The long-awaited National Drug Control Strategy, which the Bush administration unveiled on Sept. 5, 1989, will bring us more invasions of personal rights, more AIDS and AIDS deaths, more drug abuse, more drug trade murders, more assassinations of political leaders, more instability in producer countries, and more erosions of basic democratic traditions. Sadly, the only major criticism from within the Washington establishment comes from congressional Democrats who want to spend more money on the drug war.
 

Perpetuating Holy War

Why in the world would the leaders of a modern government continue and even expand such a harmful policy? As Ed Leuw, a Dutch government researcher, explained a few years ago, the drug war can only be understood as a holy war — and the important thing about a holy war is to fight it not to win it. While it is not generally recognized, therefore, it would help our understanding if we accepted that American society is now engaged in the equivalent of a holy war over differences in chemical tastes. The level of barbarism has not yet been as widespread as other holy wars, but barbarism is growing. And remember what is at the core of all of this violence. As many as 60 million or about 1 in 4 Americans sometimes perform a seemingly non-threatening act: they imbibe certain drugs that the majority of the society does not like or even hates.

The majority of citizens have enacted, through their elected representatives, laws making these substances illegal for seemingly good reasons in line with previous enactments imposing a government religion for the good of the whole people (before the First Amendment outlawed an official church). The rationale for the new chemical religion laws is that the drugs are mind-altering, harmful to health, and even fatal. While these reasons are, to an extent, supported by objective facts, millions of our citizens have persisted in taking these hated chemicals, in part because they personally do not believe them to be worse than the approved chemicals. (Support for their heretical position is found in the fact that deaths from all illegal drug overdoses total approximately 7,000 annually compared to well over 500,000 for tobacco and alcohol.)

Eliminating Heretics to Save Them

While the new holy war plan, which was authored by National Drug Control Policy Director William Bennett, promises help to some people, the major thrust of the multi-billion dollar package is hate, not help. That hatred is directed with full, virulent force at casual users of drugs, the most numerous of the heretics. The plan intends to eliminate, in a sense, casual users of drugs from American society. Casual users of, for example, marijuana and cocaine could be imprisoned for months in boot camps or hospitalized against their will through civil commitment procedures in psychiatric institutions. The plan also urges that casual users lose their cars and homes, be fired from their jobs under the drug-free workplace ideology, have their driver's licenses suspended for 1-5 years, be prohibited from obtaining student loans and grants, and suffer other penalties for "using or possessing even small amounts of drugs." States that do not pass such repressive statutes could lose hundreds of millions in federal benefits.

The high priests of the American holy war have managed to sell the notion that casual users of drugs must suffer these penalties because they are criminal co-conspirators of the drug barons and their murderous henchmen. Thus, when drug-trade thugs kill a police officer in New York or the wife of a policeman in Colombia, Mr. Bennett's rationale holds, American casual cocaine and marijuana users helped pull the triggers.

If there were no customers, of course the drug barons could not sell drugs and would not be able to hire killers. But if we accept the argument that casual users are actually involved in a murderous conspiracy, then we must perforce throw out centuries of Anglo-American legal doctrine and political philosophy. It has become central to civilized, democratic legal systems that individuals are liable only for the proximate results of their actions and only for those results they cause directly and intentionally to specific individuals. While there are some circumstances under which an individual might be liable to unknown third parties, these are rare exceptions to the general rule. Under the new logic there could be other bizarre persecutions: tobacco manufacturers could be nailed as accomplices to over 390,000 predictable cancer and coronary "homicides" a year, liquor producers as the ultimate cause of over 150,000 "homicides" due to heart disease and cirrhosis of the liver.

Ignoring Rational Government Reports

In preparing the strategy, Mr. Bennett also ignored a vast body of scientific facts and impartial reports. President Nixon's own drug commission, for example, in 1972 recommended that possession and small sales of marijuana would no longer be a criminal offense. In 1982, a distinguished panel of the quasi-governmental National Academy of Sciences reiterated the Nixon commission's findings0 and went further by recommending a national experiment wherein, as in 1933 regarding alcohol, federal marijuana laws would be repealed allowing the states freedom to enact their own, including legalization. In 1988, Judge Francis L. Young, the chief DEA administrative law judge, ruled that "Marijuana...is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man."

President Ford's White House task force report on all illegal drugs stated in 1975 that the government should be more calm in its approach, "stop raising unrealistic expectations of total elimination of drug abuse," and that excessive reliance on law enforcement will have significant adverse effects, including: "young, casual users of drugs are stigmatized by arrest; the health of committed users is threatened by impure drugs...and crime rates increase." No such worries about stigmatizing casual drug users or about harming the health of addicts appears anywhere in this new strategy. Nor is there anything of significance about controlling AIDS, a disease now threatening the entire society.

Rational Options
In the wake of the release of the Bush-Bennett strategy, the Drug Policy Foundation and other groups have been making the case against the continuation of this destructive, divisive war on the American people, and on the peoples of other countries. Some members of the loyal opposition are so appalled by the extremism of the drug warriors that they are advocating rapid legalization and the regulated sale of virtually all currently illegal drugs. That is only one of many options that have been proposed. Others include allowing states greater freedom to legalize and regulate marijuana; providing medicinal drugs and clean needles to addicts through doctors; granting treatment on demand; allowing doctors to prescribe marijuana and heroin to cancer and glaucoma sufferers; and leaving all the drugs laws on the books but enforcing them with great restraint as we do the sex laws.

Irrational Future

Nevertheless, the Bennett strategy may well dominate American society for the remainder of this century. As Jan. 1, 2000, dawns on Washington, one could make rational projections, based upon current trends, that would envision the following scene:

•    American prisoners serving one year or more total at least 138 million. (This projection is based upon the 7.4 percent rate of annual increase at the end of the Reagan Era. However, the government just announced that the rate almost doubled during the first six months of 1989 with the result that from Jan. 1, 1981, to June 30, 1989, the prison population went up a mind-boggling 104 percent from 329,821 to 673,565. If the new rate continues, the prison population at the beginning of the next century will be 2.8 million.)

•    Inmates of jails, juvenile institutions, boot camps, and psychiatric hospitals total a number equal to that of the long-term prisoners.

•    Drug trade murders amount to 10,000 annually, up from approximately 2,000 in 1989.

•    AIDS kills tens of thousands of addicts and non-addicts every year. The major vehicle for the transmission of the disease remains the heterosexual, injecting addict, especially since they still cannot get legal drugs or enough clean needles.

•    Crime on the streets is worse than ever. Troops and tanks patrol the center of Washington and most major cities.

•    The major protections of the Bill of Rights are, for all practical purposes, repealed during the continuing drug emergency.

•    Drug abuse is rampant New synthetic designer drugs have come on the market that are more potent and more deadly than crack or PCP.

•    The federal drug abuse budget is $78 billion (almost a ten-fold increase from 1989).

•    William Bennett is President of the United States.

Arnold S. Trebach and Kevin B. Zeese, "A Holy War by Any Other Name," The Drug Policy Letter, September/October, 1989, p.1.