Even Meth ????!!!
When I speak to people about drug policy and suggest that the answer to our drug problems may be legalization the most common reaction is an incredulous “Even Meth?” It’s inevitable. Whether it’s a college class or a Rotary Club that question is always asked. Why…? Why is meth perceived as significantly different from other illegal drugs? Why can’t the common sense logic that allows people to see the damage to society that prohibition causes be equally obvious when it comes to methamphetimine? The principle is the same regardless of the potential danger of whatever it is society decides to prohibit.
Obviously the information most people have about the drug is garnered from the media. The media is, of course, looking for exciting stories that will sell papers or boost viewership. What do they cover? The horrible effects of some poor unfortunate who has been doing nothing but taking meth for years and has now lost his teeth, his skin is sallow, his eyes wild. He’s been incarcerated repeatedly, is unemployed, and now lives in a doorway in a deserted neighborhood in Detroit. A true story comparable to that of a skid-row alcoholic. Excessive use is certainly not good for you. No argument there however it is not a portrait of a typical user anymore than the skid-row derelict is a typical alcohol drinker.
Did you know military aviators are often given amphetamines? “During the Falklands conflict sedatives were used by the British to regulate sleep for pilots. Amphetamines were used by the British and Germans in WWII. During Vietnam both the Air Force and Navy made amphetamines available to aviators. Intermittently since Vietnam up through Desert Storm the Air Force has used both amphetamines and sedatives in selected aircraft for specific missions” Don’t believe me? That’s a quote from a US Naval Surgeon’s Manual called “Performance Maintenance During Continuous Flight Operations,”
Country music fans may recall Dave Dudley’s big hit back in 1963 about a trucker heading home … “Six Days on the Road” which featured the line “I’m taking little white pills, And my eyes are open wide.” … those little white pills that kept him awake alert were pretty common for truck drivers throughout the 50’s and 60’s . Before the drug war I’m told ”bennies” (Benzedrine) sold in truck stops at 10 for a dollar. Pure liquid methamphetamine or Desoxin (meth tablets) could be acquired easily with a doctor’s prescription. Amphetemines were sold over-the-counter, with no prescription until the early 1950’s!
So is there a difference between the stuff pilots and truckers were taking and the stuff cooked up in meth labs today? Back then those amphetimines were produced by legitimate pharmaceutical companies and contained only what they said they contained on the label. Who knows what impurities are in the stuff cooked into homemade meth?
Today’s home meth labs create other problems as well. The chemicals used to manufacture the stuff are highly toxic. Today’s illegal makers dump the by-products in the ground or into the nearest stream or river… not good for the environment. Often the houses used are so full of spilled chemicals they become uninhabitable after the lab is busted or the makers move on.
Drug prohibition has only taken a dangerous drug and created a black market for it, making it still more dangerous. At least when you bought meth back then you knew it was meth…and only meth. Did some people get harmed by meth back then? Of course, but dangerous chemicals weren’t winding up in our water table. Families with children weren’t moving into poisonous homes recently vacated by home-style methmakers. Would people still abuse it and ruin their lives if it were legal? Of course… but, on the whole, the rest of us would be better off.
Obama’s Nightmares
Two US Consulate workers driving home from a children’s birthday party in Juarez Mexico were shot to death yesterday. Their newborn was found unharmed in the back seat.
Ten minutes later another consulate employee was driving home from the same party with his two children. He was killed in a hail of bullets from a passing car. Both children were wounded.
President Obama was incensed and rightly so. This sort of terrible violence is all too common in Mexico these days. Just a few weeks ago at least 14 high school and college students were killed and another two dozen injured after armed men opened fire on the teens also in Ciudad Juarez. Thousands are killed each year in violent attacks that are apparently related to feuds between rival drug lords over control of drug smuggling to the US.
Americas insistence on prohibiting marijuana makes it an extremely lucrative business to smuggle it across the relatively porus border into the US. Estimates show some 65% of the Mexican drug business involves the smuggling of marijuana. Never mind that polls are showing more support than ever, (in one case 56% !) for legalizing the mild drug here our government prefers to enforce decades old laws that were passed for ridiculous reasons in the early years of the last century. America arrests over 800, 000 people for marijuana each year, 90% of them for possession alone. This costs billions of our tax dollars, gives hundreds of thousands of Americans criminal records making it hard to get jobs or school loans, and is directly responsible for the violence across the border.
Of course the President has promised to do everything he can to bring the killers of these US citizens to justice and to stop the violence in Mexico. Everything that is but stop causing the violence that is.
He knows perfectly well that marijuana prohibition is behind the violence south of the border. His Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even admitted it shortly after she took office. “Neither interdiction [of drugs] nor reducing demand have been successful… we have been pursuing these strategies for 30 years.” She said, showing she understood the problem was our failed drug war.
Obama did just what our elected officials have always done in the face of prohibition-related problems - call for more of the same policy that caused the problem in the first place. He’s sending increased numbers of DEA and FBI agents to Mexico. Just across the border in Laredo, Texas City Councilman Beto O’Rourke called on the US to send more aid to Mexico. He meant money, Mr. President, not policemen.
I can only imagine the rationalization and denial that President Obama must be engaging in to avert having nightmares of that orphaned child in the back of that car and knowing he’s partly responsible.
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.”
