Farce on Drugs

Here’s a piece I just wrote on the War on Drugs, which I feel represents a pretty typical attitude among my age and social position:

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Senseless Motives, Senseless War

 

            In 1971, Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs,” marking the beginning of a series of far-reaching and extravagant solutions to a non-problem. Like many wars, this one had its roots in politics, misinformation, and racism; these factors are particularly true here in terms of which substances must be warred against and which ones must be protected as American cultural values (tobacco, alcohol, etc). For example, marijuana’s criminalization came to a head in the 1930s due to its association with Mexican immigrants and jazz musicians; federal restriction on cocaine resulted from the influence of Southern senators who claimed that the drug turned black men into “beasts” and made them systematically rape white women; LSD’s association with youth counter-culture in the 1960s made it a target of Nixonian lawmakers who thought that dissent of their policies would stop if hallucinogens were removed.

 

            Aside from its uneven and bigoted selection of which substances should be controlled, the War on Drugs is also unjustified from a legal standpoint. True to its Lockean origins, the US Constitution clearly defends the right to property when that property does not infringe upon the rights of others, from the Second Amendment’s defense of gun ownership to the Fourth’s insistence of the privacy of one’s person. Our country’s brief and ill-fated prohibition of alcohol required the passing of a new Amendment; substance prohibition through federal act alone treads a fine line in governmental power.

 

            In its implementation, the War on Drugs proves itself not as a tool of justice but as yet another avenue for the government to impose institutionalized racial discrimination. As is widely known, minorities are targeted and arrested for drug use wildly out of proportion of their numbers (blacks make up a whopping 27% of defendants in marijuana possession cases). A common answer to this criticism suggests that perhaps this racial disparity exists because minorities simply use more drugs than whites. This argument ignores the facts of drug use, as it has been established that whites are arrested significantly less for drug crimes in proportion to their use, while the opposite is true for minorities; for more on this, look up our Editor-in-Chief’s piece from last semester, in which he lays out these facts with personal experience to reinforce them. And if all that wasn’t enough to prove the institutional racism of the Drug War, look at sentencing for the possession of powder cocaine, which is more commonly used by whites, and crack cocaine, which is more commonly used by blacks: in terms of punishment, 1 gram of crack is treated as the equivalent to 100 grams of powder cocaine.

 

            The cost of the Drug War has been hard to pinpoint, thanks to the sprawling budget, social damages, and the actual wars fought for its sake, but the price tag has been well into the trillions for decades: enough to provide years of universal health care to all Americans. The next time a conservative lectures you about fiscal conservatism and why we shouldn’t waste money on social programs, ask him if the unjustified, ineffective and immeasurably expensive Drug War counts as one of them.