Casualty of War –A Point-by-Point Argument for Drug Decriminalization

    

“I’m a POW, you know—a prisoner of war.” It was a joke I often made, while I was doing my little 5-year bid, probably disrespectful to the real POWs who went thru unimaginable stuff in ‘Nam and elsewhere, but that wasn’t my intent.

Fact of the matter is, I felt like a casualty of war—America’s War on Drugs.

I didn’t die, but I’ve often argued that caging people for some number of years is tantamount to murdering those years of their lives. After all, I lost those years, in every meaningful sense of the word.

My business, too, was a casualty. (I was, at the time of my indictment, running a pretty successful small contracting company.) My home, my bank balance, my reputation—all lost to the War on Drugs. All casualties.

My relationship with my daughter—a casualty of war. (Oh, we’re still close now, since I got home—thank God. But where I was once her primary caregiver, now I have to fight to get an occasional weekend with her. It’s not the same, not by a long shot.)

This isn’t an attempt to avoid responsibility for the havoc I wreaked upon my own life. I broke law, I took risks, and I got smacked for it. End of story.

But I do wonder, why?

What was the damn point?

The Internet doesn’t need another dissection of the failures of the current Drug War policy. Drug use is up, overdoses are up, violence and other drug-related crime—all inexorably up. There’s more statistical proof than I could possibly aggregate here; we’ve lost this war.

So why keep fighting it? I’d often have this discussion with guys in lockup. And funny thing, most of them, just like most of you, couldn’t imagine a world in which America abandoned the drug war.

The conversations would go something like this:

“I mean, what’s the actual problem we’re trying to deal with, here?” I’d ask ‘em. “With the War on Drugs… What are we trying to fix?”

…And then people would look at me crazy. “The problem?” they’d say.

“Yep. What’s the problem the drug war is addressing?”

“Well, I guess the problem is…” They’d think for a minute. “Problems, plural. They’re manifold.”

I’d beam at that. “Good. Absolutely right. Let’s look at ’em one at a time. Pick one.”

“Okaaay…” By now they’d be warming to this. “Well, overdoses, I guess. I know everybody’s freaking out about the overdoses.”

“Hm,” I’d say. “That’s a tough one you picked. Well, let’s look at the last fifty years of statistics. Is the ‘War on Drugs’ keeping the overdoses down? Are we having less people OD, since we’ve stepped up the interdiction and enforcement, year after year?”

“Um. No?” They’d guess.

“Fuckin’ right, ‘no.’ Not by a long shot. The more the DEA works, the more they spend, the more kids die. You can’t legislate morality. Now let me ask you this, re: the overdoses. If we dropped the drug war, legalized everything—or at least decriminalized it—do the overdoses go up or down?”

At this point, people would just shake their heads. “I don’t know… Up?”

“Well,” I’d shoot back, “they haven’t in Europe, in Canada, in dozens of countries and districts and cities where they’ve already been decriminalizing. In fact, the deaths go down. By half, in Portugal. Abuse rates, too. The thing is, the people who use drugs? They use ’em whether or not it’s legal to do so. And the people who don’t, they’re not gonna just up and decide to turn themselves into junkies one day, because there’s smack on the shelves at 7-11 now.”

They’d nod. Anybody who’s been around drugs much would know this to be true.

“And hell, if you got legal drugs for sale, you can regulate the dosages, the potency—and you eliminate the accidental overdoses, at least. You see that with those new ‘injection sites’ they’re testing in Vancouver and elsewhere.”

“But, wait,” they’d say, “what about crime? The biggest problem with drugs, as far as ‘the man’ is concerned, isn’t really junkies OD’ing, no matter what they say on the news. It’s the crime.”

“Ah,” I’d give ‘em a sagacious nod. “And which crime is that? The crime that comes with low-level dealers shooting it out over territory?”

“Well, yeah, that…”

“Okay, so let me ask you this: If you decriminalize the drugs, what happens to the drug prices?”

“They…go down?” (God forbid, most of the dealers would be thinking.)

“They go down. Tenfold, maybe a hundredfold. Now, think it through, and you tell me… You see people shooting people over fifty-cent bags of crack? You see 7-11 clerks whacking each other over territory, with that kind of low profit margin at stake?”

At this point, they’d laugh, shrug, but would not concede. “You’ve still got the users, all the theft and bullshit they do to get high.”

I’d give ‘em placating here. “True, true. But hey, let me ask you this: You ever use drugs yourself?” I’d say it with sincerity, no hint of facetiousness at all, even though a sober convict’s rarer than an innocent verdict in federal court. “Because if you have,” I’d continue, smirking now, “you probably already know that people will beg, borrow and steal to get high, if they want to get high. I’ve seen a veritable parade in my life—burners, boosters, burglars, brawlers… And the one thing they have in common, most of ’em?” I’d pause dramatically here... “All they wanted was to score enough money to get high. So, what happens if you decriminalize, and prices tank? Less crime, ipso facto.”

“All right, good point.” Nobody could argue that logic. “But what about the cartels and all that, Max?”

I’d scoff. “That’s the biggest inconsistency in the whole drug war. What is it, you think, that makes the cartels so damn powerful, so damn bad, to begin with, hmm?” Then I’d answer my own question: “Money. It’s all about the money. And the drug war is the only reason the drugs are worth so much money in the first place! We’re causing our own problem, here. And Mexico’s.”

“Well, I suppose…” Even the guys who essentially make their living in the drug trade usually haven’t done much deep thinking on the economics of it.

“There’s no ‘suppose’ about it,” I’d retort. “I mean, do you know why there’s so much profit in drugs? Do you?”

