Dr. McNamara is the retired police chief of
San Jose, Calif. before that, he was chief of the Kansas City police dept where
he went after rising to the rank of deputy inspector in the New York City
Police Dept. He is now a research fellow at the
Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He completed his doctoral dissertation
at Harvard University on the history of criminalizing drugs and the impact on
the American police force.
He has also written an article
on police corruption for the forthcoming issue of The ReconsiDer
Quarterly
Commentary: Criminalization of
Drug Use
by Joseph D. McNamara,
D.P.A.
Psychiatric Times September 2000 Vol. XVII Issue
9
The average American's image of drug users is that of
dangerous young people of color-males who will rob them to obtain money to buy
drugs or female prostitutes spreading disease and delivering crack babies as a
result of enslavement to drugs. These cherished misconceptions are the enduring
and erroneous foundations of the ill-conceived "war on drugs."
Actually,
the overwhelming majority of American drug users have historically been
Caucasians. The fact that minorities are arrested and incarcerated at vastly
disproportionate rates for drug offenses contributes to false stereotypes and
permits the continuation of one of the most irrational public policies in the
history of the United States. Blacks make up approximately 15% of America's drug
users, but more than one-third of adults arrested for drug violations are
black.
Furthermore, relatively few of America's estimated 80 million
illegal drug users go on to commit other crimes. In fact, the majority of
policemen I hired during my 18 years as police chief in two of the largest
cities in America had used illegal drugs. They did not commit other crimes and
grew out of their early drug use.
Yet I can remember, some 40 years ago,
as a young policeman in Harlem, gathering in the bar with my colleagues after
work listening to them complain vigorously about the junkies who made our work
so difficult. During our discussions, we drank prodigious amounts of beer
without the slightest awareness we were consuming a drug that could be as lethal
as heroin. In fact, more of my fellow policemen died in driving accidents after
these drinking sessions than were slain in the line of duty.
Even today,
85 years after the federal government first outlawed narcotics, public and
police attitudes toward the dangerousness of drugs are shaped by ignorance of
their impact and by mistaken prejudices regarding their users. These are the
same irrationalities that led to the criminal prohibition of certain drugs.
Individuals taking Prozac (fluoxetine), Valium (diazepam) or other psychoactive
prescription drugs are regarded as patients. Yet millions of our own citizens
using heroin, cocaine or marijuana have been, and are still regarded as
dangerous enough to be caged in brutal prisons, frequently under mandatory
sentences more characteristic of a totalitarian society than a
democracy.
The impetus for the passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act of
1914 came from the lobbying efforts of the American missionary societies in
China. These groups enlisted the aid of other alcohol temperance organizations
and religious groups in the United States to get their version of sin written
into the penal code. The anti-drug arguments in Harrison were replete with
statements claiming that it was the duty of whites to save the inferior races.
Those moving to criminalize drugs made references to Negroes under the influence
of drugs murdering whites, degenerate Mexicans smoking marijuana and "Chinamen"
seducing white women with drugs. This racist nonsense would be laughed at today,
but it was quite influential in the passage of anti-drug
legislation.
David Musto, M.D., the renowned drug historian and professor
of child psychiatry and the history of medicine at Yale University School of
Medicine, wrote in The American Disease: Origins of Narcotics Control,
"Consequently, the story of the Harrison Act's passage contains many examples of
the South's fear of the Negro as a ground for permitting a deviation from the
strict interpretation of the Constitution." Musto also noted that opium use in
the United States had been declining for about 16 years before the federal
government saw fit to outlaw it.
The Harrison Narcotic Act of 1914
represented a gross departure from past federal practice of not interfering with
state police powers. The racist arguments convinced Southern representatives,
who were reluctant to acknowledge federal power over states' rights, to vote for
the act. Congressional uneasiness over the law's constitutionality caused it to
label the act a revenue measure, but in 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court correctly
interpreted it as a penal statute, making it the cornerstone of laws leading to
the present "war on drugs."
It is one of the ironies of history that
national black political leadership today paradoxically accepts the racist
implications of white Southern politicians in 1914: that Negroes were especially
susceptible to the negative impact of drug use. With the notable exception of
Kurt Schmoke, former mayor of Baltimore, who called for the medicalization of
drug use, many African-American politicians describe decriminalization of drugs
as racial genocide, thus subliminally reinforcing fears that people of color are
more susceptible to drug use and the harm it can cause.
