War on drugs doomed to failure
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.
According to Americans Against the War on Drugs (AAWD), the U.S. has spent more than one trillion dollars on the War on Drugs during the past thirty years without achieving even a small reduction in drug trafficking or drug abuse. Traffickers have continued success, now garnering around four hundred billion dollars per year. Drugs on the street are of higher quality and are more plentiful than ever before. And in the past decade, the use of illegal drugs by junior high kids in the U.S. has increased by three hundred percent. How then can you categorize the War on Drugs as anything but total insanity?
Of course, if the result our nation’s drug czar and his troops wanted was the incarceration of over two million U.S. citizens (an incarceration rate, by the way, six times that of our nearest Western competitor), many of these inmates nonviolent drug offenders, the majority of them minority men; if the result they wanted was a more powerful, better-armed criminal class; if the result they wanted was justification to invade the privacy of the citizens of this nation, all in the name of a drug-free society, then maybe it’s not so crazy after all. (Above statistics from The November Coalition)
But a drug-free society? Who’s kidding whom? Frankly, I believe that anyone who claims that the War on Drugs is about establishing a drug-free society is either asleep at the wheel or a shameless liar. Even if it were possible to interdict every kilogram of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, and other illegal drugs at our borders, even if we found and destroyed every pot farm in the U.S., even if we closed every illegal drug lab in the country, we would be far from drug-free. All you have to do is drive to the nearest mini-mart to purchase the two drugs that cause more deaths annually than all the others combined—tobacco and alcohol. In fact, each year more than five hundred thousand deaths are attributed to tobacco and alcohol, as compared to approximately seventeen thousand deaths from all illegal drugs (no deaths from marijuana) according to AAWD. And don’t get me started on the pharmaceutical companies that, according to the American Association of Retired People, spent sixteen billion dollars in 2000 to hawk prescription drugs as if they were laundry detergent or underarm deodorant.
But we Americans like the quick fix. Here, take this pill for obesity/sadness/cholesterol/whatever, and you can bypass the tougher choices that might bring the undesired condition under control without using drugs at all.
Yet I believe there’s an even deeper issue here. I believe that much of the abuse of mind-altering drugs takes place because of unconscious negative beliefs that many of us have about ourselves and about life, beliefs like “I’m a loser” or “Life is hard and then you die.” We use the drugs for a few moments of respite from the psychic pain that results from such beliefs. The only problem is that the angst comes roaring back with even greater intensity when the drugs wear off.
In my youth I partook of various legal and illegal drugs (Yes, I did inhale.). And I can tell you that the primary reason I did it was to feel comfortable in my skin, if only for a few hours. It was not until I had the courage to confront the limiting beliefs about myself—that I was weak and needed to be cared for—and then deal with these beliefs, that I was willing to cast aside the emotional crutch that drugs provided and begin to live with more purpose and passion. This, I believe, is the work that must be done. If we are to help anyone to truly be free from the deleterious effects of drugs (or TV or sugar or consumerism), if we are to be free ourselves, we must support one another to awaken, to get in touch with who we really are, and to live out of that reality. Happiness, excitement, and, yes, even joy can be ours without smoking, snorting, ingesting, or shooting anything. The War on Drugs, like Prohibition, was doomed to failure even before it began. Perhaps we’ll get it this time.
Saturday, March 31st, 2001No Comments »
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