A Slight Delay

Or, Why I Predict the War On Drugs Will Not End in My Lifetime.

A few days ago in this space, I took up the issue of the “Drug War” as it’s currently being waged, and one of the solutions–namely, legalization–that’s been offered as a means to end it. While I think that there’s tremendous public benefit in solving the drug problem, I have reason–call it my cynical side tempering my idealism–to think that it won’t happen any time soon.

It’s not that the means don’t exist, or that they’re some kind of state secret. Tightening legal loopholes, making better use of existing laws, and going–for once–after the right targets all have the potential to radically alter not only the discussion of this problem, but also (more importantly) its ultimate solubility.

The present methods don’t work. There’s evidence enough on the news, and in any number of cities and suburbs. Multimillion dollar seizures of guns and dope, and the arrest of a handful of hapless small-time dealers make for magnificent theater. But at the end of the day, that theater is about as important–if as expensive and elaborately staged–as a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. The seizures that take place are more theraputic in nature than practical, allowing politicians and law enforcement to congratulate themselves on how wisely they’ve spent your money. They have not, in the meantime, stopped the flow of drugs, nor have they made our neighborhoods one iota safer. They’ve driven a black-market economy that much further underground, and driven prices just that much higher, with all the attendant mayhem.

What’s needed is something we seem to do very rarely: we could draw some lessons from our own history. We learned, or should have learned, a handful of things during the Prohibition era. To wit:

• Prohibition of nearly anything isn’t terribly effective at ensuring that the consumption of that thing will fall off; anyone who wants it badly enough will find it.
• The easiest way to increase the allure of something is to prohibit it.
• The cost of enforcement–not just in dollars, but measured against societal consequences–can be prohibitive, especially measured against real or perceived benefits.
• Rather than cutting down on crime, it creates new breeds and classes of criminals.

To that last point, the same era also showed us the best way to deal with said criminals. Granted, a bunch of G-Men with tommy guns spawned films, television shows, and novels; however, it was their ledger-toting counterparts–accountants and numbers-crunchers–that had the greatest effect. Want to stem the tide of illegal drugs? Follow the money.

This means tightening money-laundering statutes, especially in places like New Jersey where they’re notoriously lax. It means less drug seizures and more RICO Act prosecutions. It means less time and money spent going after individual users and small-time dealers, focusing instead on distribution networks. It also means, as discussed earlier, devising a sane approach to drug policy that allows everyone involved–communities, users, government, et. al.–to address this as a public health issue.

So why, when all is said and done, won’t this happen? By the numbers: 2% of our population–the overwhelming majority black and Latino–is behind bars. This has to do, at least in part, with the fact that sentencing guidelines are stricter on drugs more likely to be found in the inner city, like crack and heroin.

The extensive use of prison labor to manufacture everything from body armor to stereo speakers further complicates things. Now you can have American made product and sweatshop labor–few regulations, no unionization–all rolled into one! While many state prisons pay minimum wage, not all do. Colorado, for instance, pays two bucks an hour, while most private prisons pay less still.

Speaking of private contractors: For all the attention that’s been paid to the use of private contractors in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, it should come as no surprise that an overburdened prison system has also turned to private contractors. For-profit prisons turn profits in the billions per year; they profit from crime as surely as do the criminals they house. The only difference is that your average Colombian or Mexican cartel, to say nothing of your local chapter of the Bloods, Crips, or MS13, isn’t publicly traded.

It wouldn’t take too much cynicism to say that there are a few too many competing interests here. Those supplying the drug trade don’t want their profits driven down by legalization; those who profit from private prisons and prison labor would prefer not to piss off their shareholders; no politician worth his or her campaign button wants to be known as the one that went “soft” on drugs. All of this is unfortunate, since the results of the status quo–as can be seen on the nightly news, or (depending where you read this) out your window–show this to be an issue both of personal and national security, and no small measure of our personal and national sanity.

Sources/Further reading:

Much of the thinking on money laundering that I’ve outlined above comes–in greatly expanded form, naturally–from a series that ran in the Bergen Record called Dirty Money: Why We’re Losing the War on Drugs (1998). The bits on what’s sometimes been called the Prison-Industrial Complex are taken largely from this article by Vicky Pelaez. Three former Latin American heads of state weigh in on the problem in this article from the Wall Street Journal. The Canadian press has also weighed in, as have members of law enforcement. The Seton Hall Legislative Journal, meantime, puts New Jersey’s money-laundering statutes under the microscope.

Tags: Drugs, legalization, money laundering, narcotics, public health, public safety, war on drugs

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.