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From: Rusty HAMC-BHC
Date: 4/15/2003
Time: 10:00:40 PM
Remote Name: 66.142.237.174
When the Nixon administration conceived the idea of a war on drugs in 1968, drug use wasn’t the target. Nixon hated the anti-war peaceniks, demonstrators and all the longhaired youngsters that opposed his ideologies. Nixon also hated the civil rights activists who were mostly black. He knew the feelings were mutual and needed a weapon to use against them.
One of Nixon’s advisors, H.R. Haldeman wrote in his diary, “President Nixon emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” The one common denominator the black civil rights movement and the young white counter culture of the 60’s had was marijuana use.
At the time society perceived marijuana as a soft drug and didn’t associate it with other criminal behavior, but Nixon aides knew that by conflating heroin and marijuana users together the media could make the “drug problem” appear infinitely more threatening than it was. With the true statistics showing drugs to be an insignificant problem, it was going to require enlisting the media’s cooperation of inflating statistics to show drug use being the “root of societies ills.”
In reality only 1,601 people died from all legal and illegal drug use in 1969, yet 1,824 people died from falling down stairs that same year and 2,641 people choked to death on food.
President Nixon used his “Law & Order” platform to focus attention away from Vietnam. This was a brilliant decision on Nixon’s part because the white majority middle-class of America was turning against the war in Vietnam. But, they despised the demonstrators, hippies and counter-culture of the 60’s even more. Using drug enforcement as a weapon to subdue his political enemies, Nixon pushed legislation through congress that escalated his drug war. The democrats, not wanting to be viewed as soft on crime, jumped on the “Law & Order” bandwagon, too.
Newsweek Magazine identified the targets of Nixon’s drug war as, “the incendiary black militant and the welfare mother, the hedonistic hippie and the campus revolutionary.” President Nixon couldn’t make it illegal to be young, poor, or black, however, he could crack down hard on the illegal drug use identified with the counter-culture.
Under Nixon’s drug bill the job of “scheduling” drugs was taken from the Surgeon General and given to the Attorney General. Now cops, not doctors, would henceforth determine the toxicity of drugs.
Attorney General John Mitchell asked the director of Nixon’s Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, John Ingersoll, how they could jigger the figures and make seizures as impressive as possible for the media. Ingersoll came up with the idea to use “street values” when reporting the amount of drugs seized because it would increase the factor by 100 fold.
When anti-war demonstrators were scheduled to assemble, Nixon’s “narcs” would arrest as many people as possible on pot charges. In one instance, they detained 8000 protestors on the day BEFORE a scheduled anti-war rally.
Some of President Nixon’s aides tried to reason with him, urging him to stick to the facts when reporting drug and crime statistics, only to be ignored as he plowed on. Nixon reported to Congress in 1971 that heroin addicts were responsible for 2 billion dollars in property theft that year, when in fact, the total value of all property stolen in the United States that year was 1.3 billion. Much of crime isn’t related to drug abuse. Most addicts that do steal were thieves long before they were addicts, so crimes they committed may not necessarily be attributed to drug use.
Nixon appointed a “Marijuana Commission” to once and for all prove his case to the public that marijuana was a dangerous drug. He was shocked when the commission report sided with his political enemies, the youth counter-culture. The commission told him that the real marijuana problem wasn’t the drug, but the war on the drug. This war was alienating young people,turning “straight” society against the counter-culture, and leading police to use pot laws as political weapons. Marijuana prohibition, the commission concluded, is not in the national interest. They also dispelled the “gateway” drug theory many drug warriors use to justify continued criminalization of marijuana, saying that the theory has no basis and that smoking marijuana inhibits criminal behavior.
The commission went on to say, “Our youth cannot understand why society chooses to criminalize a behavior with so little visible ill effect or adverse social impact. These young people have jumped the fence and found no cliff. The disrespect for possession laws fosters disrespect for law and the system in general. On top of this is the distinct impression among young people that some police may use marijuana laws to arrest people they don’t like for other reasons, whether it be their politics, their hairstyle, or their ethnic backround.
