A Bloated Vestige of the Past, the DEA Struggles for Relevancy

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According to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) website, when the agency was established in 1973, it had 1,470 special agents and a budget of less than $75 million. Today it boasts over 5,000 special agents (which doesn’t include what must be tens of thousands of support staff) and a budget of $2.03 billion. That’s a sizable organization and one with a long reach into the various branches of government and the military.

Yet today there is an article in the Huffington Post in which the author seems befuddled by the recent efforts of the DEA to place the rather benign herbal supplement Kratom into Schedule 1 of the Controlled Substances Act along with heroin, cocaine and crack. The author correctly notes the softening trend nationwide toward marijuana prohibition, and wonders why the DEA would be taking such a Draconian stance against an herb that has little potential for abuse and that many people use for help with various medical ailments.

The obvious answer to the Kratom conundrum is found in the first paragraph. The DEA has become a huge, bloated bureaucracy over the past 43 years that is now fighting for its survival. The change in attitude toward marijuana and drug prohibition in general has the agency running scared, and it is now grasping at straws to try and retain its relevance. We saw this just recently when it refused to take marijuana off the Schedule 1 list despite the mountains of data and research attesting to the drug’s relative safety and proven medical benefits.

The question is, what do you do with a large government agency that history has passed by and is now doing more harm than good (if it ever did do any good)? In Washington, you plug your ears and sing “Na, na, na” for as long as you’re able so that you can hopefully hand-off your expensive White Elephant to the next administration. Not long ago, Obama appointed a new head of the DEA who is only a slightly less maniacal drug warrior than his predecessor, indicating that this president isn’t going to walk into the political minefield associated with downsizing the Pentagon of the drug war.

Not surprisingly, there has been no indication from either Trump or Clinton that their administrations will take a more reasoned approach to drug prohibition than Obama. So the prognosis is that our government will spend more billions of tax dollars and keep increasing the prison population for base political reasons. And people are upset that an athlete won’t stand during the pledge of allegiance.

America’s Racist Legacy: The Real Reason for the War on Drugs

So here we are, forty-five years after the inception of the war on drugs, after spending tens of billions of dollars, after overseeing the deaths and imprisonment of untold numbers of people, after ravaging numerous Latin American countries, after helping establish and expand bloodthirsty drug cartels, after creating the cocaine epidemic of the seventies and eighties, after jailing tens of thousands of Americans for non-violent drug offenses, after all of that we learn what the war on drugs was really all about: racism.

John Ehrlichman, a former top Nixon aide and central figure in the Watergate scandal, confessed to a reporter in 1994 that the primary reason for initiating the war on drugs was to oppress Nixon’s primary enemies, blacks and hippies. This is what Ehrlichman said:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

If this doesn’t make you ashamed of being an American, you must be a Trump supporter. The toll that racism has taken on this country since its earliest days is incalculable, and in 2016 we have presidential candidates appealing once again to the bigotry and hatred felt by a segment of white Americans. It’s shameful and disgusting and is cause for much of the rest of the world to see us as the village idiot of the global community. 

Thinking people have long argued that the war on drugs was racist in nature, but even they believed incarcerating large numbers of people of color was a byproduct of a war that’s primary mission was to end the illegal drug trade. They were wrong. It was from the very beginning a tool to oppress and disrupt the lives of American citizens who were perceived to be a threat to the establishment.

Perhaps the saddest part of all of this is that no one will ever be brought to justice for this major crime against U.S. citizens. Like the perpetrators of the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crises, the bigger your crime, the more likely you are to go unpunished. And many citizens of this country continue to harbor racist beliefs and support leaders who espouse white supremacy. Nixon’s legacy lives on in today’s Republican presidential candidates.

Will Our Next President Have the Courage to End the War on Drugs?

The war on drugs has been a hopeless boondoggle since its inception in the mid-seventies. It has syphoned off billions of dollars over the past 40 years that could have gone to much more useful endeavors such as renovating America’s crumbling infrastructure or funding clean energy sources.

