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Drug War Mythology
Paul Armentano
It’s been said that the first casualty of war is truth; the aptly titled US “War on Drugs” is no different. America’s Drug War is a $50 billion-per-year1 boondoggle, which thrives on federal lies and distortions,
media complicity, and an ill-informed public. Over the course of this battle, bureaucrats and prohibitionists—including the country’s top-ranking anti-drug official, Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey—have popularized
countless myths to justify and support their endeavor. More often than not these lies go unchallenged and become accepted by the public as truth. Those that are exposed are quickly replaced by even grander sophistry. Let’s explore some of the more pervasive myths of America’s longest war.
Myth: Law enforcement rarely arrest or jail drug offenders.
“Very few drug-use offenders ever see the inside of a prison cell. It’s simply a myth that our prison cells are filled with people who don’t belong there.” —Rep. John Mica (R-FL), speaking before Congress, July 1999
Fact: Approximately 25 percent of American inmates are imprisoned on drug charges. —US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics
Drug offenders, often low-level users, comprise the fastest-rising percentage of today’s inmates. According to statistics compiled by the Washington, DC Justice Policy Institute, 76 percent of the increase in admissions to US prisons from 1978 to 1996 was attributable to nonviolent offenders. The majority of these were drug violators. Since 1989, the number of drug offenders sent to prison has exceeded the number of violent commitments every year.
Over the past 20 years, the total number of inmates incarcerated on drug charges in federal and state prisons and local jails has grown over 1,000 percent. There are now more than 450,000 drug offenders behind bars, a total nearly equal to the entire US prison population of 1980. Put another way, there are presently 100,000 more Americans imprisoned for drug offenses than total prisoners in the European Union, even though the EU has 100 million more citizens than the US. As a result, nearly one out of every four Americans behind bars is incarcerated for drugs.
The ratio for federal prisoners is even more apalling; drug offenders comprise approximately two out of every three federal inmates.
Punishment for first-time federal drug offenders averages 82.4 months, a sentence longer than those for manslaughter, assault, and sexual abuse.
State prosecutors are sending drug offenders to jail in greater and greater numbers. One recent study found that approximately half of all California prisoners are there on drug charges. A review of 1999 New York State sentencing data revealed that 91 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison that year were incarcerated for either drug possession or violating one of the state’s three lowest level drug offenses.
The federal drug control budget has escalated at a similarly alarming rate. Today, the federal government spends over $13 billion annually on domestic anti-drug law enforcement alone, a figure that is 800 times larger than the entire federal drug control budget of 1981. Predictably, this increase has led to an unprecedented explosion of drug arrests. Police today annually arrest three times as many individuals on drug charges than they did in 1980. According to FBI crime report figures, approximately 1.6 million Americans were arrested on drug charges in 1998, one of the highest totals ever recorded.
Contrary to prohibitionist rhetoric, the majority of those arrested are low-level offenders charged with drug possession, not sale. Seventy-nine percent of all drug arrests in 1998 were for possession only. Overwhelmingly, those arrested are marijuana smokers. In1998 police arrested 682,885 Americans for marijuana offenses, more than the total number of arrestees for all violent crimes combined, including murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Eighty-eight percent of these arrests were for marijuana possession only. This translates into one out of every 25 criminal arrests in the United States. Believe it or not, one in seven drug prisoners is now behind bars for pot!
Those drug offenders arrested and sent to prison, typically for lengthy sentences, are citizens not much different than you or I. They are mothers, fathers, and grandparents. They are families like Joanne, Gary, and Steve Tucker, together serving 26 years for selling legal hydroponics gardening equipment from their family-owned store. Prosecutors charged and convicted them with conspiracy to manufacture marijuana based on the offenses of a handful of their customers, and the Tuckers’ failure to allow DEA agents to install surveillance cameras in their store.
They are patients like Will Foster, sentenced to 93 years by an Oklahoma jury for cultivating marijuana for the purpose of alleviating pain associated with rheumatoid arthritis.
They are grandfathers like Loren Pogue, age 64, presently serving 22 years for conspiracy to import drugs and money laundering. Pogue helped a paid government informant sell a plot of land to undercover agents posing as “investors.” The investors, whom Pogue met only once, allegedly were to use the land to build an airstrip for the purpose of smuggling drugs. The fact that there were no actual drugs involved, that Pogue was an upstanding citizen with no prior drug history, and that the airstrip was never built failed to mitigate his virtual life sentence.
