Lawson for Congress

Going through medical training gave me a valuable perspective on humanity. There’s no doubt we are “fallen creatures” — from psychiatry rotations to the trauma ward, I had opportunities to see people at their best, and at their worst.

In medicine, you attempt to help whomever comes in through the door — regardless of the problem, and regardless of the circumstances that led up to it. Sometimes the problems are acute, but more often the problems are the result of chronic lifestyle choices that in the end take a toll on the human body.

At the end of the day, I was struck by the observation that we all face challenges and struggles. Many people also suffer from addictions: alcohol and tobacco are two of the most damaging, but others fall into repetitive overconsumption of refined carbohydrates, saturated and trans fats, and sedentary lifestyles that ultimately lead to diabetes, cardiovascular disease and a drastic reduction in quality of life.

How do people deal with addictions, and addictive behavior? I had the opportunity to observe different group therapy settings, including AA meetings, where people gather to support and hold each other accountable. Indeed, alcoholism is a disease for which there a large amount of social tolerance — when we know people who are alcoholics, we acknowledge their struggle, encourage them, and give them a pat on the back.

When they fall off the wagon, though, assuming they don’t hurt anyone else, do we throw them in jail?

Why not?

I also occasionally prescribed pain medications, many of which were narcotics: powerful, addictive, often extremely expensive, and heavily regulated.

If patients with chronic pain become dependent on narcotic pain relievers, do we throw them in jail?

Why not?

I have also met people with seizure disorders and chronic pain whose symptoms are relieved by a non-addictive plant that can be easily cultivated at minimal cost: cannabis, or marijuana. Yet our federal government has decided to label those people criminals.

Why?

I couldn’t explain why. I still can’t explain why. And after studying the Constitution, I am absolutely certain that our founders never intended our federal government to declare plants and chemical substances for personal consumption illegal in direct defiance of the Tenth Amendment. At least when we experimented with alcohol prohibition, we had the intellectual honesty to amend the Constitution.

Please understand, I am not minimizing the scourge of substance abuse, or addiction. I do not wish for heroin to be available at the Wal-Mart checkout. But it is time for us to recognize that we can no longer afford to be the most incarcerated nation in the world, with harsh mandatory sentences requiring us to lock up people who have hurt no one but themselves.

Just yesterday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released some fascinating statistics, as cited by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws:

Police arrested a record 872,721 persons for marijuana violations in 2007, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s annual Uniform Crime Report, released today. This is the largest total number of annual arrests for cannabis ever recorded by the FBI.

Cannabis arrests now comprise nearly 47.5 percent of all drug arrests in the United States.

“These numbers belie the myth that police do not target and arrest minor cannabis offenders,” said NORML Executive Director Allen St. Pierre, who noted that at current rates, a cannabis consumer is arrested every 37 seconds in America. “This effort is a tremendous waste of criminal justice resources that diverts law enforcement personnel away from focusing on serious and violent crime, including the war on terrorism.”

Of those charged with marijuana violations, approximately 89 percent, 775,138 Americans were charged with possession only. The remaining 97,583 individuals were charged with “sale/manufacture,” a category that includes all cultivation offenses, even those where the marijuana was being grown for personal or medical use. Nearly three in four of those arrested are under age 30.

“Present policies have done little if anything to decrease marijuana’s availability or dissuade youth from trying it,” St. Pierre said, noting young people in the U.S. now frequently report that they have easier access to pot than alcohol or tobacco.

For those 873,000 marijuana offenders, what happens to their subsequent ability to find employment and become productive taxpaying citizens?

It costs us about $38,000 per year to incarcerate someone in North Carolina. What kind of addiction recovery, education, and job training could we provide for half that price? If we treated addiction as a public health program, and encouraged great programs like TROSA, would we need so many jails?

Fortunately, more and more Americans are realizing that the so-called federal “War on Drugs” is a failed forty-year experiment in bad public policy.