None of the big news “weeklies” reported on the commissions findings. After years of emotional back and forth about the medical, legal, and social implications of marijuana use, a commission of Nixon’s own choosing recommended legalization and the press let Nixon bury the story.
When the White House drug enforcer, Myles Ambrose was asked by a reporter about a survey that had just been published, the reporter said, “ I wonder if you are pleased with the trend among youths, particularly college kids, away from marijuana and back to booze?” Ambrose replied, “ It recalls a happier day in which those of us that have had the good fortune of going to college indulged in booze on one or more occasion. As I recall it, it was beer. Let’s say beer, mostly. Yes, I am very much pleased in that respect.”
While Nixon was busy demonizing drugs in 1971, 55,000 people died that year in alcohol related car accidents. Another 33,000 people died from alcohol poisoning and cirrhosis of the liver, while at the same time, no deaths were ever recorded as caused by marijuana use. Also in 1971, 2,313 people died from use of all legal and illegal drugs, while 2,360 people died from gun related accidents. In that same year 2,227 people died from choking on food and 24,097 died from suicide.
By 1974, President Nixon had expanded drug enforcement spending from 65 million dollars to 719 million dollars.
In 1975, a college professor named Bob Randall was arrested for growing small amounts of marijuana in his home. He has glaucoma and found that marijuana was effective treatment for this disease. He talked to scientists at N.I.D.A., the D.E.A. and the F.D.A., all of whom told him that yes, research has demonstrated that marijuana can help control glaucoma. Randall was furious. The government knew marijuana was useful in treating a disease that was otherwise hard to treat. Yet, the government kept that information a secret and the drug itself was banned. Randall fought the case on grounds of medical necessity and won.
After President Nixon was ran out of office, the drug war subsided in intensity for a while. President Carter even came close to decriminalizing marijuana six months into his term. But in his drug statement, Carter nodded briefly in the direction of the Justice Department to study the need for stiffer trafficking penalties. He did however believe that simple possession of one ounce or less should not be treated as a criminal offense.
During President Carter’s administration, the drug czar was a psychiatrist named Peter Bourne who believed adopting the policy of “harm reduction” used in the Netherlands successfully would be appropriate. Eliminating drug use is impossible, goes the reasoning. The proper role for government is to reduce the harm drugs do to individuals and society. For addicts, addiction isn’t the problem, only the harm the addiction causes. In the harm reduction context, “harm” is defined broadly, considering also the harm done by aggressive law enforcement tactics. If stiff pot-possession penalties do more harm than the drug itself, reduce them. If heavy street enforcement makes dealers more violent and more inclined to adulterate their drugs with poison, then back off.
Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Andrew Weil stated: “ Any drug can be used successfully, no matter how bad it’s reputation, and any drug can be abused, no matter how accepted it is. There are no good or bad drugs; there are only good and bad relationships with drugs.” How true a statement that is when you consider this fact: 100,000 people died from abuse of prescription drugs and only 6,000 people died from all use of illegal drugs during the entire year of 2001.
Under the harm reduction practice, the government would back off people (users) and most of them will use drugs in a way that doesn’t hurt anyone. The few that fall off the cliff into addiction can be gently nursed back into health, just as with alcohol or other legal drugs.
When President Carter’s drug czar, Peter Bourne resigned, Peter Bensinger, who at the time was D.E.A. administrator, ratcheted up the pressure to increase marijuana penalties. He knew that legalizing marijuana would threaten the D.E.A. budget. Bensinger said, “ any notion that marijuana is a valuable drug for reducing nausea in chemotherapy patients, for example, is hogwash. The Cancer Society confirms that marijuana represents a more serious cancer threat than cigarettes.” This statement took the Cancer Society by surprise, as it had made no such claim, and, in fact believed just the opposite. “We have no national policy on marijuana and cancer,” a spokesperson said in response to Bensinger’s comments; “We are interested in marijuana, though, as a treatment of pain for cancer patients.”
