We interrupt our coverage of the war on terrorism to check in with that
other permanent conflict
against a stateless enemy, the war on drugs. To judge by the glee at the
White House Office
of National Drug Control Policy, the drug warriors have just accomplished
the moral
equivalent of routing the Taliban — helping to halt a relentless jihad
against the nation's drug laws.
Ballot initiatives in Ohio (treatment rather than prison for nonviolent
drug offenders), Arizona (the same,
plus making marijuana possession the equivalent of a traffic ticket, and
providing free pot for medical
use) and Nevada (full legalization of marijuana) lost decisively this month.
Liberalization measures in
Florida and Michigan never even made it to the ballot.
Some of this was due to the Republican election tide. Some was generational
— boomer parents like
me, fearful of seeing our teenagers become drug-addled slackers. (John
Walters, the White House
drug czar, shrewdly played on this anxiety by hyping the higher potency
of today's pot with the line,
"This is not your father's marijuana.") Some may have been a reluctance
to loosen any social safety
belts when the nation is under threat. Certainly a major factor was that
proponents of change, who had
been winning carefully poll-tested ballot measures, state by state, since
California in 1996, found
themselves facing a serious and well-financed opposition, cheered on by
Mr. Walters.
The truly amazing thing is that 30 years into the modern war on drugs,
the discourse is still focused
disproportionately on marijuana rather than more important and excruciatingly
hard problems like
heroin, cocaine and methamphetamines.
The drug liberalizers — an alliance of legal reformers, liberals, libertarians
and potheads — dwell on
marijuana in part because a lot of the energy and money in their campaign
comes from people who
like to smoke pot and want the government off their backs. Also, marijuana
has provided them with
their most marketable wedge issue, the use of pot to relieve the suffering
of AIDS and cancer patients.
Never mind that the medical benefits of smoking marijuana are still mostly
unproven (in part because
the F.D.A. almost never approves the research and the pharmaceuticals industry
sees no money in
it). The issue may be peripheral, but it appeals to our compassion, especially
when the administration
plays the heartless heavy by sending SWAT teams to arrest people in wheelchairs.
Thus a movement
that started, at least in the minds of reform sponsors like the billionaire
George Soros, as an effort to
reduce the ravages of both drugs and the war on drugs, has become mostly
about pot smoking.
The more interesting question is why the White House is so obsessed with
marijuana. The memorable
achievements of Mr. Walters's brief tenure have been things like cutting
off student loans for kids with
pot convictions, threatening doctors who recommend pot to cancer patients
and introducing TV
commercials that have the tone and credibility of wartime propaganda. One
commercial tells pot
smokers that they are subsidizing terrorists. Another shows a stoned teenager
discovering a handgun
in Dad's desk drawer and dreamily shooting a friend. (You'll find it at
www.mediacampaign.org. Watch
it with the sound off and you'd swear it was an ad for gun control.)
Drug czars used to draw a distinction between casual-use drugs like marijuana
and the hard drugs
whose craving breeds crime and community desolation. But this is not your
father's drug czar. Mr.
Walters insists marijuana is inseparable from heroin or cocaine. He offers
two arguments, both of
which sound as if they came from the same people who manufacture the Bush
administration's flimsy
economic logic.
One is that marijuana is a "gateway" to hard-drug use. Actually Mr. Walters,
who is a political
scientist but likes to sound like an epidemiologist, prefers to say that
pot use is an "increased risk
factor" for other drugs. The point in our conversation when my nonsense-alarm
went off was when he
likened the relationship between pot and hard drugs to that between cholesterol
and heart disease. In
fact, the claim that marijuana leads to the use of other drugs appears
to be unfounded. On the contrary,
an interesting new study by Andrew Morral of RAND, out in the December
issue of the British journal
Addiction, shows that the correlation between pot and hard drugs can be
fully explained by the fact that
some people, by virtue of genetics or circumstances, have a predisposition
to use drugs.