Several weeks ago, I had the opportunity to interview with Mike Smithson of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) in Greensboro. Here is our interview as documented on Taking the Pulse:

The interview was fascinating, and we also set up shop at a convenience store on MLK Blvd in Greensboro looking for “man on the street” interactions. There was no shortage of folks eager to give opinions, and when we asked anyone “what the war on drugs had accomplished,” everyone gave the same answer: “We’ve locked up a lot of people.”

Not only that, but Mike was honest about some of the “collateral damage” from the war on drugs from a law enforcement perspective. Despite the high-minded rhetoric, enforcement of the War on Drugs (as evidenced by incarceration statistics) is targeted at poor and minority communities, and racial profiling and the corresponding assault on civil liberties are real.

Not to say that all social problems would disappear if we ended the “war” and began regulating drugs like we do tobacco and alcohol, but a whole class of gang activity and crimes would just disappear. Most importantly, the black market for illegal substances would go away, as well.

Is there any evidence for these seemingly radical assertions?

When’s the last time we had to lock up gun-toting gangs of underground alcohol or tobacco pushers?

More objectively, study Switzerland:

A number of studies have found that Switzerland’s heroin-assisted treatment plans help ease the scourge of addiction for users and society.

Initially met with criticism and apprehension, the Swiss model is now attracting the interest of other countries.

Programmes for the administration of heroin under medical supervision are still viewed warily by the World Health Organization, which is heavily influenced by governments with repressive drug policies, principally the United States.

“In the beginning, people worried that the Swiss government’s liberal policy would attract even more people to heroin. Those fears have proved unfounded,” Nordt stressed.

Nordt and Stohler’s research shows that in the canton of Zurich, home to more than a fifth of Switzerland’s addicts, there were 850 new heroin users in 1990 but just 150 in 2002.

Such a downward curve is not found in other countries, especially those that have tried to crack down on drugs. In Britain and Australia, drug use rose during the same period. In Italy, it vacillated from one year to the next, but the Zurich researchers view that data as incomplete.

“In Switzerland, the medicalisation of heroin use has helped change the image of users: from rebels to losers,” Nordt said. “In the eyes of the young, they’re mostly just sick people, forced to get medical help.”

The harm reduction policy followed by the Swiss authorities has also been successful in reducing heroin-related deaths, which have fallen by more than half over the course of a decade, and the transmission of AIDS.

And there is more good news concerning the fight against crime and prostitution.

“Compared with countries like Britain, where crime is very often linked to substance abuse, this trend has almost disappeared in Switzerland over the last few years,” said Nordt.

Interesting idea — “harm reduction”. Sounds vaguely Hippocratic. Do you know someone suffering from addiction?

We’ve been trying the same thing for forty years, and not liking the results. Insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results.

Americans consider our country one of the freest on earth, yet national incarceration rates beg to differ. More than half of all federal prisoners are not murderers, rapists or even thieves; they are people who have forcibly hurt no one except themselves. More than half of all federal prisoners are non-violent drug offenders.

America now has the highest prison population in the world in terms of both percentage of the population and overall prisoners with one in every one hundred Americans imprisoned. Furthermore Hispanics and Blacks are unequally affected, as the New York Times reports:

One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

In a time of economic stagnation and resource-driven inflation why are we spending so much on imprisoning these non-violent offenders? The New York Times elaborates on this point, writing:

It cost an average of $23,876 dollars to imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which data were available. But state spending varies widely, from $45,000 a year in Rhode Island to $13,000 in Louisiana.

The cost of medical care is growing by 10 percent annually, the report said, and will accelerate as the prison population ages.

About one in nine state government employees works in corrections, and some states are finding it hard to fill those jobs. California spent more than $500 million on overtime alone in 2006.

$23,876 is quite a large sum. Money that could go to a doctor’s salary to treat drug users rather than a guard’s salary to watch them.

Americans have long adopted an approach that is tough on crime. This toughness is laudable in some cases — with increased sentencing, violent crime has fallen by about 25 percent. Drugs have not followed this trend, however.  In many ways being tough on crime works, but shouldn’t we be more than tough?  Should we not also be smart? Since Nixon declared the federal “War on Drugs”, drug availability has remained essentially unchanged. Few would object to tough sentencing laws that keep violent criminals off the street and prevent violent crime. Should we not save incarceration for when it is a solution, however, rather than just a burden?

