Drug War Schizophrenia

Once upon a time, a second-term Senator named Joe Biden co-sponsored the Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986, a bill that, among other things, created a 100-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powdered cocaine offenses. Uncle Joe put the hammer down on those crackheads, you betcha. Hard rock - hard time. Nose candy, on the other hand? Guess they figured that Wall Street and the club scene should get a bye.

In 2020, 77% of federal crack convictions were of black people. How’s that for systemic racism? Steps have, fortunately, been taken to remove this and other disparities, and more are in the pipeline.

Joe kinda sorta recognized the error of his ways - or, if we are to be cynical (shocked, I'm sure you are) - realized that his championing the sentencing disparity back in the day would work against his pursuit of the black vote - and promised he'd work to undo that which he wrought.

Of course, no one in the Administration or Congress is talking about the real problem - drug prohibition itself. Half a century of War on Drugs has accomplished... what, exactly?

Other than burning over a trillion dollars, causing untold billions of dollars flowing into the underground economy and out of the country, wrecking the career and life prospects of millions, shredding Constitutional rights, wrecking the concept of privacy, militarizing police departments, creating a massive prison industry, destabilizing foreign governments, leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, fostering gangs and cartels that rival major corporations in size and organization, and producing a whole lot of the friction between law enforcement and poor/minority communities that plagues society today.

Anyone today with very little effort can get any drug he or she desires, of higher quality, purity and potency than ever, at relatively low risk.

Yet, rather than accept the reality that prohibition never works, legalize everything, and turn efforts and resources to treatment, i.e. reimagine the drug problem as a health matter rather than a criminal matter, prohibitions remain. Even the state-level momentum behind pot legalization hasn't budged the Feds from their prohibitive ways (a cynic might think that all that Other People's Money is the big holdup - lots of jobs in law enforcement and incarceration depend on there being crimes and criminals to pursue).

Instead, we get the bizarro notion of assisting users by spending public monies on syringes and, now, crack pipes. The administration recently got cranky at being called out on a program that will include the distribution of glass pipes for smoking crack, meth, and other "illicit substances."

Why keep an activity illegal, and spend money on helping those who are engaged in that illegal activity? What sort of idiots think this is makes any sense at all?

Unless we drill past the notion that solving the problem (or any problem) is any sort of priority to the people in charge.

It's not.

Political success, especially for big-government types, comes from leveraging problems into voter outrage more than from actually fixing problems. Thus, we get the lunacy of helping people commit illegal acts, rather than making the acts legal and actually helping people stop those actions. Would the money being spent on syringes and crack pipes, as well as the money spent on cops, lawyers, prisons and guards, guns, body armor, tanks, drones, surveillance gear, and on and on, be better used helping addicts break their habits? What we're doing now isn't working, obviously, and the criminality of the various recreational substances certainly contributes to people's reticence to getting help.

And to death. Addicts want to get high, not to die, but they are stuck relying on the word and good graces of ‘Eddie’ or ‘Benny’ or ‘Willie’ on the corner as to the potency and purity of their drugs of choice. Keith Richards attributes his longevity despite decades of hard drug use to his access to pharmaceutical quality drugs, something your average user or addict does not enjoy. A hundred thousand people died last year from drug overdoses - despite prohibition and over $50B a year enforcing it. Not because they wanted to, but because relying on criminals to ensure the potency and purity of their product doesn’t always work out. The Iron Law of Prohibition tells us that "the harder the enforcement, the harder the drugs," so we get Fentanyl's 100x potency relative to heroin and a commensurate increase in overdoses by people who don't know what they've got.

The drug problem in America won't be remediated by free needles or crack pipes, nor by heavy sentences for drugs in particular disfavor. It certainly won't be remediated by creating a new entitlement structure, whether it be syringes, crackpipes, or supervised injection sites, aka 'shooting galleries.' While I get the intent of such measures, they are token gestures that will likely do more to harden prohibitionists' resolve than advance us toward a real solution. People are more apt to support spending money on helping addicts kick their habits than on enabling those habits via 'free stuff," especially when it's certain that drugs-as-health-matter spending would be a mere fraction of War-on-Drugs spending.

I'm not holding my breath, of course. There's no money in solving the drug problem, for one thing. For another, too many equate allowing with condoning (you can hold a full-on opposition to drug use but still not believe it should be illegal), especially regarding the harder drugs. Addiction is a difficult problem to resolve via public policy, so politicians would rather not even try. Instead, we get nonsense like this, likely concocted by a mid-level bureaucrat and utterly tone-deaf to the dissonance of funding an illegal behavior.

To reiterate - the only way out of this is legalization and treatment. It also bears repeating that supporting legalization does not mean supporting use or abuse.