These are the faces of America’s snowballing drug inmate population, nonviolent offenders that law enforcement and prosecutors are now targeting with frightening regularity. To Drug War hawks, these
individuals are simply collateral damage; to the rest of us, they are the unfortunate victims of more than 80 years of lies, propaganda, and political posturing.
Myth: Relaxing anti-drug laws will significantly increase drug use and crime.
“The murder rate in Holland is double that in the United States. The per capita crime rates are much higher than the United States.... That’s drugs!” —US Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey, July 23, 1998
Fact: Jurisdictions that have decriminalized the possession of marijuana and other drugs experience drug use and crime rates equal to or lower than those that have maintained strict criminal penalties. The Dutch murder rate is 440 percent lower (1.8 per 100,000) than the US murder rate (8.2 per 100,000). —Dutch Central Planning Bureau of Statistics, 1996, and FBI Uniform Crime Report data, 1998
Drug War proponents argue that any relaxation of anti-drug laws will result in a sharp increase in drug use and associated crime. This assertion is unsupported by epidemiological and survey evidence in America and abroad. In many cases, drug liberalization policies are associated with a reduction in drug use and crime.
Beginning with Oregon in 1973, ten US states removed criminal penalties for the possession of small amounts of marijuana. To date, more than a dozen federal and independent commissions have examined the social and criminal impact of this legislative reform. In short, the available evidence indicates that the decriminalization of marijuana possession has little or no impact on use patterns or individuals’ attitudes toward the drug. According to a 1981 US government study investigating the issue, “Overall, the preponderance of the evidence which we have gathered and examined points to the conclusion that decriminalization has had virtually no effect either on the marijuana use or on related attitudes and beliefs about marijuana use among American young people in this age group.... In fact,...states showed a small, cumulative net decline in lifetime prevalence, as well as in annual and monthly prevalence, after decriminalization.” A 1999 study by the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine affirmed these conclusions.
There also exists no evidence that decriminalization encourages more prevalent use of other drugs. A 1993 study published in the Social Sciences Journal determined: “There is no strong evidence that decriminalization affects either the choice or frequency of use of drugs, either legal (alcohol) or illegal (marijuana and cocaine).” A 1993 examination of drug-related emergency room (ER) cases suggested
that decriminalization may reduce recreational demand for hard drugs. It found that incidents of marijuana use among patients were equal in decriminalized states versus non-decriminalized areas, but noted that rates of other illicit drug use among ER patients were substantially higher in states that retained criminal
penalties for marijuana.
Research further indicates that decriminalization fails to increase crime, and even reduces criminal justice costs. For example, California saved $958,305,499 from 1976 to 1985 by decriminalizing the personal possession of one ounce of marijuana, according to a study of the state justice department budget. An investigation of the impact of marijuana decriminalization in Maine found that the policy reduced court costs and increased revenue.
International studies of marijuana decriminalization in Australia and elsewhere demonstrate similar results. A 1994 study by the Australian National Drug Research Center reported: “Those jurisdictions which have decriminalized personal cannabis use have not experienced any dramatic increase in prevalence of use.” At the same time, those jurisdictions raised significant revenue by issuing instant, non-criminal fines to marijuana users.
In recent years, most Western nations have significantly liberalized their cannabis laws with no ill effects; Germany, Holland, and Switzerland have ceased enforcing criminal penalties against the drug altogether. Spain, Italy, and Portugal have decriminalized the possession of all drugs. Clearly, American drug policy is moving in the opposite direction of the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, American prohibitionists have chosen to malign rather than learn from these examples. They have launched the bulk of their attacks on the Dutch, who have allowed for the public consumption of small amounts of marijuana since the mid-1970s. While on a purported “fact-finding” mission regarding European
drug policy in July 1998, Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey publicly charged that the Dutch murder rate is more than twice America’s r a t e. He further purported that three times as many Dutch youth admit trying marijuana than do their US counterparts. McCaffrey said that liberal drug policies were to blame for the higher Dutch figures. As one might expect from the loose-lipped Czar, both charges were absolutely false. Dutch homicide rates and pot use remain far lower than those in America. Official data released by the Dutch government’s Central Planning Bureau immediately after McCaffrey ’s allegations put the country’s murder rate for 1996 at 1.8 per 100,000 people, a figure substantially lower than the US murder rate. McCaffrey had falsely claimed that the Dutch murder rate was 17.58 per 100,000.