Mr. Walters's other justification for turning his office into the War on
Pot is the dramatic increase in
the number of marijuana smokers seeking professional help. This, he claims,
reflects an alarming rise
in the number of people hooked on cannabis. But common sense and the government's
own statistics
suggest an alternative explanation: if you're caught with pot, enrolling
in a treatment program is the
price of avoiding jail. And marijuana arrests have doubled in less than
a decade, to 700,000 a year,
even as use of the drug has remained static. In other words, the stampede
of pot smokers into
treatment is probably not a sign of more dependency, but of more aggressive
enforcement.
So what's really going on at the White House drug office? I can think of
three answers. One is that
they are sincerely worried about pot. Marijuana is not harmless. Regular
pot smoking can mess with
your memory and attention span, your immune system and fertility. Mr. Walters
may feel the dangers
justify a lot of hyperbole.
A second explanation is the old political-bureaucratic imperative. To justify
a $19 billion drug control
program you need a threat that touches middle-class voters — not just the
few million mostly
wretched, mostly inner-city, mostly nonvoting users of heroin and cocaine.
And you want to be able to
claim success. When he appointed Mr. Walters, President Bush announced
he wanted "measurable
results," and the measure would be a reduction in the number of people
who admit to being recent
drug users — 10 percent by 2004. Well, since three-fourths of illicit drug
users are pot smokers, the
easy way to get the numbers down is to attack the least important aspect
of the drug problem. That
will give President Bush some bogus victories to boast about when he runs
for re-election.
The third reason is the culture war. Mr. Walters is a veteran of the conservative
political bunkers,
where pot is viewed as a manifestation of moral degeneracy. "It's still
about the war in Vietnam and
growing your hair long," says Mark Kleiman, a drug law expert at U.C.L.A.
and a thoughtful centrist in
a debate monopolized by extremes. "It's the 60's being replayed again and
again and again — the S.D.S.
versus the football team." For this White House, to give ground on pot
would be a moral surrender.
Mr. Kleiman's view, which I find persuasive, is that the way to deal with
marijuana is to remove
criminal penalties for possession, use (recreational or medicinal) and
cultivation of small amounts, but
not to legalize sale. It's silly and costly to treat people as outlaws
for enjoying a drug that is roughly
as addictive as caffeine and far less destructive than tobacco or alcohol.
At the same time, the
inexorable logic of a legal marketplace would mean a lot more consumption
and abuse. Consider this
statistic: Fifty percent of the liquor industry's revenues are derived
from alcoholics — people who down
at least four drinks every day. The sin business, whether it's a private
liquor company or a state-run
lottery, may preach responsible behavior, but it thrives on addiction.
Once you're past pot, you face the gloomy landscape of hard drugs, along
with newer chemical
worries like Ecstasy. If your experience of the hard-core drug world is
mostly from movies like "Traffic"
or two splendid HBO series, "The Corner" and "The Wire," you may be inclined
to despair of easy
answers. You would not be wrong. The moralistic drug war has overstuffed
our prisons, left
communities fatherless, fed corruption, consumed vast quantities of law
enforcement time and money,
and led us into some cynical foreign ventures, all without making drugs
scarcer or more expensive.
Legalization, on the other hand, means less crime and inner-city misery,
but more addicts.
The things worth doing are incremental and unglamorous and lacking in demagogic
appeal. They aim
not at winning a spurious war but at minimizing harm — both the harm caused
by drugs, and the harm
caused by draconian enforcement. Almost everyone (including Mr. Walters,
in principle) agrees that
diverting drug users into treatment, preferably backed by the threat of
jail, is much better than
consigning them to prison. But liberalizers are all carrot, and drug warriors
are all stick. The drug czar
who so eagerly intervened in Arizona and Nevada has kept his distance from
efforts to humanize New
York's merciless and failed Rockefeller drug laws.
Drug reform requires not only money, creativity and patience, but also
the political courage to face
down ideologues. And political courage, you may have noticed, is a lot
harder to come by than drugs.