In Crazy Town: Money. Marriage. Meth.

Here is that chapter from Crazy Town, “War”.

Rarely does a day pass without bold-faced headlines or televised sound bites describing some significant effort or result relative to the U.S. government’s flagship program, the “War on Drugs.” On the political front, a candidate’s unconditional support of any of the “war’s” initiatives represents a stark, black and white litmus test of his or her commitment to the well-being and security – and even the survival – of our great society. To even question the fairness or efficacy of a given initiative all too frequently brands the questioner as being soft on crime or, worse, in cahoots with the criminal element. After all, who could possibly be against reducing the drug problem in our country, or protecting our children from addiction?

Someone who has been through a drug-related personal nightmare, whether it involves methamphetamine or some other substance, might be expected to have a somewhat militant attitude toward the problems directly arising from the use of some illegal drugs (and the illegal use of legal ones). A desire to see certain drugs wiped off the face of the planet would certainly be understandable. Yet such views might be tempered by having witnessed the efforts of regulators and law enforcement personnel, and having seen first-hand the damage that has been done by the spurious “war.” Given the dismal results of our efforts to battle drugs and drug addiction, it is tempting to wonder if we as a society aren’t actually exacerbating the problems in our very efforts to solve them. Perhaps a better perspective can be achieved by looking back to the origins of the drug war, and subsequent efforts over the years,  and then asking ourselves, honestly, what we have achieved so far.

The first battle in the War on Drugs was waged in 1880, when the U.S. and China signed an agreement to outlaw the shipment of opium from China to the U.S. The agreement had a modest effect upon the flow of opium into this country, but its most significant effect was the streamlining of the delivery process. While less raw opium passed into the hands of Americans, a more refined form – heroin – was introduced to replace it. Heroin had first been synthesized in 1874 by an English chemist named C.R. Alder Wright, and subsequently marketed – quite legally – by the Bayer company (of aspirin fame) as a pain reliever and even as a cure for opium addiction! In 1914, a law was passed to regulate its sale and distribution, but heroin remained available to the public until 1924, when legislation was passed making it illegal to import, manufacture, or sell the drug in the U.S. As we have long known, the legislative efforts have been quite effective, as there is no longer a heroin problem in this country, all those people who became addicts before the laws were passed have long since died, and there are no longer any Americans addicted to heroin.

For any reader who failed to notice, that last statement should have been flagged with a bright red “Sarcasm Alert.” Despite all the initial and subsequent efforts to eradicate heroin use in this country, heroin addiction remains a significant problem to both the law enforcement and health care industries. It has been estimated that during the 1970s, there were between 400,000 and 600,000 heroin addicts in the U.S. In 2003, that estimate had decreased to 345,000. While that sounds like a significant decrease, consider some additional numbers that actually overshadow these modest gains: heroin use by twelfth graders increased by more than 100% between the years of 1990 and 1997, the number of heroin-related cases in hospital emergency rooms increased by 64 percent between 1988 and 1994, and 1.6 million Americans were incarcerated for drug-related crimes during the same period, many for distributing or merely possessing heroin. Even as far back as 1926, a significant number of the prisoners in federal penitentiaries were there after being convicted of drug-related crimes. And it is worthy of note that, according to studies endorsed by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), punitive enforcement may have little or no deterring effect on injection drug abuse.

As of this writing, the cost of the “War on Drugs” is in excess of $50 billion per year, when federal, state, and local enforcement programs are included. When you add the cost in property lost as a direct result of drug-related crimes, the number soars much higher. And it is impossible – indeed, unethical – to apply a value to the lives lost in what are commonly labeled “drug-related” crimes, which are more accurately crimes of commerce occurring when a drug deal goes bad: a direct result of the profit incentive that arises from the criminalization of drug manufacture, sale, and use.

To see just how effective criminalizing a recreational substance is in the effort to eliminate its presence in American life, one has only to look at the results of the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enacted on January 16, 1920, which began the period in American history commonly called Prohibition. Legal distillers and breweries ceased operation, only to be replaced by bootleggers and moonshiners who were more than capable of feeding the citizens’ thirst. While tax revenues dropped sharply, income from fines levied against the suppliers soared, as did the price of their products. When it became obvious that there were substantial profits to be made by producing and selling the illegal substances, a concerted effort was begun by organized crime families to get the biggest piece of the illicit pie. Gang violence became a near-daily occurrence, as individual criminal factions competed for control. The booze – and the blood – continued to flow, despite the best efforts of law enforcement, until finally the government realized the futility of their efforts, and on December 5, 1933,  passed the Twenty-First Amendment, repealing Prohibition and ending the “War on Booze.”