The Harrison Act
was a remarkably radical change in public policy. Racism, religious pressure and
an elitist concern to ensure that the lower classes were protected from
temptations to lead "immoral" lives prevailed over the promises of the
Declaration of Independence.
During roughly the first 130 years of our
nation's history, at least under national law, the right to life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness included the right to ingest whatever chemicals one
wished. These rights were not simply an omission by Thomas Jefferson, who penned
the immortal words of the declaration and later chastised France for passing
laws regulating diet and medicine. Jefferson said that a government that
controlled what food people could eat and the kind of medicine they took would
soon try to control what people thought.
That may sound far-fetched, but
only a few months ago the Clinton White House was embarrassed when a journalist
disclosed that the government had been secretly paying television networks,
magazines and newspapers to covertly insert "correct" material on drug use for
our education.
Since 1914, American drug control efforts have ebbed and
peaked. However, a sea change occurred in 1972 when Richard Nixon saw a
political advantage in telling the citizenry that a war against drugs was
necessary. The federal budget for the war was roughly $101 million that year.
Presently, it is around $17 billion a year. By comparison, the average monthly
Social Security check in 1972 was $177. If, however, Social Security benefits
had increased at the same rate as drug war spending, today's check would be
around $30,000 a month. The annual cost of the drug war exceeds $40 billion a
year when state and local costs are added to federal costs.
The magnitude
of increase and paucity of positive results have recently begun to discomfit
some of the leading academic supporters of the drug war. A major focus of
government strategy has been to reduce foreign production of illegal drugs. Yet,
a dozen years after the U.S. Congress proclaimed that we would have a drug-free
America by 1995, opium production has doubled in Southeast Asia and cocaine
crops have increased by a third in Central and South America. Periodic
government announcements of crises of methamphetamine, ecstasy and other
designer drug use, increasingly being manufactured in Mexico and domestically,
are intended to mobilize more public support for the drug war. What they further
illustrate, however, is the hopelessness of attempts by the United States to
reduce world drug production. Simultaneously, the government is forced to
concede that despite interdiction efforts, 90% of the drugs that arrive in the
United States are undetected.
The United States, as well as most of the
world, is awash in illegal drugs, the violence of the illegal drug black market,
and unprecedented police and political corruption resulting from the extreme
mark-up caused by the prohibition of cheaply produced chemical
substances.
The sheer irrationality of continuing to expand a policy
doomed to failure begs an explanation. A Jihad comes to mind-a holy war that
must be fought regardless of the resulting human horrors. Thus, some scholars
who can no longer ignore the inevitable failure of past practices now proclaim a
new solution, which the government is eagerly embracing. The phrase coerced
abstinence is the practice of continuously drug-testing convicted criminals (and
eventually, in all probability, many others) through special drug courts, to
detect the presence of illegal drugs in their bodies. Judges, traditionally
functioning as impartial legal experts during trials to guarantee due process of
law, will now become shamans taking on the responsibilities of judging who is
falling under evil spells. We will have legions of real-life television "Judge
Judys" routinely denouncing and incarcerating people not on the basis of what
they did, but because certain chemicals are present in their
urine.
Scholars who know well the difference between correlation and
causation have casually disregarded two axioms of behavioral science by
advancing coerced abstinence as new when, in fact, it is the same old
demonization of certain drugs present in our culture and the same dehumanization
of their users. First of all, many individuals convicted of crime do have a
history of previous use of illegal drugs. But high correlations of illegitimacy,
illiteracy, extreme poverty, lack of health care, child abuse, failure in
school, smoking, gambling, unhealthy diets, poor employment history and a host
of other variables are also present in criminal populations. Drug use as the
sole explanation for criminal behavior is no more persuasive than these other
characteristics. Secondly, experts know that past behavior, including the use of
certain chemicals, cannot be used to accurately predict the future behavior of a
particular individual.
America's drug war has always trifled with
science. But the assumption that the presence alone of a particular chemical in
a person's bloodstream is cause for imprisonment replaces the fundamental
American right of presumption of innocence with the police-state mentality of
assumed guilt. Nevertheless, we should not worry. The people in jail cells are
not prisoners, just patients undergoing the new therapy of coerced
abstinence.
Hope you are enjoying your Tidbits. If
you're not a member of ReconsiDer and would like to join please fill out our membership form. And be sure to visit our website.
Click here to unsubscribe to
this mailing list.