Bush Ignores the Anti-Drug War Tide

There have been many ironic moments during the now thirty-years-long, $300 billion war on drugs.

There was the time when Elvis, strung out on all manner of narcotics, presented himself to President Nixon as drug-busting king and was credentialed a Special Assistant in the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs hours before he overdosed and died.

There was the downfall of Carter administration drug czar Peter Bourne, who after being caught writing a fraudulent prescription for Quaaludes and accused of snorting cocaine at a marijuana legalizers' party, unintentionally transformed the drug war from a public health campaign to a moral and law enforcement battle.

And there was the realization on the part of the DEA that even after the 1984 bust of Tranquilandia, a Colombian jungle lab that produced $15 billion in cocaine, there was no impact on the availability or purity of cocaine on the American market.

Now yet another moment of blistering irony has come: just when the drug war is swinging into reform mode, when opinion among politicians and the public about the success of imprisoning nonviolent drug offenders and interdicting drug traffic is at an all-time low, the most conservative cabinet in years is settling into the White House.

Realists have long said the drug war is intractable. Americans have a problem. They like experimenting with mind-altering substances. Drugs will never be legalized and therefore a lucrative black market will always thrive. But there are now close to 2 million people in American prisons and 500,000 of them -- a full fourth -- are nonviolent drug offenders. Of that number, 62.7 percent are black, even though five times as many whites use drugs. Meanwhile, the United States spends over $40 billion a year to fight the flow of narcotics, and the only sure beneficiary is the prison industry, which has boomed to keep up with a prison population that has doubled since 1980. In big states like New York and California more money is spent on keeping people locked up than on education or health care.

These are some of the numbers, a few of the damning facts. And more and more Americans are aware of them. On Election Day, voters in California, Oregon, Utah, Colorado and Nevada made it clear they believe the war on drugs has created -- in departing drug czar Barry McCaffrey's words -- a veritable "drug gulag." Ballot initiatives challenging law enforcement's blanket treatment of criminals passed by wide margins. Additionally, in Oregon and Utah initiatives to restrict police from keeping seized property of drug offenders -- for years criticized as unconstitutional -- also easily passed. In California, a landmark bill, Proposition 36, will now require that nonviolent offenders be treated instead of jailed, with the result that as many as 37,000 fewer Californians will be incarcerated annually and hundreds of millions of dollars will be saved.

If that were not enough proof of the public's loss of faith in recent drug policy, a 1998 Harvard School of Public Health reports that 78 percent of Americans believe anti-drug efforts have failed, with 58 percent asserting that after five years of increased anti-drug spending the nation's drug problems have not improved.

So it seems we reached a "tipping point" in the war on drugs, to use writer Malcolm Gladwell's phrase for the viral-like passage of an idea into wide acceptance. Indeed, over the past few months condemning drug policy has reached epidemic proportions. Editorialists from the Washington Post, the New York Times and Newsweek have been demanding decreased prison sentences, an end to racist discrepancies between crack and cocaine sentencing and increases in funding for treatment. "Until now," wrote Washington Post columnist Judy Mann, referring to the drug reform movement, "we have had hysteria instead of sensible debate about the way to deal with the wreckage brought on families, society and the Constitution by illegal drugs and the failed war against them."