A Rehabilitated Prohibitionist
The former director of President George W. Bush’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, and the co-author with former Drug Czars Bill Bennett and John Walters of the book “Body Count: Moral Poverty…And How to Win America’s War Against Crime and Drugs” has just come out in favor of medical marijuana and serious consideration of marijuana decriminalization.
A political scientist and criminologist John J. Dilulio Jr. holds a Harvard Ph.D. He is a former professor of politics and public policy at Princeton and former director of the Brookings Institution’s Center for Public Management. He is now a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and the Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society at the University of Pennsylvania. Dilulio has been a proponent of coerced substance-abuse treatment as a way of reducing crime for years and his serious consideration of legalizing marijuana is a surprising turn-around.
The author of an article called ”Let ‘Em Rot,” DiIulio was often cited by conservatives advocating more prisons and longer sentences. “No one - at least, no one in elite policy-wonk circles - is a bigger fan of incarcerating known, adjudicated adult and juvenile criminals than me,” he wrote in a 1996 article for Slate. 1993 book review for The New Republic, he implied that they were getting off too lightly. “It is not unreasonable to argue,” he wrote, “that the problem with the ‘get-tough’ approach of the last twenty-five years is that it hasn’t actually been followed. Despite mandatory sentencing laws, most drug offenders and other felons continue to spend only a fraction of their sentences behind bars.”
Over the years DiIulio has shown that he understands the difference between predatory criminals and non-violent drug offenders. Imprisoning the former reduces crime and protects the public safety. Imprisoning the latter however, just costs a lot of money.
In a recent article in Democracy his prescription for reducing crime addresses marijuana thusly…
“… legalize marijuana for medically prescribed uses, and seriously
consider decriminalizing it altogether. Last year there were more than
800,000 marijuana-related arrests. The impact of these arrests on crime
rates was likely close to zero. There is almost no scientific evidence
showing that pot is more harmful to its users’ health, more of a
“gateway drug,” or more crime-causing in its effects than alcohol or
other legal narcotic or mind-altering substances. Our post-2000 legal
drug culture has untold millions of Americans, from the very young to
the very old, consuming drugs in unprecedented and untested combinations
and quantities. Prime-time commercial television is now a virtual
medicine cabinet (”just ask your doctor if this drug is right for you”).
Big pharmaceutical companies function as all-purpose drug pushers. And
yet we expend scarce federal, state, and local law enforcement resources
waging “war” against pot users. That is insane.”
Well put professor.
Today’s Victorians
Back in the late 1800’s in Victorian England an unwed mother was treated as a pariah. The chambermaid who was seduced by the master of the house… the shop girl seduced by the charming sailor, or the society debutant seduced by the handsome cad with a title, they were all considered vile fallen women by polite society. The wealthy in this situation might move abroad, concoct some story about being a widow and start anew in the south of France perhaps. The poor had no such options.
Of course no pregnant unmarried woman could continue to work in public. No proper home would tolerate such a moral failure as a cook or parlourmaid. No shop would allow a fallen woman to serve their decent customers and no decent customer would enter a shop that did. So what these girls do? Where did they give birth? There was no public hospital that would accept them. No emergency room to go to when labor began. They gave birth in filthy rooms in cheap tenements or even in alleyways.
There were a couple of birthing hospitals run by nuns but these were grim establishments were the pregnant women were treated like criminals, made to pray and beg forgiveness incessantly during their stay. They were told how bad they had been and forced to work until labor pains made it impossible. Such places were but marginally better than a dirty tenement room to have a baby in.
When some kind society women had the idea to open a birthing hospital for such women, a clean place, staffed by midwives and nurses, a place where unwed mothers could give birth without being judged or mistreated they met with fierce opposition from society. “You are simply encouraging this sort of immoral behavior” they were told. “If these women are offered a free place such as you propose to give birth to their bastards what’s to prevent them from repeating their vile behavior? What’s to prevent other women, seeing your helping arms awaiting, from emulating them? It will be the end of morality in England.”
It took many years for such places to put together the funding needed to operate. Unwed mothers were thought to be solely at fault for their wanton behavior. Much convincing of bankers and the wealthy that to be an unwed mother meant being shunned by polite society. It promised slim prospects for marriage in the future. Employment for a woman with a child was almost impossible. It meant a life of hardship far beyond the hardships typically endured by the working classes of the time. Providing a few days of decent treatment for a woman giving birth was hardly going to be sufficient enticement to others to get pregnant out of wedlock.
