to acts of terror to homicide. Taking the drug market out from under the chokehold of the black market would also weaken those syndicates and cartels, allowing federal law enforcement to focus on more serious problems like human trafficking, weapons trafficking, and cybercrime. The public has been duped into believing that drugs are categorically bad, and fooled into accepting the hypocrisy inherent in contradictory laws linked to legal substance abuse. Based on empirical evidence rather than alarmist rhetoric, drug policy reform signals a shift towards sane, evidence-based policy.

References

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