War on Crime, Not on Drugs

By Norm Stamper, AlterNet. Posted June 15, 2005.

Editor's Note: The following excerpt is reprinted with permission from "Breaking Rank: A Top Cop's Expose of the Dark Side of American Policing (Nation Books, 2005).

I say it’s time to withdraw the troops in the war on drugs.

For a jaw-dropping illustration of drug enforcement’s financial costs, take a look at DrugSense.org’s Drug War Clock. To the tune of $600 a second, taxpayers are financing this war. For the year 2004 the figure added up to over $20 billion, and that’s just for federal enforcement alone. You can add another $22 to $24 billion for state and local drug law enforcement, and even more billions for U. S. drug interdiction work on the international scene. We’re talking well over $50 billion a year to finance America’s war on drugs.

Think of this war’s real casualties: tens of thousands of otherwise innocent Americans incarcerated, many for 20 years, some for life; families ripped apart; drug traffickers and blameless bystanders shot dead on city streets; narcotics officers assassinated here and abroad, with prosecutors, judges, and elected officials in Latin America gunned down for their courageous stands against the cartels; and all those dollars spent on federal, state, and local cops, courts, prosecutors, prisons, probation, parole, and pee-in-the-bottle programs. Even federal aid to bribe distant nations to stop feeding our habit.

“Plan Colombia” was hatched under the last year of the Clinton administration to wage America’s drug war on Colombian soil. Costing over $1.3 billion ($800 million going to the military), the plan sought to “eradicate” that nation’s coca and heroin poppy plants (Colombia supplied 95 percent of America’s cocaine). The chemical used was the herbicide glyphosate, which when sprayed on crops does untold damage to the environment. When sprayed on water supplies or unprotected people, it causes a host of serious to fatal medical problems.

Similar efforts in Peru and Bolivia have reduced production only temporarily, and always at high cost: recall that the Peruvian Air Force, on the strength of mistaken U.S. drug intelligence, shot down a civilian aircraft carrying an American missionary and her infant daughter in April of 2001.

In Afghanistan, the Bush administration supported the Taliban to the tune of $125 million in foreign aid, plus another $43 million for enforcing its ostensible ban on poppy production—right up until September 10, 2001. (As Robert Scheer makes clear in his May 22, 2001 column in the Los Angeles Times—“Bush’s Faustian Deal With the Taliban”—the president knew all along that the Taliban was hiding Osama bin Laden.)

Today, Afghanistan’s drug lords give the country’s warlords (when they’re not one and the same) a run for their money. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in the summer of 2004 issued a scathing report citing the phenomenal growth in Afghan poppy production—and the Bush administration’s failure to monitor its own anti-drug aid. The United Nations estimates the value of the 2004 crop at $2.2 billion, with production up 40 percent, breaking all records for a single year.

According to Peter Rodman of the Pentagon (BBC News, September 24, 2004), “…profits from the production of illegal narcotics flow into coffers of warlord militias, corrupt government officials, and extremist forces.”

The United States has, through its war on drugs, fostered political instability, official corruption, and health and environmental disasters around the globe. In truth, the U.S.-sponsored international "War on Drugs" is a war on poor people, most of them subsistence farmers caught in a dangerous no-win situation.

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Another casualty of the drug war: the reputation of individual police officers, individual departments, and the entire system of American law enforcement. If you aspire to be a “crooked” cop, drugs are clearly the way to go. The availability, street value, and illegality of drugs form a sweet temptation to character-challenged cops, many of whom wind up shaking down street dealers, converting drugs for their own use, or selling them.

Norm Stamper began his law enforcement career in San Diego in 1966, as a beat cop. In 1994, he was named chief of the Seattle Police Department. He retired in 2000.