And who has benefited from this unwinnable and costly war? As the chart above clearly shows, a major benefactor has been the nation’s prison system, and in recent years, a growing number of privately run prisons around the country. This is, however, only the tip of the iceberg. Local law enforcement organizations have hauled in tens of millions of dollars by seizing property and cash from both guilty and innocent suspects. A huge government bureaucracy was built that employs thousands of people who have a stake in keeping the drug war going. And the war has given rise to numerous vicious drug cartels that spread chaos and violence as they fight for their piece of the illegal drug trade.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that people of color are the primary victims of our drug war. Millions of young black and brown men sit in prison cells learning how to be better criminals instead of gaining job skills and contributing to their communities.

There is some hope. The movement to end the war on drugs is coming from the bottom up as more and more states move to decriminalize pot, a substance that is still considered as dangerous as heroin by the federal government. We now need a President who will end this fruitless and wasteful effort and channel that money into projects that benefit all Americans. 

The war on drugs has been a disaster on many levels, and here’s why

By every measure the war on drugs has been a complete failure, and there are few people outside of Washington who would dispute that. Despite this, Obama’s new budget asks for $27.6 billion for federal drug control programs, a billion more than last year. More lives will be lost, more people will be jailed and more criminals will be rewarded. It is a tragic cycle that is perpetuated by politics and an entrenched serpentine bureaucracy that demands to be fed.

For nearly a century, we have been accosted with propaganda from the government about the dangers of drugs and addiction, and brainwashed into believing that drug users are dangerous “others” or criminals who will sell their babies for a fix. Like I said, this is the propaganda. The truth, however, might shock you.

I read a truly illuminating article at Alternet this morning here. It’s an interview with Johan Hari, author of the book, “Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs.” What’s fascinating about Hari’s findings after four years of world-wide research is that basically everything we think we know about drug use and abuse and how to deal with it is wrong. The war on drugs, according to Hari, is based on totally false notions of what the problem is and how to deal with it.

If you have any interest in drug policy or the war on drugs, I encourage you to read this article and pass it on.

The War on (Legalizing) Drugs

There are a number of powerful organizations across the country using their money and influence to try and stop marijuana legalization. They have a legal right to do this, of course, but it’s their motives that are highly problematic. From law enforcement organizations to pharmaceutical companies to private prisons and prison guards to alcohol and beer companies, the reason they oppose legal marijuana revolves around profits. It all boils down to money.

As knowledge about cannabis has spread, the “all drugs are bad” mentality has shifted, and there are few serious attempts anymore to portray marijuana as the devil weed of depraved and soulless addicts. Today’s opponents of legalization have much more practical objections. Once again, capitalism raises its amoral head. For the companies that object to legalization, arguments do not revolve around what’s clearly the right thing to do for society, but how legalization will affect their bottom lines. There’s no concern for the tens of thousands of people doing hard time in prison for being caught with a baggie of pot. There’s no sympathy for the disproportionately large number of African Americans serving time for pot possession. There’s no interest in the scientific findings that marijuana is far less hazardous to a person’s health and far less addictive than alcohol or tobacco. Our allegiance, they will gladly tell you, is to our shareholders and investors.

Although their objections to marijuana legalization are morally repugnant, it’s not hard to understand the resistance of police and private prisons. The more people they arrest and lock up, the more money they make through various channels. The groups that puzzle me are the alcohol and pharmaceutical companies. Both of these industries seem perfectly suited to take advantage of legalization and profit form it. They already have distribution channels, staff for research and development, and in the case of alcohol companies, a network of farmers who would probably be happy to grow marijuana alongside their hops and barley.