Whatever your opinion on the use of drugs, we should question the appropriateness of enforcing laws that are in contradiction to our nation’s highest law, the Constitution. At least with alcohol prohibition in the early 1900s, we had the intellectual honesty to recognize that federal alcohol prohibition required a Constitutional amendment. Today, however, we tolerate unconstitutional expansion of government power.

In one such excess, Gonzales v. Raich (2005), Federal authorities were affirmed in their efforts to criminalize the local, intrastate cultivation and distribution of medical marijuana.  Not only does this imprison people who sought to relieve the suffering of the sick, but as Clarence Thomas writes:

If the majority is to be taken seriously, the Federal Government may now regulate quilting bees, clothes drives, and potluck suppers throughout the 50 States. This makes a mockery of Madison’s assurance to the people of New York that the “powers delegated” to the Federal Government are “few and defined,” while those of the States are “numerous and indefinite.” The Federalist No. 45, at 313 (J. Madison).

The federal drug war must be rethought, and we must adopt a rational drug policy that not only pays attention to social mores but also respects empirical evidence and, most importantly, obeys our Constitution.

William Griffin is a rising Junior studying Political Science and Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a policy intern with Lawson for Congress.

Debating the War on Drugs normally focuses attention on the obvious: the negative effects drugs have on society and the individuals who use them, the money spent on combating the illicit trade, and whether individuals have the right to choose to consume these substances.

The negative effects this war has on other nations and their people is widely ignored.

Trafficking these products in Central America, West Africa and the Caribbean contributes to instability and endangers national security. In both Colombia and Afghanistan, the illicit drug trade helps fund violent insurgencies which cause large regions of lawlessness, commit hundreds of murders, and actively kill government and allied military forces including, in the case of Afghanistan, our own men and women in uniform.

In Colombia, a 42 year civil war has raged between the government and FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), an authoritarian left-wing organization that has killed countless Colombians and foreigners. Most of Colombia’s 3000 kidnappings are also the work of these revolutionaries. FARC receives $300 million a year by ‘taxing’ the thriving cocaine trade in Colombia, and more than half the world’s coca is grown in FARC controlled territories.

By legalizing and regulating cocaine, any market in the United States could be supplied by legal cultivation in Bolivia, which does not have the problem of a violent insurgency. Since most of the price of cocaine comes from the illegal nature of the product and the risk the suppliers must take, by legalization will hamper FARC’s cash supply and ability to terrorize the countryside.

Meanwhile, southern Afghanistan cultivates 80% of the world’s poppy crop (the plant used to create opiates). 53% of Afghanistan’s GDP now comes from the export of poppies. Currently the Taliban uses this to their advantage, funding themselves with much of the profits. Western troops in the country destroy the crop where they can, but despite our efforts, Afghan poppy production grew 17% last year to hit $4 billion. As a result, the Taliban profited handsomely:

The Taliban earned $200 million to $400 million last year through a 10 percent tax on poppy growers and drug traffickers in areas under its control, Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime, said in an interview. He estimates that Afghan poppy farmers and drug traffickers last year earned about $4 billion, half of the country’s national income.

American troops have made gains by adopting counter-insurgency tactics and winning the populace over to our side. However, it’s difficult to win support of impoverished citizens when our troops are physically destroying the people’s primary means of subsistence.

As long as the price of the poppy remains high (once again due to the illegal nature of the product), it remains the best crop with which to provide food for one’s family. We can enforce the ban and destroy the crops, but American and Coalition troops will be seen as the enemy. If we legalize the product and depress the price, the problem will be mitigated through market forces. It will become less profitable to cultivate poppy and the Taliban will not be able to fund themselves with the trade. Farmers will switch their crop to either something to eat themselves or whatever else is most profitable.

The interference with real conflicts is another problem with America’s unconstitutional War on Drugs that must not be overlooked.