With several scandals in the White House for drug use, tainting President Carter’s image, he felt he must distance himself from the marijuana decriminalization issue. Also, he needed to protect his right flank with the 1980 elections looming. The nations voters were getting more conservative by the day and soon, the Reagan Administration would be in office.
The days of liberal thinking, reform minded people in the White House were over. Under Reagan’s administration, the words “hard” or “soft” drugs were eliminated, as was “casual” or “recreational” use. This administration wanted to call drug use “abuse” and be done with the argument for legalization. They spread the word that they were determined to make America “drug free”. Reagan’s drug warriors wanted to not only eliminate drug use all together – an impossible feat – but also change the way people think. The harm chemicals actually do was no longer an issue. The permissive social attitudes they accompany were every bit as harmful to societies health, in their opinion. “A permissive societal attitude has posed a particular problem for law enforcement and teachers in the performance of their duties, as well as for parents who are striving to impart the values and attitudes of responsible citizenship to their children,” said the drug policy director.
Conservative policy makers often decried the liberal Supreme Court decisions of Earl Warren, William Douglas, Hugo Black, John Harlan and Potter Stewart. Under conservative Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan the Supreme Court swerved far to the right with Justices Warren Burger, John Stevens, Lewis Powell, William Rehnquist and Sandra O’Connor. In decision after decision during the 1980’s, the Supreme Court rewrote the 4th amendment’s protections against police excess as actively as any congress in history.
The court followed the drug war agenda of the Reagan White House so closely that one of their own, conservative Judge John Paul Stevens, lamented in writing that the Supreme Court had become little more than a “loyal foot soldier” in the war on drugs.
Alexander Hamilton once called the original Supreme Court judiciary “the least dangerous branch of government”. Appointed for life, federal judges are presumed immune from the political passions that seize elected officials. But even Supreme Court Justices are only people, appointed for their politics by politicians seeking political gain. The “permanently liberal” judiciary that Alexander Hamilton had described in earlier days was but a memory by the 1980’s as a conservative judiciary revised The Constitutions’ protections time after time in drug cases.
Under President Reagan, a pharmacologist named Carlton Turner became the national drug policy director, not because he was qualified to set drug policy, but because he “believed” in the Reagan hard-nosed approach to dealing with drugs.
Another department dealing with education, treatment and prevention was A.D.A.M.H.A. Carlton Turner appointed a pediatrician to head that department, someone with no credentials or experience in drug treatment. National drug policy slipped another notch further from the grasp of those with experience and training.
“Reaganomics” dismantled the federally funded treatment system. County officials spent more money on criminal justice than education. People were jailed without trial and properties were confiscated without due process. Armies of drug agents with inflated powers to wiretap and surveil set off volatile inner city turf wars and gunfights. The 4th amendment of the constitution is a mere shadow of its former self as a result of the drug war.
Since the Reagan era, mere suggestion that the country pursue any path but total prohibition has been forbidden speech. What replaced it was an unquestionable anti-drug orthodoxy that skewed the work of every government agency. It also elevated drug users to national enemies and limited even the language permissible in drug discussions.
An aide to Congressman Bill Hughes suggested that he consider legally separating marijuana from more dangerous drugs in an upcoming crime bill. Using the old argument that marijuana has never killed anyone and that we are damaging the criminal justice system, respect for the law and public health by falsely considering marijuana equal to other drugs, he pressed Hughes to consider it. Hughes finally said, “ There are only two ways I will be defeated in the next election. One, I’m accused of stealing. Two, I talk about decriminalizing marijuana.”