McCaffrey’s charges concerning adolescent marijuana use also proved fallacious. 1996 data recorded by the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future project determined that 45 per-cent of America’s high school seniors admit having tried marijuana. By comparison, research compiled by the National Institute of Medicine, Health and Addiction in the Netherlands found that only 30 percent of Dutch adolescents have experimented with the drug. McCaffrey falsely stated that only 9.1 percent of American teens had ever
experimented with marijuana.
If any cause and effect relationship exists between Dutch drug policy and drug use, it is associated with reducing substance use. Fewer than half as many Dutch adults have tried marijuana as have Americans.
Dutch adults also use hard drugs like cocaine and heroin at rates dramatically lower than US citizens. Since the Dutch government liberalized its marijuana policies, the number of problem hard drug users has fallen steadily. Dutch Ambassador to the US Joris M. Vos publicly denounced McCaffey’s false allegations. Nevertheless, McCaffrey never apologized or retracted his remarks, and continues to bash Dutch drug policy. Diplomacy has never been his strong suit.
Myth: Cannabis has no medical or therapeutic value. “There is not a shred of scientific evidence that shows that smoked marijuana is useful or needed. This is not science. This is not medical. This is a cruel hoax.” —US Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey, August 16, 1996
Fact: Available scientific research indicates that medical cannabis provides symptomatic relief for a number of serious ailments, and is less toxic and costly than many conventional medicines for which it may be substituted.
“Scientific data indicate the potential therapeutic value of cannabinoid drugs, primarily THC, for pain relief, control of nausea and vomiting, and appetite stimulation.... Except for the harms associated with smoking, the adverse effects of marijuana use are within the range tolerated for other medications.” —Final conclusions of US Institute of Medicine, March 1999
Written references to medical marijuana date back more than 2,000 years. The world’s oldest surviving text on medical drugs, the Chinese Shennung Pentshao Ching, specifically cites cannabis’ value for reducing the pain of rheumatism and for treating digestive disorders. Western medicine embraced pot’s medical properties in the mid-1800s, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, physicians had published more than 100 papers in the Western medical literature recommending its use for a variety of disorders.
Cannabis remained in the United States’ pharmacopoeia until the late 1930s when Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act prohibiting physicians from prescribing it. The American Medical Association was one of the most vocal organizations to testify against the ban, arguing that it would deprive patients of a safe and
effective medicine.
Modern research suggests that cannabis is a valuable aid in the treatment of a wide range of clinical applications. These include pain relief—particularly naturopathic pain associated with cancer, arthritis, and spinal cord damage—nausea, spasticity, glaucoma, movement disorders, and hypertension. Marijuana is also a powerful appetite stimulant, specifically in patients suffering from HIV, the AIDS wasting syndrome, or dementia. Emerging research suggests that pot’s medicinal constituents (known as cannabinoids)
may protect the body against some types of malignant tumors are neuroprotective.
Despite overwhelming evidence of marijuana’s therapeutic value, it remains classified as a Schedule I substance, the most stringent drug classification available under US law. By definition, Schedule I substances have “no accepted medical use in treatment,” and physicians may not legally prescribe them. Federal officials have rejected legal challenges ordering pot to be rescheduled—including a 1988 ruling from the Drug Enforcement Administration’s own administrative law judge—and ignored pleas from dozens of esteemed medical organizations to lift the ban on medical cannabis. As a result, physicians often recommend pot to their patients clandestinely. A 1991 Harvard study found that 44 percent of oncologists had previously advised marijuana therapy to their patients. Fifty percent admitted that they would do so if marijuana were legal.
Virtually every government-appointed commission to investigate marijuana’s medical potential has issued favorable findings. These include the US Institute of Medicine in 1982, the Australian National Task Force on Cannabis in 1994, and the US National Institutes of Health Workshop on Medical Marijuana in 1997.
After a one-year scientific inquiry, members of the United Kingdom’s House of Lords Science and technology Committee found in 1998 that the available evidence supported the legal use of medical cannabis. MPs determined: “The government should allow doctors to prescribe cannabis for medical use.... Cannabis can be effective in some patients to relieve symptoms of multiple sclerosis, and against certain forms of pain.... This evidence is enough to justify a change in the law.”
