How much longer for the war on drugs?
Forty years ago, President Nixon declared a war on drugs. Since then, an estimated $500 billion has been spent on the battle. Kai Ryssdal speaks with Ben Wallace-Wells of Rolling Stone magazine about whether the U.S. should continue its strategy.
More than 400 pounds of marijuana sits in a U.S. Border Patrol station after agents seized it from drug smugglers. (John Moore/Getty Images)
More on Crime - Law
TEXT OF INTERVIEW
KAI RYSSDAL: The U.S. was in Vietnam for more than a decade. Iraq for six years -- so far. The war on drugs, though, has been going on for four decades. Forty years ago today President Nixon asked Congress to create a national anti-drug policy. It became the war on drugs in this speech two years later.
PRESIDENT NIXON: America's Public Enemy No. 1 is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.
Since then best guesses are we've spent more than a half-a-trillion-dollars trying to get drugs off American streets.
Ben Wallace-Wells is the national affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone. He covers the drug war for the magazine.
Ben, thanks for being here.
BEN WALLACE-WELLS: Great to be here.
RYSSDAL: What was going on that President Nixon felt the need to make that speech and make this announcement?
WALLACE-WELLS: Vietnam was going on. There were all of these reports that were beginning to filter back from Southeast Asia that said American soldiers were developing very, very bad heroin and marijuana problems. And there grew out of that a sense that a kind of public health emergency was in the offing. When these troops returned to the U.S. they'd bring addictions back with them.
RYSSDAL: And from that we have the Drug Enforcement Administration. We have the Office of National Drug Control Policy, the drug czar's office. We have, according to things you've written, $500 billion spent in the last 40 years. Are we winning the war on drugs?
WALLACE-WELLS: It's hard to make the case we're winning. I'd also argue that we need a different metaphor. The way to think about this is not a battle against an opponent we can beat or not. The drug war is a kind of running index of human misery that, you know, the government has some not-negligible ability to impact, if it chooses its policies wisely. The problem that a lot of critics have is that we haven't always chosen our policies very wisely.
RYSSDAL: But there have been successes. I mean, if you go back to the late '80s, early '90s, and the days of Pablo Escobar, I mean, you know, we tracked him down, we got him, and the DEA was riding high.
WALLACE-WELLS: That's sort of the moment that represents the greatest opportunity we've had in the history of the drug war. By the early '90s, not only had we managed to kill Escobar, but the social scientists who were looking at drug policy and the drug war had begun to come up with some pretty interesting and pretty wise suggestions about how we might better allocate our funds, and how we might sort of reduce that kind of human misery we've been talking about.
RYSSDAL: What did they come up with, these social scientists, in terms of how to fight this problem, this enemy.
WALLACE-WELLS: People who look at the drug war tend to group policies into two categories. The supply of drugs coming into the country and then the other side is programs like treatment and prevention that try to reduce demand, try to reduce the market for illegal drugs in this country. What they've found sort of consistently over the last 15 years is that, crudely, we need to spend more on demand-side programs and less on supply-side programs.
RYSSDAL: And, in fact, we do spend most of our money on the supply side, right?
WALLACE-WELLS: We spend about two-thirds on buying, you know, fun toys for the Mexican and Colombian militaries and other measures -- and that's a number that's been rising.
RYSSDAL: And this whole question of drugs and what to do about it is so freighted. It's got questions of social justice and prison policy and "Just Say No." I mean, is there a way to agree on how to figure out if we're doing well or poorly?
WALLACE-WELLS: I think there is. I mean, we can measure success by how much we're able to affect the supply of drugs coming into the country, how much we're able to reduce the consequences of serious drug use, and how much we're able to cut down on the amount of drugs that are being used in the country. And the problem is that the recommendations that have evolved from that have never really been paid much attention to.
RYSSDAL: So what do we do? I mean, if you looked back 15 years, why don't we try to look forward 15 years and think about what this war on drugs might look like then?
WALLACE-WELLS: We can make marginal improvements, you know. And we know that if you take addicts and you put them through rehabilitation programs, you know, 10 percent, 12 percent of them will go from using drugs very regularly -- using cocaine, using heroine very regularly, to not using cocaine and heroine very regularly. And that's a real improvement. And so, I think over time, I think that we can at least hope that if we do apply the science here that we can begin to make a dent.