In 1984 the Omnibus Crime Bill was passed and signed into law the next day by Reagan. It substantially boosted maximum prison terms for drug crimes. It replaced parole with supervised release, which lets judges add a period of parole-like restrictions and supervision onto the end of a completed sentence. It let prosecutors appeal sentences – a right previously reserved for the defense. It stipulated that anybody charged with a drug crime that might result in a ten year sentence is presumed dangerous and can be held without bail. It axed a long-standing program that expunged the records of first-time drug offenders between eighteen and twenty-six years old, who had already served their time.
Prosecutors could now confiscate, with no more “proof” than was required for a search warrant. Cash, cars, boats, homes, bank accounts, stock portfolios- anything “believed” to have been purchased with drug money or earned in drug sales. No charge, indictment, trial or conviction was necessary. The burden of proof was placed on the person whose assets were seized. Drug offenses were the target; accused murderers, kidnappers or rapists were in no danger of losing their assets without trial.
By 1991 the fund created from seized assets had grown to $1.6 billion.
Finally, the new law gave the prosecutors power to confiscate before proving any wrongdoing, the money a drug defendant might use to hire a lawyer. Accused murderers or big-time embezzlers could still keep their money and hire any lawyer they could afford, but under the new drug law, defendants would be forced to rely on overworked, under funded public defenders. One federal prosecutor wrote, “Under the constitution, defendants are entitled to legal advice, not high priced advice.” To enforce the new law, defense lawyers could be subpoenaed to tell how much they received as retainer and how much they were paid.
Another of the many industries that have directly benefited from the drug war is the urine-testing laboratory. By the end of the 1980’s this industry was worth $300 million. A Northwestern University study found that national averages for false-positive test results were 25%. And a U.C.L.A. study found that of 161 prescription and over-the-counter medications, 65 produced a false positive in illegal drug urine tests. Clerical errors, sloppy lab work and the limitations of the testing machines themselves were all blamed for the appalling results.
At a forensic scientists conference in Cincinnati, the chief toxicologist for North Carloina’s medical examiner’s office asked, “ Is there anybody in the audience that would submit to a urine for canneboid testing if his career, reputation, freedom or livelihood depended on it ?” Not a single hand was raised.
In 1985, a new drug called MDMA was introduced in America. It was developed by independent chemists to be used by psychiatrists as a tool to help people confront personal issues they previously could not. A handful of psychiatrists reported phenomenal success with it and one woman told Newsweek Magazine, “Not only did MDMA help me recover my sanity, it enabled me to recover my soul.” Unfortunately, the drug had a popular following as a party drug when taken in conjunction with alcohol. Its street name is Ecstacy. Within weeks of hitting the press, MDMA was banned by D.E.A. Chief Jack Lawn under sweeping emergency powers granted him under the 1984 drug law.
No deaths had been attributed to the drug and no studies were ever undertaken by scientists to offer evidence it was a health threat. In statistics compiled as late as 2000, only one death was attributed to MDMA in Great Britain.
By 1986, another new drug, crack cocaine became the number one drug war concern. Crack is highly addictive, but not as addictive as the government states. Heroin is physically addicting where crack will cause a psychological type of addiction. Crack does not cause instant addiction as the Drug Abuse Warning Network has stated. If that was true, everybody that tried it would be in trouble. Of high school seniors polled in 1987, (the first year they were asked about cocaine), 4.1% had tried crack cocaine in the past year. Less than 1/3 of those had tried it in the past month and a 40th of those who had tried it were using it everyday. The proportions have remained the same since then as overall crack use has declined. The numbers actually indicate that nicotine is more reinforcing than crack.
In 1987, fully 65% of high school seniors who smoked cigarettes at least once a month smoked them everyday, in most cases a half a pack or more.