Five months later, US investigators reached a similar conclusion. After conducting a nearly two-year review of the medical literature—at the request of Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey—investigators at the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine affirmed, “Marijuana’s active components are potentially effective in treating pain, nausea, anorexia of AIDS wasting syndrome, and other symptoms [including the involuntary spasticity associated with multiple sclerosis].” The authors added that inhaling cannabis “would be advantageous” in the treatment of some diseases, and that the herb’s short-term medical benefits outweigh any smoking-related harms for some patients. Nevertheless, McCaffrey and other Washington bureaucrats—none of whom is a doctor—rejected the findings of their own handpicked expert commission, and continue to publicly assail medical cannabis as “a crock.”
Myth: We can attain a drug-free America by 2003.
“We must continue our commitment to deter the demand inside our country, stop the supply on and beyond our borders and increase the accountability within drug fighting programs. We must win the War on Drugs by 2003.” —House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Il), February 25, 1999
Fact: We will never become drug-free, only less free.
“For more than a quarter century the United States has been on a rampage, kicking in doors and locking people up in the name of protecting its citizens from illegal drugs. Hundreds of billions of dollars into the Drug War, nobody claims victory. Yet we continue, devoted to a policy as expensive, ineffective, delusional, and destructive as government policy gets.” —Dan Baum, author of Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (Little, Brown & Company, 1996)
The “War on Drugs” has become America’s longest and most costly battle. Though casualties remain high, its leaders show no indication of retreating.
Congress passed the first federal law authorizing law enforcement to control individuals’ use of specific substances in 1914. It outlawed marijuana in 1937. It introduced mandatory sentences for drug offenders in the 1950s and again in the 1980s. Yet despite Congress’ best efforts, Americans continue to use illicit drugs in greater and greater numbers. In 1937, an estimated 60,000 Americans had tried pot; this total rose to 100,000 in 1945 tops 72 million today. On a per capita basis, more people use cocaine today than when its use was legal. More Americans die today from illicit drug overdoses, often as a result of administering tainted narcotics, than at any time in our nation’s history.
The prohibitionists’ response to this stark reality is unthinking and predictable: tougher laws, stricter enforcement, longer jail terms, and greater intrusions into the lives of suspected drug offenders, a
category that includes all of us! This latter approach threatens to shred the US Constitution in its wake. In many instances it already has. High school students are now urine-tested without probable cause; law enforcement seize individuals’ property and cash based on little or no suspicion; police conduct warrantless searches of people’s trash and infrared scans of citizens’ homes to look for clues of drug activity; passengers in motor vehicles are frequently stopped and searched; warrants are procured based solely upon the testimony of confidential informants and are executed in “no-knock” raids; drug roadblocks are common. In one shocking Supreme Court decision, Justices “approved a prolonged and humiliating detention of an incomer who was held by customs agents to determine, through her natural bodily processes, whether or not she was carrying narcotics internally,” even though probable cause was lacking. In other words, law enforcement forced a woman to defecate even though there was no probable cause to
believe she was carrying drugs.
“Zero tolerance” abandons our nation’s traditional sense of justice. Judges are forced to sentence drug offenders to lengthy prison terms without considering mitigating factors. Students are expelled for possessing small amounts of pot or, in some cases, legal over-the-counter medications. Tenants are evicted from public housing because of drug offenses committed without their knowledge by friends and family members. College applicants are denied student aid if they have a prior drug conviction. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) supported legislation in the mid-1990s that would have imposed the death penalty for people convicted of importing two ounces or more of marijuana. A 1999 bill introduced by Congress threatened to impose a ten-year felony sentence on anyone who disseminated—by any means—information relating to the manufacture of a controlled substance if that person should have somehow known that a recipient of the information would use it to commit a federal crime.
And so it goes. Politicians continue to beat the Drug War drum and propagandize the enemy in order to justify their failing policies. All the while, it remains prohibition itself that creates the very problems
their extreme measures are meant to target. As a result, “victory” in the “War on Drugs” remains unachievable regardless of our leaders ’ hollow promises and tall tales. Wake up and listen, America: You are being lied to!