So why am I telling you about pregnant shop girls in Victorian England? A very similar battle rages today. People, dealing with the travails of life (poverty, unfaithful spouses, massive growth in the prison population, racism, and, of course, in many cases, plain old stupidity ) become addicted to heroin. Society sees to it that they have to buy their heroin from unlicensed sources on the street. That heroin is unregulated as to purity or potency and could be cut with anything from plaster dust to rat poison. Death from impurities or just excessive potency is relatively common. Clean needles are often unobtainable resulting in the spread of diseases ranging from minor skin infections to Hepatitis, to AIDS. As the dosage is unregulated consciousness is not always possible so employment is impossible. And of course there is always the threat of arrest and incarceration waiting around every corner. Not a pleasant way of life.
When some caring people come along and talk about ways to remove some of the most serious problems that plague drug addicts (and cost the rest of society a fortune to boot) they are told such measures will make drug addiction more popular. “If you remove the threat of AIDS by giving addicts clean needles you make it more acceptable to be an addict” they say. “If you provide free needles others will get them, fill them with heroin and get addicted.” Yes… the life of an impoverished heroin addict is so appealing that without the threat of contracting AIDS millions would succumb… Sure. “Providing a clean injection room where IV drug users could get clean needles and shoot up in sterile surroundings and talk to healthcare professionals about their health, perhaps even enter treatment voluntarily would remove all the stigma of drug addiction. It would become an attractive lifestyle to others” Uh huh…
Here we are one hundred plus years down the road and Victorian morality is still with us.
Out in the west Texas town of El Paso…
Way back in 1913 El Paso Texas became the first place in America to pass a local ordinance prohibiting marijuana. Overcome by anti-Mexican prejudice that attributed all sorts of heinous violent crimes to Mexicans under the influence of the drug El Paso’s local government resorted to prohibition. Marijuana-crazed Mexicans reputedly axe-murdered their families, raped white women, and generally behaved unacceptably and the best way to put a stop to all this was to prohibit the drug that they believed fomented this sort of behavior amongst Mexicans. Of course the real motivation was that marijuana prohibition gave white Texans a tool to control those foreigners that came across the Rio Grande to seek work or start new lives in Texas.
Fast forwarding some 90-odd years we find that marijuana prohibition has been about as successful in El Paso as in the rest of America; that is to say, not very. The black market in the drug created by prohibition has created wealthy and powerful cartels in Mexico that engage in smuggling along the border. They control the Mexican side of the border and rule by bribery and fearsome violence. “Plata o piombo”, (”Silver or lead”) are the options given to those who are in a position to thwart their activities. Killings and corruption are threatening to spread across the border from Juarez into El Paso and the Texans are not pleased about it.
Back in January 2009 the El Paso City Council unanimously passed a resolution that called for serious consideration of ending prohibition as one possible
option to stop the border violence threatening their city El Paso’s Mayor Cook vetoed that resolution and the council refrained from overriding the veto only after receiving threats from Congressman Silvestre Reyes that the city would lose federal stimulus money if it insisted on supporting a discussion of the merits of legalization.
Earlier in February of 2010 the El Paso City Council considered a resolution calling for the legalization of marijuana as way to strip Mexican drug cartels of the rich profits they make from the illegal market. Again the resolution failed when Mayor John Cook broke a 4-4 tie and voted against it. However, the council then amended the resolution to take out the marijuana legalization language and passed it as amended. The amended resolution still says the council calls for a “comprehensive re-examination of our country’s failed War on Drugs and…support[s] initiatives that do not result in wasting government funds and empowering criminal gangs and trafficking organizations.”
Well that resolution may not have used the dreaded “L” word but it seems pretty clear just what they are considering. Councilwoman Susie Byrd explained why she supported the marijuana regulation language. “The fuel to the fire in Juárez is the profits of a black market,” Before the vote on the resolution University of Texas-El Paso political science professor Tony Payan reminded the council’s members about the city’s historic role in marijuana prohibition. “It was the first city council a hundred years ago that passed the first resolution forbidding the use of marijuana. One hundred years later we’ve come full circle, and now we’re debating 100 years of a failed policy.”
Geriatric Zombies
Here comes the latest scare tactic in the seemingly never-ending fight to extend the life of the failed policy of prohibition. Back in the 1930’s we were shown images of marijuana-crazed “addicts” restrained in straight-jackets, hair messed up, black circles around the eyes; “this could be you were you to be so foolish as to smoke so much as one marijuana cigarette” was the message.
