Why The Drug War Is A Failure -- And Creates Two Waves Of Crime -- A 1930s LA Story
Johann Hari writes in the LA Times:
For most of the history of the United States, drugs were legal. People could buy opiates and cocaine-based products from their local pharmacy. An opiate-laced brew called Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup, for example, was particularly popular with housewives. One person who viewed this legal system with skepticism was a Los Angeles doctor named Henry Smith Williams. When a small number of his patients became addicted, he was disgusted, and he came to see them as despicable "weaklings." So when opiates and cocaine were banned in 1914, he welcomed this first birth-pang of the drug war with glee.But then he noticed what happened to his addicted patients. They didn't stop using. Instead, "here were tens of thousands of people, in every walk of life, frantically craving drugs that they could in no legal way secure," he wrote in one of his books. "They craved the drugs, as a man dying of thirst craves water. They must have the drugs at any hazard, at any cost."
At the same time, Smith Williams realized that the drug war was "in effect ordering a company of drug smugglers into existence." Because pharmacists could no longer sell these drugs, the Mafia and other criminal organizations stepped in, selling a vastly inferior product at extortionate prices. In the pharmacies, morphine had cost two or three cents a grain, but the criminal gangs charged a dollar.
The death rate among addicts rose, and those who survived began to behave very differently. An official government study had found that, before the drug war kicked in, three-quarters of self-described addicts had steady and respectable jobs: some 22% were wealthy, while only 6% were poor. They were more sedate as a result of their addiction, but they were rarely out of control or criminal. Yet faced with the need to meet these extortionate new prices, many of the men started to commit property crimes, and many of the women started to steal or prostitute themselves.
So Smith Williams watched as the drug war created two waves of crime: first a wave of violent criminal drug-dealers, and then a wave of criminality among addicts. "The United States government," Henry wrote in shock, had become "the greatest and most potent maker of criminals in any recent century."
Drugs being criminal to use or sell does not stop people from using them or selling them -- it just creates criminals of those who do either and often leads to violence.
Predicting dire consequences from decriminalization? That's not what happened in Portugal when they decriminalized possession.
RELATED -- from Maia Szalavitz at Tonic, a piece on how prescribed painkillers didn't cause the opioid crisis:
Researchers had examined records of more than 10,000 hospitalized patients treated with opioids for pain and found only four new cases of addiction...."The simple story is that addiction happens all the time when people get opioids for pain and that simple story is clearly wrong," says Stefan Kertesz, associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Alabama.
The research actually shows that people who developed new addictions in recent years were overwhelmingly not pain patients. Instead, they were mainly friends, relatives, and others to whom those pills were diverted--typically young people. Among the older patients, many who appeared to be newly addicted had actually relapsed or never recovered from prior addictions: some faked pain to get pills from well-meaning doctors; others got them from pill mills where shady physicians wrote prescriptions for cash.
How do we know this--and why is this story so different from the one we hear in the media? For one, the National Household Survey on Drugs has asked about the sources of misused opioids in recent years: this representative survey of tens of thousands of Americans shows that less than a quarter of people who start misusing these drugs obtained them directly from one or multiple doctors. Half of new users, in fact, say they got them from a friend or relative for free.
Secondly, an early study of people being treated for Oxycontin addiction found that 77 percent of them had also taken cocaine--and it's hard to imagine that this was supplied medically or that these pain patients went out in search of a cocaine dealer once they found out how nice opioids are. In addition, only 3.6 percent of people who misuse prescription opioids ever even try heroin. Although 75 percent of heroin users start with prescription opioids these days, very few prescription opioid users actually go on to heroin addiction.
...While the media loves to highlight "innocent victims" who became addicted through medicine, the fact is that this group is a minority. Medical use surely increased access to the drugs--but the people who got hooked tended to do so while using medication that was either prescribed for someone else or otherwise distributed illegally.
...And this has clear implications for what needs to be done. The first is to stop thinking that simply cutting the medical supply will work.
This leads to the sort of horror pain patients these days are forced to go through -- out of a panic that they will get addicted. The real fear should be what happens when they are not prescribed the pain relieving drugs they need -- that they remain in daily torture.
The war on drugs will never be won nor will it ever be over. The reason is quite logical. The many organizations, politicians and federal, state and local governments stand to lose too much money (as in funding) if they admit to this ongoing failure.
Millions of dollars stand to be lost. The budgets of these organizations would be decimated. Highly paid administrators would have to seek work in the real world. The DEA and ATF would be mere skeleton entities.
The war on drugs has become the war to maintain funding and job security for too many people. As always, if you seek an answer just follow the money.
Jay at June 21, 2017 3:30 PM
The war on drugs will never be won nor will it ever be over. The reason is quite logical.
Elements of the public will never be satisfied until they can escape from reality at any time they wish, without consequences. The number seeking escape will vary with the ease with which they can get drugs, and inversely with the number of role models who teach them to cope.
Some airheads will insist that if {name drug here} was available endlessly that there will be fewer casualties. They would be wrong.
Ask someone who has had a crack addiction just how hard it was/is on them, how much money they squandered, how many family members they abandoned, how intact their family is after their addiction because obvious, how much time they've spent in the emergency room.
Then make it easier for them to get crack. Tell me what happens later.
You might know a professor who uses a drug to unwind. Whoopee! Now, don't lie about the costs.
Radwaste at June 21, 2017 4:30 PM
The problem with that Rad is you haven't prevented them from getting crack. The sad reality is you aren't capable of protecting them from themselves.
Ben at June 21, 2017 6:24 PM
It is not societies job to collectively punish all in an effort to say a minority from itself.
If you arent willing to advocate that adults are too incompetent to drink booze you shouldnt support the notion that they are too incompetent to imbibe substances that cause less damage to society and hundreds of time more in tax dollars to police.
Think about this. Tens of billions have been spent on the drug war. Hundreds of billion in money and product have been confiscated. Tens of thousands imprisoned and killed, thousands of people in WITSEC and on permanent disability.
And the end result of all this? Drugs are cheaper now than when they were legal. Imagine how much cheaper still they would be without all that money and effort being spent to limit supply
Why not advocate the illegalization of sugar Rad? it has for more addicts and casualties than any other drug?
Why not outlaw read meat and fat and force everyone to eat healthy?
At what point do you feel the governemnt should stop at telling people how to conduct their lives?
lujlp at June 21, 2017 10:40 PM
"Why not advocate the illegalization of sugar Rad?"
I thought New York was already trying that.
Ben at June 22, 2017 6:07 AM
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