A secondary, yet significant effect of the criminalization of a substance is best summed up by Richard Cowan, former director of the National Association for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). Cowan coined the term, “the Iron Law of Prohibition,” which states that “the more intense the law enforcement, the more potent the prohibited substance becomes.” Indeed, history has demonstrated that as efforts to make a substance unobtainable – be it alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, or meth – are increased, the potency of the substance itself increases. During the period of Prohibition, the “moonshine” produced by illicit distillers was typically not only higher in alcohol content, it was also much more frequently contaminated by chemicals that posed as great a health risk as the alcohol itself, if not a greater one. The government’s efforts to stem the flow of cocaine was the primary impetus behind the creation of a more addictive and potent form of the drug: crack.

As to the assertion that by waging a “war on drugs,” we can somehow remove them from existence – particularly by legislation – consider what Radley Balko, policy analyst at the Libertarian think tank The Cato Institute, said. In a 2005 piece about the new restrictions on over-the-counter cold medicines, he opined that the new laws would do little to deplete the meth supply. “Supply of controlled substances always rises to meet demand. It’s similar to the air in a balloon. You can squeeze the supply on one end, but the air inevitably pops up again elsewhere. The total volume of air in the balloon never changes.” The drug supply might relocate, or even change its form, but it can’t be squeezed out of existence.

Yet the passage of new laws seems to be the only “solution” the government can ever come up with. In a 2006 article, Toronto-based journalist Marni Soupcoff, writing about the “Combat Meth Epidemic Act,” came up with the “pufferfish analogy” to describe government. Pufferfish, Soupcoff noted, have the ability to blow themselves up by swallowing water or air when threatened. “Doesn’t that sound familiar?” she asked rhetorically. “Just replace the ‘swallowing water or air’ bit with ‘passing laws,’ and you’ve got a perfect match.” In other words, “Government is a giant sea creature, trying to swell itself up with new legislation to keep itself alive.”

This is not at all an argument in favor of making methamphetamine more readily available to the general public. Given my own experiences, it would be understandable if I were predisposed to locking every user away for the rest of their natural lives (well, perhaps one or two of them!). But while I desperately want the whole meth problem to go away, I am convinced that we have gone the wrong way in our previous efforts to solve the problem, and have, in fact, only made things worse. By making the penalty for simple possession so severe, we have greatly increased the incentive for criminals to go to the very profitable well of supplying the drug to others. By aggressively enforcing the laws restricting its use, we have created a cottage industry of do-it-yourselfers, who face lesser legal risks by making their own, while actually increasing the dangers they face in the form of lab fires and accidents, poisoning due to lack of expertise in formulating their drugs, and even retribution from criminal drug distributors who don’t want anyone cutting into their cash flow. Beyond that, we are creating an entire, huge class of criminals out of individuals who led otherwise law-abiding lives, and whose only crime was poor judgment.

To make matters worse, when we transform users into inmates, we have paid their tuition to the ultimate school for criminal training – the prison system. We pay to house them for years, in an environment geared not toward helping them overcome their problems, but rather toward molding them into real, hardened criminals. Once a prisoner is released, he or she has a new set of criminal skills, along with diminished opportunity to acclimate back into a lawful existence. It should come as no surprise that most of them end up right back in prison.

The War on Drugs is further stymied by the fact that the demand for mind-altering, or at least mood-altering, substances seems to be inherent in our species. The desire to get intoxicated or high may very well be hard-wired into our brains. In the late 1980s, Ronald K. Siegel, a research psychopharmacologist at UCLA, wrote a book called Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances. Re-issued in 2005, and as controversial at re-issue as when it was first published, the book postulates that intoxication is “the fourth drive” – that the desire to get drunk or stoned is the most powerful human drive, after hunger, thirst, and sex. This drive is not limited to the human animal by any means; some mammals and birds appear to seek out psychoactive plants, fermented berries, and the like for the sole purpose of getting a buzz.

More than one reviewer has taken issue with Siegel’s extrapolations from wild animals’ consumption of psychoactive plants to people’s use of, and addiction to, recreational drugs. Whether or not one agrees that the desire to get high is a “fourth drive,” however, it seems clear that it is fairly deeply rooted in our species. In view of this, the attempt to wipe out recreational drug use completely is a fool’s errand.

It is beyond the scope of this book, and certainly beyond my own qualifications, to attempt to establish the “right” way to deal with the drug problem in general, or the meth problem in particular. There are many people who are infinitely better qualified than I to determine the criteria for an effective drug program. However, I do have some small amount of common sense, and can see very plainly that what we have been doing for the last hundred years or so simply isn’t working, and never has. That common sense tells me that it never will. Until we put down the shovel we have used to dig ourselves into this massive hole, we will never get out. My hope is that we’ll at least stop digging long enough to look honestly at our “progress,” and put some real energy – rather than photo-op lip service – into healing ourselves, so that we won’t feel so compelled to medicate ourselves into oblivion.

 ~ from Crazy Town: Money. Marriage. Meth. (Braswell, 2008)