Paul Armentano
It’s been said that the first casualty of war is truth; the aptly titled US “War on Drugs” is no different. America’s Drug War is a $50 billion-per-year1 boondoggle, which thrives on federal lies and distortions,
media complicity, and an ill-informed public. Over the course of this battle, bureaucrats and prohibitionists—including the country’s top-ranking anti-drug official, Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey—have popularized
countless myths to justify and support their endeavor. More often than not these lies go unchallenged and become accepted by the public as truth. Those that are exposed are quickly replaced by even grander sophistry. Let’s explore some of the more pervasive myths of America’s longest war.
Myth: Law enforcement rarely arrest or jail drug offenders.
“Very few drug-use offenders ever see the inside of a prison cell. It’s simply a myth that our prison cells are filled with people who don’t belong there.” —Rep. John Mica (R-FL), speaking before Congress, July 1999
Fact: Approximately 25 percent of American inmates are imprisoned on drug charges. —US Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics
Drug offenders, often low-level users, comprise the fastest-rising percentage of today’s inmates. According to statistics compiled by the Washington, DC Justice Policy Institute, 76 percent of the increase in admissions to US prisons from 1978 to 1996 was attributable to nonviolent offenders. The majority of these were drug violators. Since 1989, the number of drug offenders sent to prison has exceeded the number of violent commitments every year.
Over the past 20 years, the total number of inmates incarcerated on drug charges in federal and state prisons and local jails has grown over 1,000 percent. There are now more than 450,000 drug offenders behind bars, a total nearly equal to the entire US prison population of 1980. Put another way, there are presently 100,000 more Americans imprisoned for drug offenses than total prisoners in the European Union, even though the EU has 100 million more citizens than the US. As a result, nearly one out of every four Americans behind bars is incarcerated for drugs.
The ratio for federal prisoners is even more apalling; drug offenders comprise approximately two out of every three federal inmates.
Punishment for first-time federal drug offenders averages 82.4 months, a sentence longer than those for manslaughter, assault, and sexual abuse.
State prosecutors are sending drug offenders to jail in greater and greater numbers. One recent study found that approximately half of all California prisoners are there on drug charges. A review of 1999 New York State sentencing data revealed that 91 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison that year were incarcerated for either drug possession or violating one of the state’s three lowest level drug offenses.
The federal drug control budget has escalated at a similarly alarming rate. Today, the federal government spends over $13 billion annually on domestic anti-drug law enforcement alone, a figure that is 800 times larger than the entire federal drug control budget of 1981. Predictably, this increase has led to an unprecedented explosion of drug arrests. Police today annually arrest three times as many individuals on drug charges than they did in 1980. According to FBI crime report figures, approximately 1.6 million Americans were arrested on drug charges in 1998, one of the highest totals ever recorded.
Contrary to prohibitionist rhetoric, the majority of those arrested are low-level offenders charged with drug possession, not sale. Seventy-nine percent of all drug arrests in 1998 were for possession only. Overwhelmingly, those arrested are marijuana smokers. In1998 police arrested 682,885 Americans for marijuana offenses, more than the total number of arrestees for all violent crimes combined, including murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Eighty-eight percent of these arrests were for marijuana possession only. This translates into one out of every 25 criminal arrests in the United States. Believe it or not, one in seven drug prisoners is now behind bars for pot!
Those drug offenders arrested and sent to prison, typically for lengthy sentences, are citizens not much different than you or I. They are mothers, fathers, and grandparents. They are families like Joanne, Gary, and Steve Tucker, together serving 26 years for selling legal hydroponics gardening equipment from their family-owned store. Prosecutors charged and convicted them with conspiracy to manufacture marijuana based on the offenses of a handful of their customers, and the Tuckers’ failure to allow DEA agents to install surveillance cameras in their store.
They are patients like Will Foster, sentenced to 93 years by an Oklahoma jury for cultivating marijuana for the purpose of alleviating pain associated with rheumatoid arthritis.
They are grandfathers like Loren Pogue, age 64, presently serving 22 years for conspiracy to import drugs and money laundering. Pogue helped a paid government informant sell a plot of land to undercover agents posing as “investors.” The investors, whom Pogue met only once, allegedly were to use the land to build an airstrip for the purpose of smuggling drugs. The fact that there were no actual drugs involved, that Pogue was an upstanding citizen with no prior drug history, and that the airstrip was never built failed to mitigate his virtual life sentence.