“Um. Americans have disposable income? And like to self-medicate?”

I’d bark a laugh at this. “True enough. But listen, what makes drugs worth so much in the first place? Do you know what it takes to make cocaine? Heroin? Meth?”

Most of the guys would have some idea, but they wouldn’t have thought about it much, until I made the point. “The point is, the answer is: Nothing. Fucking. Special. It takes nothing fucking special to make any of this crap. Cocaine comes from coca leaves. Heroin comes from flowers, for God’s sake… Meth comes from overseas chemical precursor suppliers, or even your local Home Depot; there’s a dozen ways to do it, and I’ve seen ’em all.

“What I’m getting at is, none of this shit comes from rare earth mines or meteors or volcanoes or anything like that. It’s not gold, diamonds, platinum, whatever that we’re talking about here. They’re not precious metals and gems, drugs are just old-fashioned chemical compounds, medicines refined from nature in pretty much the same way it was done two hundred years ago.”

Most everyone’s seen enough documentaries on NatGeo to know the truth of this.

I’d keep pressing. “There’s nothing inherently expensive or valuable about drugs in themselves. No more than aspirin, say, or any other hundred-year-old remedy with no patent attached. So, why are kilograms of the stuff worth thirty, fifty grand? Hm? Why, if not for the transport costs, if not for the risk?”

“The risk?”

“Sure, the risk. The risk of bringing it over here, the risk of getting caught with it. That’s what drives the costs up!”

“Okay, sure…”

“Exactly,” I’d go on vindicated. “Because of the smuggling costs, because of the risk, you have these substances that shouldn’t be worth more than your average over-the-counter analgesic meds suddenly commanding luxury-car prices! Something that costs only a couple hundred dollars to make is suddenly worth a hundred or a thousand times as much, thanks to DEA interdiction efforts. Now, who benefits from this, hm?”

“Um.”

“I’ll give you a hint: what ‘problem’ were we addressing just now?”

“Um, I forget… Oh! The cartels?”

“Yes! The cartels! The crazy, murderous, violent cartel thugs in the drug game, giving Mexico a bad name with all the killings and beheadings and crap. The cartels, who are in the drug game why?”

“…For money, obviously.”

“For money,” I’d agree. “For money that’s only there because of the fuckin’ War on Drugs in the first place.” Now I’d look at them triumphantly. “The drug war is perpetuating its own problems. Causing them, even.”

“So… No drug war, no interdiction, no risk…” They’d be working it out here. “Prices go down? Cartel guys wouldn’t know what to do.”

“Right. Trust me, nobody wants drugs legalized less than the cartel guys do. It’s the drug war that’s making them rich men. If it ever stops, the cartels are out of business, almost overnight. It doesn’t take sophisticated cartel guys to make the damn drugs, it takes some peasant farmers, mostly.

“Heroin and cocaine shouldn’t cost more than cotton or sugarcane. And none of it has to be, or should be any more profitable for the producers.”

There’d be silence as they all pondered this for a moment, until they’d come back to reality.

“All bullshit aside, Max,” they’d tell me, “it’ll never happen. Even if it would work… From somebody like, I dunno, my mom’s perspective, say, it sounds like a prescription for thousands of kids blowing their hearts out with fifty-cent speedballs, like, overnight…”

“Well,” I’d say, “if you wanna kill yourself, it’s easy enough to do now, as it is. Bullets are cheap, if you’re already of a suicidal mindset. And hell, alcohol is cheap, too, and legal, if you want to go out and get intoxicated. Didn’t you see ‘Leaving Las Vegas?’”

“Sure, but—”

“Listen, I’m not saying there’s not still going to be problems. You’re still gonna have kids doing reckless shit, still gonna have addicts—although maybe those addicts can at least be functioning addicts, if their fix becomes affordable and easily available, not a crime. But yeah, you’re still gonna have to have rehabs, and education, and all that jazz. Some regulation, even. Age limits, and the like.

“And most important of all, you gotta have parents teaching and guiding their kids. That’s crucial.”

At this, the guys I’d be walking the yard with—most of whom had had lives that were markedly deficient in the parental-supervision metric—would nod. They mostly had kids themselves, and a lot of them were seeing first-hand the impact their absence was having on their own children’s maturing.

Just another casualty.

Look, we know that Nixon’s Chief of Staff admitted that they only started the whole ‘War on Drugs’ in ’71 to create an excuse to arrest hippies and the anti-war types. We know that the laws against drugs, each one, can be traced back to one ethnic group or another that the people in power at the time wanted to disenfranchise. You ever wonder why alcohol’s legal, but drugs aren’t?

In 44 years of life, I’ve seen nothing but waste as a result of this War on Drugs. I’ve seen guys getting busted with a single baggie and ghost-doped to kingpin level. I’ve seen gals getting charged as co-conspirators simply for living in the same house as a drug dealer, and maybe turning a blind eye. I’ve seen families torn apart by incarceration, murder, addiction—I’ve lived through most of those things.

What I haven’t seen is any of this being ameliorated by prohibition and the drug war. And the ass-backwards policies just get worse, as the prison system’s become a self-perpetuating machine.

Decriminalization doesn’t solve every problem. But it instantly gets a couple million Americans out of jail and out of the criminal justice system altogether. It cuts crime way back, it cuts violence way back, we save a shit-ton of money, and, based on the stats from Europe and elsewhere, if we do get any uptick in usage at all, it’s a minor one, and short-lived.

I’d finish with this: “If we got rid of this drug war, you know what the best part would be?”

“No, what’s the best part?”

“The best part would be, we—America, my country and yours—we finally get to stop being hypocrites.”