Drugs, Guns and Money

Just about everone hates the War on Drugs. Public officials and pundits at every point along the political spectrum, from the governors of New Mexico and Minnesota to the former mayor of Baltimore, have railed against its wastefulness; Detroit Police Chief Jerry Oliver blames it for exacerbating inner-city crime. William F. Buckley calls it a "plague that consumes an estimated $75 billion per year in public money"; Christopher Hitchens has labeled it "grotesque, state-sponsored racketeering."

According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last year, three-quarters of the country believes the drug war is failing. Enter the words "end the war on drugs" into Google, and you'll get some 2,400 links, leading to the Web sites of religious groups, corporate-media sources and drug-legalization advocacy groups.

You might also get a couple of "sponsored links" -- paid advertisements Google coughs up when you search for certain keywords. One evening I got two: an ad for Questia.com, where you can "research the War on Drugs at the world's largest online library," and another for www.mymeds.org, advertising "Xanax, Valium, Lortab, etc. (Import a 90-day personal supply)."

The irony is obvious, and clichéd enough to be comical. As Mike Gray points out in the introduction to his new anthology, "Busted: Stone Cowboys, Narco-Lords and Washington's War on Drugs" (Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books), the U.S. government spends over $40 billion annually to promote the cause of a drug-free America, while Bob Dole appears on national television shilling for Viagra. Marijuana is non-lethal and non-addictive, but you can't talk about it on the phone; Xanax is known to be dangerously addictive and Valium is responsible for thousands of deaths by overdose every year, but both are readily available with the click of a mouse.

"There has never been a drug-free society anywhere," argues Gray, also author of the 1998 "Drug Crazy: How We Got Into This Mess and How We Can Get Out," "least of all in the United States where the dividing line between legal and illegal seems almost whimsical."

This deep societal muddle-mindedness finds a parallel in public attitudes toward the control of illegal substances. Despite a majority vote of non-confidence for the drug war, the Pew study found that most Americans still defend its tactics. Over half of the people interviewed believed that arresting and locking up both drug users and dealers were the best solutions to our drug problems, even while our prisons fill to bursting with nonviolent offenders.

Just as many poll participants agreed that more needed to be done to halt the importation of illegal substances, even though attempts to shut down the international market have only contributed to a more sophisticated network of international criminals willing to risk their lives to satisfy the lucrative American market.

And so the drug war continues unabated, with the Bush administration -- for which legalization proponents once held out hope -- ramping up spending on interdiction and enforcement and aiming to expand punishable offenses to include driving while under the influence of yesterday's marijuana. The DEA, in an effort to make wayward states comply with the federal ban on any kind of marijuana use, has stooped so low that it's raiding California hospices and carting away the terminally ill.

"The War on Drugs," says Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance, a think tank advocating drug-law reform, "just keeps getting bigger and meaner."

"Busted" begins with an essay by T.D. Allman called "Blow Back," an earlier version of which ran in Rolling Stone last spring, just as the billion-dollar defoliation and harassment effort known as "Plan Colombia" was found to have resulted in a 25 percent increase in coca production. It's an apt beginning: Allman uses the blunders of Colombia as a metaphor for U.S. drug policy, which "trundles along, divorced from reality." The War on Drugs has become, he argues, an institutionalized arm of the federal government, "much like the Department of the Interior." Among the salaried careerists who stroll the manicured lawns of Arlington, Virginia, where the DEA is headquartered, Allman detected "no real sense that the War on Drugs was something that might actually be lost or won, and end someday."