These are the faces of America’s snowballing drug inmate population, nonviolent offenders that law enforcement and prosecutors are now targeting with frightening regularity. To Drug War hawks, these
individuals are simply collateral damage; to the rest of us, they are the unfortunate victims of more than 80 years of lies, propaganda, and political posturing.
Myth: Relaxing anti-drug laws will significantly increase drug use and crime.
“The murder rate in Holland is double that in the United States. The per capita crime rates are much higher than the United States.... That’s drugs!” —US Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey, July 23, 1998
Fact: Jurisdictions that have decriminalized the possession of marijuana and other drugs experience drug use and crime rates equal to or lower than those that have maintained strict criminal penalties. The Dutch murder rate is 440 percent lower (1.8 per 100,000) than the US murder rate (8.2 per 100,000). —Dutch Central Planning Bureau of Statistics, 1996, and FBI Uniform Crime Report data, 1998
Drug War proponents argue that any relaxation of anti-drug laws will result in a sharp increase in drug use and associated crime. This assertion is unsupported by epidemiological and survey evidence in America and abroad. In many cases, drug liberalization policies are associated with a reduction in drug use and crime.
Beginning with Oregon in 1973, ten US states removed criminal penalties for the possession of small amounts of marijuana. To date, more than a dozen federal and independent commissions have examined the social and criminal impact of this legislative reform. In short, the available evidence indicates that the decriminalization of marijuana possession has little or no impact on use patterns or individuals’ attitudes toward the drug. According to a 1981 US government study investigating the issue, “Overall, the preponderance of the evidence which we have gathered and examined points to the conclusion that decriminalization has had virtually no effect either on the marijuana use or on related attitudes and beliefs about marijuana use among American young people in this age group.... In fact,...states showed a small, cumulative net decline in lifetime prevalence, as well as in annual and monthly prevalence, after decriminalization.” A 1999 study by the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine affirmed these conclusions.
There also exists no evidence that decriminalization encourages more prevalent use of other drugs. A 1993 study published in the Social Sciences Journal determined: “There is no strong evidence that decriminalization affects either the choice or frequency of use of drugs, either legal (alcohol) or illegal (marijuana and cocaine).” A 1993 examination of drug-related emergency room (ER) cases suggested
that decriminalization may reduce recreational demand for hard drugs. It found that incidents of marijuana use among patients were equal in decriminalized states versus non-decriminalized areas, but noted that rates of other illicit drug use among ER patients were substantially higher in states that retained criminal
penalties for marijuana.
Research further indicates that decriminalization fails to increase crime, and even reduces criminal justice costs. For example, California saved $958,305,499 from 1976 to 1985 by decriminalizing the personal possession of one ounce of marijuana, according to a study of the state justice department budget. An investigation of the impact of marijuana decriminalization in Maine found that the policy reduced court costs and increased revenue.
International studies of marijuana decriminalization in Australia and elsewhere demonstrate similar results. A 1994 study by the Australian National Drug Research Center reported: “Those jurisdictions which have decriminalized personal cannabis use have not experienced any dramatic increase in prevalence of use.” At the same time, those jurisdictions raised significant revenue by issuing instant, non-criminal fines to marijuana users.
In recent years, most Western nations have significantly liberalized their cannabis laws with no ill effects; Germany, Holland, and Switzerland have ceased enforcing criminal penalties against the drug altogether. Spain, Italy, and Portugal have decriminalized the possession of all drugs. Clearly, American drug policy is moving in the opposite direction of the rest of the world.
Unfortunately, American prohibitionists have chosen to malign rather than learn from these examples. They have launched the bulk of their attacks on the Dutch, who have allowed for the public consumption of small amounts of marijuana since the mid-1970s. While on a purported “fact-finding” mission regarding European
drug policy in July 1998, Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey publicly charged that the Dutch murder rate is more than twice America’s r a t e. He further purported that three times as many Dutch youth admit trying marijuana than do their US counterparts. McCaffrey said that liberal drug policies were to blame for the higher Dutch figures. As one might expect from the loose-lipped Czar, both charges were absolutely false. Dutch homicide rates and pot use remain far lower than those in America. Official data released by the Dutch government’s Central Planning Bureau immediately after McCaffrey ’s allegations put the country’s murder rate for 1996 at 1.8 per 100,000 people, a figure substantially lower than the US murder rate. McCaffrey had falsely claimed that the Dutch murder rate was 17.58 per 100,000.