RYSSDAL: Ben Wallace Wells of Rolling Stone magazine. Ben, thanks a lot.
WALLACE-WELLS: Thank you so much.
Comments
Comment | Refresh
From Atlanta, GA, 07/23/2009
This interview doesn't even address the question of cognitive freedom or why the government should be concerned at all with what kinds of substances I put into my body. It assumes that it is the government's role to regulate my psychological states. I'm an adult. I should be able, for instance, to grow whatever plants I want in my backyard, and use them however I wish without fear of being raided by jackbooted thugs. The DRUG WAR is immoral, not dealers or users. The DRUG WAR is the problem.
07/18/2009
AH! Found the song - Thanks!
07/18/2009
Hello everybody,
Can anyone tell me who plays the song right at the beginning before Kai starts the report, it's the guitar instrumental at 8:15 on "How much longer for the war on drugs?"
Thanks very much.
From Washington, DC, 07/15/2009
I believe that the War on Drugs is a "jobs programs" and feel that is why it has existed for 40 years. The Congressional authorizations are bolstered, barricaded and buried in the federal budget to ensure that the slots never go away.
From Colorado City, CO, 07/15/2009
Dear Marketplace. Their exists important and successful social layers for America to consider, with drugs-related social issues. Please accept this tiny piece of information from one of my Social Psychology classes, with Park University.
America should look to England, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, and others, for other successful enforcement/treatment models.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely, Vincent D. Cornish.
From SO304; Week Seven Lesson.
"Drugs
Drugs as an Issue of Public Health
Whereas criminal justice anti-drug efforts in the U.S. focus primarily on law enforcement approaches to reduce drug use, countries as diverse as Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland focus on public health approaches that emphasize treatment and reduction of harms to drug users and the community (MacCoun & Reuter, 2001). The purpose of reading the chapters on drugs in Eitzen‟s Solutions to Social Problems during the week on “Population and Health” is to contemplate how shifting the perspective on drugs produces different policy solutions.
An Objective Perspective on Drug Use Prevalence as a Social Problem
As mentioned in the first lecture, there is often a discrepancy between the objective seriousness and subjective concerns about conditions. This is clearly true in the case of drug use.
Only a minority of the population of nearly every country on Earth uses illicit drugs. By contrast, the legal drugs alcohol and tobacco attract a much higher proportion and number of users. Therefore, from the point of view of the potential harm they can inflict, we could argue that alcohol and tobacco represent a much more serious social problem.
For instance, only three percent of respondents to the Australian 2001 National Drug Strategy Household Survey designated the use of tobacco as the major drug problem in Australia; eight percent did so for alcohol, and ninety percent did so for illicit drugs (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2002). Yet, the use of tobacco costs Australian society almost six times as much as alcohol and twenty times as much as the use of illegal drugs, and these drugs kill Australians in roughly the same proportions. More or less the same picture prevails for the U.S. (Horgan, Skwara, & Strickler, 2001).
Looking globally, with respect to death and disease, objectively speaking, tobacco is the world‟s number-one drug problem, killing more people than all other drugs combined, and by a considerable margin.
Objectively speaking, alcohol is the globe's number-two drug problem. Its consumption is associated with death and disease, and accidents and violence. Worldwide, the monetary cost of drinking runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The consumption of illicit drugs stands far below the legal drugs with respect to medical harm and monetary cost.
4
So why the discrepancy? What generates so much more societal concern over illicit drugs than is true for legal drug use? And why are the members of a society more concerned about drug use at one point in time than at another?
Drugs and Poverty
As Erich Goode (2004) points out, poverty must be understood as a major factor in the production, distribution, and sale of illicit drugs:
1. At the source end, heroin and cocaine tend to be produced by poor peasant farmers who are economically dependent upon cultivating opium poppies (from which heroin is derived) and coca bushes (from which cocaine is derived). Of course, most of the world‟s opium and coca are grown to produce legal substances.
2. In the middle of the distribution chain, most of the illegal drugs smuggled across international borders are carried by poor couriers, called mules.