The other aspect to consider is the inevitability of legalization. Spending tens of millions of dollars opposing the will of the American people seems incredibly stupid from a business standpoint. The snowball is rolling down the hill and while some efforts may succeed in slowing it down, it won’t be stopped. If I were Anheuser Busch, I’d quit throwing money away on anti-legalization efforts and put it toward retooling the company to start growing, packaging and selling pot. Actually, it wouldn’t surprise me if behind the scenes, they weren’t already doing just that.

One more nail in the war on drugs coffin

Momentum is building for real change in America’s draconian policies toward illegal drugs, but we still have a long way to go. A new report by the London School of Economics analyzed in an Alternet article looks at the huge economic and social costs of the international war on drugs, and why we should be dismantling a failed policy that is doing much more harm than good.

Looking beyond the most obvious damages caused by the drug war — drug cartels, violence, jailing of citizens for non-violent crimes — the research exposes the lesser known, but no less harmful, costs of our current approach: enforcing drug laws actually increases the profitability of illegal drugs, counter narcotics efforts worldwide are based on faulty assumptions and have led to horrible unintended consequences, there are huge costs related to displaced populations, how mass incarcerations are a public health disaster and the harm done to constitutional commitments when long established principles are sacrificed to meet the reactionary needs of the drug war.

With the exception of a few Washington drug warriors on the propaganda payroll, virtually no one thinks the war on drugs has been a success. This latest report is one more in a long line of indictments of our failed drug policies and confirms that the war on drugs can’t end too soon.

American taxpayers keep a Mexican drug cartel in business

An investigative report by the Mexican paper El Universal finds that since at least 2000, the CIA has been working with the Sinaloa drug cartel, allowing them to smuggle billions of dollars worth of drugs into the U.S. in exchange for information on the activities of other drug cartels.

Mmmm. Let me get this straight. Instead of taking down one of Mexico’s largest drug operations, we allow them to conduct business as usual in exchange for information on their competitors. Makes total sense. U.S. taxpayers are spending billions of dollars every year for a war on drugs, but billions of dollars worth of drugs are being allowed into this country in an arrangement that makes the Sinaloa cartel stronger than ever.

Please, make the insanity stop. Our taxes are going to pay for this lunacy. Think of the things the trillions of dollars spent on the drug war over the past 40 years could have gone to – scientific research, strengthening public education, technological advances, much needed repairs to the countries roads and bridges, and much more. Instead it’s been dumped down a black hole that eventually ends up lining the pockets of criminals.

Make some noise. Write to your representatives and tell them to end the war on drugs. The sooner the better.

Drugs and the politics of control

I have one additional thought around drugs and this country’s draconian approach to drug use. There is a puritanical, Calvinist heritage that runs strong and deep through America’s roots. This strain of Christianity equates pleasure with sin, fun with frivolity and the questioning of dogma as heresy. Even in more moderate branches of Christianity, pleasure for pleasure’s sake has always been frowned upon. Although there may not be many people who consciously identify with these more fundamentalist teachings, they have nonetheless influenced America’s elites, who support this harsh ideology as a way to control the rabble. Think about it. As late as 1984 we had a hit movie (Footloose) about a big city boy who moves to a small town where they don’t allow dancing in high school.

Mind-altering drugs are a direct threat to an orderly, controlled, obedient society. Just as in prior centuries where the clergy attacked anything (including science) that challenged approved church dogma, elites today are terrified that if people start experiencing different realities, opening their minds to different ways of living and thinking, the one-percent’s grasp on the levers of power will be threatened. What happened in the 1960s scared the shit out of the ruling class and they’ve been working hard over the last 50 years to try and stop it from happening again.

Fortunately, they won’t succeed. Spineless politicians and FOX pundits may still cling to their drug war mentality, but the people are moving forward without them. South American and European countries are telling the hypocritical, drug-consuming U.S. enough is enough, your drug war is a sham and it’s time to try a new approach. The dominos are falling fast. There will come a time when prisons house those who truly belong there, not a bunch of schmucks who got busted for nothing more than smoking a blunt.