McCaffrey’s charges concerning adolescent marijuana use also proved fallacious. 1996 data recorded by the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future project determined that 45 per-cent of America’s high school seniors admit having tried marijuana. By comparison, research compiled by the National Institute of Medicine, Health and Addiction in the Netherlands found that only 30 percent of Dutch adolescents have experimented with the drug. McCaffrey falsely stated that only 9.1 percent of American teens had ever
experimented with marijuana.
If any cause and effect relationship exists between Dutch drug policy and drug use, it is associated with reducing substance use. Fewer than half as many Dutch adults have tried marijuana as have Americans.
Dutch adults also use hard drugs like cocaine and heroin at rates dramatically lower than US citizens. Since the Dutch government liberalized its marijuana policies, the number of problem hard drug users has fallen steadily. Dutch Ambassador to the US Joris M. Vos publicly denounced McCaffey’s false allegations. Nevertheless, McCaffrey never apologized or retracted his remarks, and continues to bash Dutch drug policy. Diplomacy has never been his strong suit.
Myth: Cannabis has no medical or therapeutic value. “There is not a shred of scientific evidence that shows that smoked marijuana is useful or needed. This is not science. This is not medical. This is a cruel hoax.” —US Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey, August 16, 1996
Fact: Available scientific research indicates that medical cannabis provides symptomatic relief for a number of serious ailments, and is less toxic and costly than many conventional medicines for which it may be substituted.
“Scientific data indicate the potential therapeutic value of cannabinoid drugs, primarily THC, for pain relief, control of nausea and vomiting, and appetite stimulation.... Except for the harms associated with smoking, the adverse effects of marijuana use are within the range tolerated for other medications.” —Final conclusions of US Institute of Medicine, March 1999
Written references to medical marijuana date back more than 2,000 years. The world’s oldest surviving text on medical drugs, the Chinese Shennung Pentshao Ching, specifically cites cannabis’ value for reducing the pain of rheumatism and for treating digestive disorders. Western medicine embraced pot’s medical properties in the mid-1800s, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, physicians had published more than 100 papers in the Western medical literature recommending its use for a variety of disorders.
Cannabis remained in the United States’ pharmacopoeia until the late 1930s when Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act prohibiting physicians from prescribing it. The American Medical Association was one of the most vocal organizations to testify against the ban, arguing that it would deprive patients of a safe and
effective medicine.
Modern research suggests that cannabis is a valuable aid in the treatment of a wide range of clinical applications. These include pain relief—particularly naturopathic pain associated with cancer, arthritis, and spinal cord damage—nausea, spasticity, glaucoma, movement disorders, and hypertension. Marijuana is also a powerful appetite stimulant, specifically in patients suffering from HIV, the AIDS wasting syndrome, or dementia. Emerging research suggests that pot’s medicinal constituents (known as cannabinoids)
may protect the body against some types of malignant tumors are neuroprotective.
Despite overwhelming evidence of marijuana’s therapeutic value, it remains classified as a Schedule I substance, the most stringent drug classification available under US law. By definition, Schedule I substances have “no accepted medical use in treatment,” and physicians may not legally prescribe them. Federal officials have rejected legal challenges ordering pot to be rescheduled—including a 1988 ruling from the Drug Enforcement Administration’s own administrative law judge—and ignored pleas from dozens of esteemed medical organizations to lift the ban on medical cannabis. As a result, physicians often recommend pot to their patients clandestinely. A 1991 Harvard study found that 44 percent of oncologists had previously advised marijuana therapy to their patients. Fifty percent admitted that they would do so if marijuana were legal.
Virtually every government-appointed commission to investigate marijuana’s medical potential has issued favorable findings. These include the US Institute of Medicine in 1982, the Australian National Task Force on Cannabis in 1994, and the US National Institutes of Health Workshop on Medical Marijuana in 1997.
After a one-year scientific inquiry, members of the United Kingdom’s House of Lords Science and technology Committee found in 1998 that the available evidence supported the legal use of medical cannabis. MPs determined: “The government should allow doctors to prescribe cannabis for medical use.... Cannabis can be effective in some patients to relieve symptoms of multiple sclerosis, and against certain forms of pain.... This evidence is enough to justify a change in the law.”