3. At the low-level, seller-to-consumer end, especially in poor neighborhoods, petty street dealers likewise tend to be poor and barely earn enough on their transactions to pay for their own drug habits (pp. 503-504).
As the enormous economic gap between the industrialized, overdeveloped countries and the poorer, underdeveloped countries widens, poverty assumes a greater role in drug trafficking.
References:
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. (2002). 2001 national drug strategy household survey. Canberra, Australia: Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
Goode, E. (2004). Drug use as a global social problem. In G. Ritzer, (Ed.), Handbook of social problems: A comparative international perspective (pp. 494-520). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Horgan, C., Skwara, K. C., & Strickler, G. (2001). Substance abuse: The nation’s number one health problem. Princeton, NJ: Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
MacCoun, R., & Reuter, P. (2001). Drug war heresies: Learning from other vices, times, and places. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press."
Wing, B. (2009) Week Seven Lesson, Population and Health. Retrieved, July 13, 2009, from parkonline.org.
From MN, 07/15/2009
Legalize! You can't stop people from hurting themselves so why don't we start helping them with treatment instead of imprisoning them. Prisons take drug users and turn them into super criminals who see no future.
07/15/2009
Legalizing drugs will have the same result as cigarettes--incredible taxes levied on addicted people. And what economic class, generally, are these people? Will the companies that sell these drugs advertise to children, just as the tobacco companies do again and again?
The best way to cut down on drug use, is to figure out why do the citizens of the world's richest country need to escape from a reality they are free to create for themselves (compared to other countries) ?
When/if demand decreases...supply will not be lucrative. But, even if you could dry up Mexico, Canada's cannibis farmers would ramp up, and get rid of that, someone else will step in to fill demand. Its simple economics.
From New York, NY, 07/15/2009
This is one of the poorest interviews concerning drug prohibition I've ever come across. Even the most elderly members of my extended family no longer support this destructive farce and are convince we have to regulate these substances before the real mayhem commences. BTW. the 'great wall street crash' of 29 happened during alcohol prohibition; go figure!
From Pawtucket, RI, 07/14/2009
It was so amusing to listen to Kai and his guest from the Rolling Stone talk about the War On Drugs as if there was any meaning to the question of whether we are winning or not. You create an irresistibly lucrative market by making something illegal, then you spend endless billions chasing down the marketeers. That is not a war, that is a perpetual motion game. There is no winning, there is only more money fed to the enforcement machinery. Why would the enforcers want to win--it would only put an end to their annuity. Forty years this has been going on, and for forty years the press has gone along for the ride, asking if we are winning or not. What a charade. Why not start asking real questions, questions that might lead to real answers?
From Santa Barbara, CA, 07/14/2009
The reason President Nixon started the so-called "War on Drugs" was as a way to attack the civil rights and antiwar movements, to expand the Republican appeal for white southerners who, before the 1960s, were reliable Democratic voters. As a way to take away popular support from the civil rights and antiwar agenda, he zeroed in on drugs as a codeword for African Americans and anti-war protesters. To this day, the policies of the drug war disproportionately affect non-whites, to the extent that 1 in 9 young African American men are in prison, the majority for minor drugs violations.
07/14/2009
There is only one way to resolve the war on drugs and that is to end the prohibition on all drugs. The current system has been well documented from the Keystone Cops and Chaplin's Essanay films (especially A Dog's Life, 1918) to more contemporary efforts such as Police Academy. And if it wasn't for Federal funding of The War on Drugs we would probably still be laughing. But when people are being killed for no reason the laughter fades away (http://www.reason.com/blog/show/127848.html). The antidote is action based on knowledge see "anti-drugwar", by Brian C. Bennett: http://www.briancbennett.com/.
Post a Comment: Please be civil, brief and relevant.
Email addresses are never displayed, but they are required to confirm your comments. All comments are moderated. Marketplace reserves the right to edit any comments on this site and to read them on the air if they are extra-interesting. Please read the Comment Guidelines before posting.
You must be 13 or over to submit information to American Public Media. The information entered into this form will not be used to send unsolicited email and will not be sold to a third party. For more information see Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.