END THE WAR ON DRUGS
19-year-olds Gunner Bundrick and Jake Morales graduated from Bradshaw Mountain High School last year. During high school they were heavily involved within the athletic community at their school. Bundrick was captain of the football and baseball team his senior year. Both students were at Yavapai College and Bundrick was a member of their baseball team. On November 3rd, both students were pronounced dead. The cause of death? A fentanyl overdose.
Statistics released from the Center for Disease Control last Thursday paint a grim picture for the American populus. More than 70,000 Americans died last year due to overdoses, an unprecedented record. These deaths surpass gun deaths, car crashes, or H.I.V. at each of their respective peaks. The sharp incline in drug overdose deaths has ultimately led to our country experiencing the most extreme decline in life expectancy since World War II. With a problem of monumental proportions before us, what is our government doing?
When President Nixon began the ‘war on drugs’ during his tenure. He poured more resources into to federal drug control agencies and attempted to expedite the incarceration process. Ultimately, Nixon left a long lasting legacy that persistently exacerbates drug issues today. If we ever hope to save the thousands of young lives currently at risk, we need to end this war.
A Racist Battle
The criminalization of drugs has had little to do with the adverse side-effects of these drugs, but actually who they were associated with. The anti-opium laws of the 1870s were created to target Chinese immigrants. The earliest anti-cocaine laws, developed in the early 1900s, were crafted with the intent of targeting African American men in the South. Anti-marijuana laws were produced to directly single out Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans.
.Policy makers developed laws in order to incriminate specific minority populations. This was done despite the fact that many of these drug users were actually white. Multiple studies convey the fact that white adolescents use drugs far more than other minority groups. This highlights an important issue: the war on drugs was and still is racist.
After Nixon had put the war on drugs into full swing, one of his top aides, John Ehrlichman, exposed the hidden agenda : “You want to know what this was really all about. 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.” The Nixon campaign knew full well that they were taking advantage of stereotypes associated with African Americans and used that to boost their own political standing.
Of the 1.6 million arrests made in 2017 for drug related crimes, 85.4% of them were possession and 46.9% of those arrested were black or Latino. With hefty punishments, these arrests ruin lives. The war on drugs has led to an increase of over 500% in our incarceration rate. This directly hurts low-income and minority groups making it more likely that they would turn to drugs in the first place.
The war on drugs has already taken away more than 1.5 million lives of African Americans due to early deaths and/or incarceration. This is because of the way policy was developed at the time. Crack cocaine, which is more strongly associated with African Americans, was given much stricter sentencing than powder cocaine, which is strongly associated with white Americans. Excessive prison time has done little to curb drug use, yet the federal government continues to enforce these misguided laws.
These policies persist and leech into contemporary politics as many of these laws were never overturned. Criminalization remains prevalent and minority communities continue to be punished. The Trump administration has latched onto these former policies and used them to push their agenda against illegal immigrants. Instead of helping these rural white communities hit hardest by the opioid epidemic, the Trump administration is focusing on these illegal immigrants, these “criminals” who somehow threaten America’s everyday way of life. The best way to help those affected by opioid addictions is to end these racist policies and actually enact laws that will help.
Perverse Incentives
The United States’ current strategy feeds into the characteristically backwards-logic of the drug war. The drug war itself is more focused on curbing supply instead of demand. The problem with this is that it has made it more profitable to sell illicit substances.
The economics of selling drugs has ensured that stifling supply makes it more compelling to sell. The problem is that the U.S. has effectively put a stopper on supply within some markets, but they have done little to nothing to lower demand. With a low supply and a high demand, organized crime has the ability to charge more for their products, all while maintaining a strong consumer base. They can effectively sell drugs for more and expand their own empire.
Furthermore, imposing such strict prohibition essentially creates a monopoly within this market. This means that large groups have the capital to utilize more resources when selling drugs. More men on the ground means they are able to sell an increasing amount of drugs for a higher profit. This has allowed groups to keep demand up even if U.S. drug officials shorten their supply.
Current drug policy has done nothing to alleviate the opioid epidemic. Instead, what might have been solvable issues have only been exacerbated as there is little framework to help those threatened by drug addictions.
What now?
The war on drugs has ultimately had the opposite of its intended effect. In order to reverse the rising opioid epidemic, certain actions need to be taken.
First, we can look to Portugal who was experiencing a very similar issue. Decades ago they saw record opioid usage and several thousands dying of overdoses. Instead of attacking the drugs themselves, Portugal took the opposite approach. In 2001, they decriminalized the use of all drugs.
As counterintuitive as this might seem, this policy approach was unequivocally successful. The Portuguese government now estimates that only 25,000 of their citizens still use heroin, a number representing a sharp decline from the previous 85,000. Drug overdoses fell 85%. If the U.S. were to implement similar policy. The lives of our dying youth could be saved, and minority communities would no longer be punished.
The reason Decriminalization has been so successful is because it has been coupled with accessible drug treatment programs within the country. America has similar programs but they are either too expensive or too inaccessible. The smart thing for America to do would be to subsidize several different treatment programs in order to simultaneously educate the public and eliminate the demand for such dangerous substances.
This strategy treats addiction more as a medical issue than a criminal one. Rather than putting users in prison where there issues might only escalate, they would be given actual help to prevent their problem from actually taking their lives. The roots of this strategy exist in multiple parts of our country already. Locations where users can safely get high exists within several states. However, federal policy needs to be enacted if we ever want to see this problem go away.
The lives of tens of thousands of Americans remain at risk as long as the federal government remains inactive. The problem can easily be solved by reversing previous drug policy and actually helping addicts. If the U.S. doesn’t act soon, we will continue to see another generation evaporate before our very eyes,