Five months later, US investigators reached a similar conclusion. After conducting a nearly two-year review of the medical literature—at the request of Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey—investigators at the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine affirmed, “Marijuana’s active components are potentially effective in treating pain, nausea, anorexia of AIDS wasting syndrome, and other symptoms [including the involuntary spasticity associated with multiple sclerosis].” The authors added that inhaling cannabis “would be advantageous” in the treatment of some diseases, and that the herb’s short-term medical benefits outweigh any smoking-related harms for some patients. Nevertheless, McCaffrey and other Washington bureaucrats—none of whom is a doctor—rejected the findings of their own handpicked expert commission, and continue to publicly assail medical cannabis as “a crock.”
Myth: We can attain a drug-free America by 2003.
“We must continue our commitment to deter the demand inside our country, stop the supply on and beyond our borders and increase the accountability within drug fighting programs. We must win the War on Drugs by 2003.” —House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Il), February 25, 1999
Fact: We will never become drug-free, only less free.
“For more than a quarter century the United States has been on a rampage, kicking in doors and locking people up in the name of protecting its citizens from illegal drugs. Hundreds of billions of dollars into the Drug War, nobody claims victory. Yet we continue, devoted to a policy as expensive, ineffective, delusional, and destructive as government policy gets.” —Dan Baum, author of Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure (Little, Brown & Company, 1996)
The “War on Drugs” has become America’s longest and most costly battle. Though casualties remain high, its leaders show no indication of retreating.
Congress passed the first federal law authorizing law enforcement to control individuals’ use of specific substances in 1914. It outlawed marijuana in 1937. It introduced mandatory sentences for drug offenders in the 1950s and again in the 1980s. Yet despite Congress’ best efforts, Americans continue to use illicit drugs in greater and greater numbers. In 1937, an estimated 60,000 Americans had tried pot; this total rose to 100,000 in 1945 tops 72 million today. On a per capita basis, more people use cocaine today than when its use was legal. More Americans die today from illicit drug overdoses, often as a result of administering tainted narcotics, than at any time in our nation’s history.
The prohibitionists’ response to this stark reality is unthinking and predictable: tougher laws, stricter enforcement, longer jail terms, and greater intrusions into the lives of suspected drug offenders, a
category that includes all of us! This latter approach threatens to shred the US Constitution in its wake. In many instances it already has. High school students are now urine-tested without probable cause; law enforcement seize individuals’ property and cash based on little or no suspicion; police conduct warrantless searches of people’s trash and infrared scans of citizens’ homes to look for clues of drug activity; passengers in motor vehicles are frequently stopped and searched; warrants are procured based solely upon the testimony of confidential informants and are executed in “no-knock” raids; drug roadblocks are common. In one shocking Supreme Court decision, Justices “approved a prolonged and humiliating detention of an incomer who was held by customs agents to determine, through her natural bodily processes, whether or not she was carrying narcotics internally,” even though probable cause was lacking. In other words, law enforcement forced a woman to defecate even though there was no probable cause to
believe she was carrying drugs.
“Zero tolerance” abandons our nation’s traditional sense of justice. Judges are forced to sentence drug offenders to lengthy prison terms without considering mitigating factors. Students are expelled for possessing small amounts of pot or, in some cases, legal over-the-counter medications. Tenants are evicted from public housing because of drug offenses committed without their knowledge by friends and family members. College applicants are denied student aid if they have a prior drug conviction. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) supported legislation in the mid-1990s that would have imposed the death penalty for people convicted of importing two ounces or more of marijuana. A 1999 bill introduced by Congress threatened to impose a ten-year felony sentence on anyone who disseminated—by any means—information relating to the manufacture of a controlled substance if that person should have somehow known that a recipient of the information would use it to commit a federal crime.
And so it goes. Politicians continue to beat the Drug War drum and propagandize the enemy in order to justify their failing policies. All the while, it remains prohibition itself that creates the very problems
their extreme measures are meant to target. As a result, “victory” in the “War on Drugs” remains unachievable regardless of our leaders ’ hollow promises and tall tales. Wake up and listen, America: You are being lied to!
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