As more and more people failed to believe that marijuana made you a raving lunatic prohibitionists pushed the “gateway theory”. This scare tactic maintained that since the majority of heroin addicts started their drug use by smoking marijuana that proved that marijuana use led almost inevitably to using like heroin. Of course the overwhelming majority of heroin addicts also drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and/or drank alcohol but these drugs are legal so they didn’t count. The real question to ask is “What percentage of marijuana smokers go on to use heroin?” That number is tiny… in the low single digits. In spite of the convoluted logic of the gateway theory it is still pulled out of the bag regularly and the public still fails to see the fundamental fallacy in its premise.
Last year we had many stories in the press reporting on a British study that purported to show a strong link between teenage marijuana use and schizophrenia. That got lots of attention until other researchers took a look overall marijuana use rates in the UK. If marijuana use causes schizophrenia then in times when smoking marijuana was popular like in the late sixties and early seventies schizophrenia diagnoses should have risen. They stayed the same however and further research showed that the correlation was due to teens self-medicating themselves in an attempt to alleviate some of the early symptoms of the illness. Of course that research didn’t get nearly the airtime that the “marijuana causes schizophrenia” story did.
Now I read that Dr. Richard Dupee, chief of geriatrics at Tufts Medical Center is painting a picture of millions of boomers turning into what I can only describe as geriatric zombies. Apparently the concern is that all these pot-smoking boomers are going to develop memory loss to the degree that it will be indistinguishable from Alzheimers.
According to a recent survey by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) roughly 5.2 percent of Americans ages 50 to 59 had used marijuana in the past year. Peter Delany, the substance abuse agency’s director of the Office of Applied Studies said “We are projecting that by the year 2020, we will probably have enough people in the 50-to-59 age group needing [substance abuse] treatment that we will probably need to double the number of treatment facilities. ”
Now most of these boomer marijuana users have been using for 30 or 40 years. Most function quite acceptably in society, hold good jobs such as teacher, factory worker, doctor, attorney, or even President of the United States. They marry and raise children, travel, go skiing, sailing, and do all the things non-marijuana smoking Americans do but suddenly they will all need drug treatment. This is just another in a long history of claims totally unsubstantiated by the facts designed to scare the public.
H.L. Mencken said “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Geriatric zombies indeed… and no, I’m not interested in buying that bridge you’ve got for sale either!
Is it Change yet?
This does seem like the time to pick on Obama. The media is full of stories about unfulfilled promises and bungled initiatives. Our foreign policy today is hardly different from Bush’s - we’re still in Iraq and now we’re also in Afghanistan and there’s trouble on the horizon in Yemen. Guantanamo is still open. Our Anti-terrorism policy, according to the New York Times Magazine story a couple of weeks back, is still run largely by Bush appointees and the policy hasn’t changed. The Patriot Act is still here. The health care effort was bungled and now its passage is doubtful. He’s angered the Right and he’s angered the Left just as much. So what about us drug policy reformers?
Typically after a Presidential election US Attorneys appointed under the outgoing administration submit letters of resignation and the new administration replaces many of them with new ones. Well, in the spirit of change Mr. Obama did not accept the resignations of the US Attorneys and appoint his own people. The result? We still have Bush appointees overseeing prosecutions in all of the federal districts. No change in the Justice Department.
With 14 states now having passed medical marijuana laws there has been a demand for some scientific research , done here in the US, into the medical uses of marijuana. Currently the drug is Schedule One - (no medical use, high potential for abuse) and cannot be possessed even for research except for a highly controlled crop of poor quality pot grown in a government-run facility in Mississippi. The only agency with access to that marijuana is The National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) and Shirley Simson, a NIDA spokeswoman told the New York Times recently: “As the National Institute on Drug Abuse, our focus is primarily on the negative consequences of marijuana use. We generally do not fund research focused on the potential beneficial medical effects of marijuana.”
The DEA’s own administrative law judge ruled that NIDA’s monopolization of marijuana research is not in the public interest and ordered the government cannabis be made available to legitimate medical researchers, not just NIDA.
Former DEA Deputy Administrator Michele Leonhart chose to ignore the DEA’s own administrative law judge’s ruling.
So who did Obama pick last week to be the new head of the DEA? Bush-era appointee Michele Leonhart. No change at the DEA.
Before his election, when he was seen by many as the bringer of serious drug policy reform Obama told the Washington Post “Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources - it’s also about protecting free and open inquiry. It’s about letting scientists like those who are here today do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion, and listening to what they tell us,, even when it’s inconvenient - especially when it’s inconvenient.”
Back in May of last year, after some awful comments by the Presidents new Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowski and his laughing at and dismissing the number one most popular question to come to his own website (Remember that?) I wrote on this blog that “For drug policy reform advocates it looks like the honeymoon with Obama is quickly coming to a close.” Now I think we can safely say the honeymoon is over.