The statistics used by the government agencies that report cocaine deaths are notoriously inaccurate because if cocaine traces are found in the body of a heroin addict who overdoses (or a drunk who passes out and never wakes up), the incident may be recorded as a “cocaine death”. Such reporting anomalies tend to overstate rather than understate the cocaine problem. But even so, the Drug Abuse Warning Network figures showed cocaine killing fewer people than aspirin or the flu. Cocaine was mentioned in 604 deaths in 1984. That doesn’t mean cocaine killed that many people, just that the drug was present in the bodies of 604 people who died suddenly from substance abuse. It was a threefold increase from 1981, but hardly the biggest health crisis in the country.
Five times as many Americans died choking on food and ten times as many from ulcers. To say nothing of strokes, heart disease, auto wrecks, handguns and other cases of preventable deaths.
Media hype is largely responsible for overstating the drug problem and causing mass hysteria. Newsweek Magazine has again and again written articles concerning crack cocaine with no facts to back up their claims. When Newsweek published an issue with a teenager snorting cocaine on a suburban home’s carpeted staircase, it sold 15% more copies (that issue) than the years’ average. Recognizing a good thing when he saw it, editor-in-chief Richard M. Smith put crack on the cover again three months later. “An epidemic is abroad in America,” he wrote in a signed editorial, “ as persuasive and dangerous in its way as the plagues of medieval times.” Thus was cocaine, which killed 1/400,000 of the population that year, compared with the Black Death Plague, claiming a third of Europe’s population.
Crack use has been declining since 1985. At the height of the epidemic, 96% of high school seniors had never tried it. Neither the government nor the press had much to gain by saying so.
Today, 745,000 people are arrested every year for marijuana possession nationwide. In California between 1976 and 1985 marijuana possession was a fineable offense. California saved $958,305,499.00 during that period of time with a zero increase in marijuana use.
When Len Bias, a rising star basketball player died while using cocaine, the media hysteria that followed enraged and scared Congress into enacting 29 new tough mandatory minimum sentences. Without holding hearings on the wisdom and efficacy of each of these sentences, Congress overlooked many important aspects of mandatory minimum sentencing.
This had been tried before in 1956, but was repealed. Congress did not show the expected overall reduction in drug law violations. In New York, the “Rockefeller Laws” of 1973 had heavy sentences and no plea bargaining which caused more defendants to go to trial. Predictably, the number of cases tried by jury more than doubled, So the time it took to dispose of on average case doubled. Dispite a big expansion in the New York court system, a 2,600 case backlog developed in the first eighteen months. Neither the crime nor the addiction rate improved.
With crack cocaine leading the morning papers and evening news that summer, Congress felt there was “no time”. Similarly, the subcommittee drawing up the new drug legislation didn’t take the time to learn about a new federal survey suggesting that tough law enforcement doesn’t discourage drug abuse or use. Rather, fully three-fifths of the drug-using prison inmates surveyed had not tried drugs until after their first arrest.
One Florida lawmaker, Larry Smith said, “my recommendation is that we don’t worry ourselves with the dosage units. We don’t worry about anything… what difference does it make how many dosage units are in it? They shouldn’t have any of the substance in their possession. And if somebody has got 400 parts cornstarch and one part cocaine, it’s obvious that are intending to kill somebody.”
With no time for hearings before pushing the legislation through, Congressmen informed themselves from television, magazines, constituents’ letters and each other’s increasingly florid statements to the TV. Cameras. Clay Shaw of Florida declared drugs “the biggest threat that we have ever had to our national security”. House majority leader Jim Wright of Texas upstaged him by calling drugs “a menace draining away our economy of some $230 billion this year, slowly rotting away the fabric of our society and seducing our young.” The $230 billion figure- roughly equal to the social security budget- apparently was plucked from thin air. The bills flew fast and furious. No more probation! No more suspended sentences! Death penalty for kingpins! A billion dollars for new prisons! Another billion dollars for state and local narcotics squads! Urine tests for all federal employees! Drugs are “a threat worse than any nuclear warfare or chemical warfare waged on any battlefield,” South Carolina Republican Thomas Hartnett said. The drug bills absurdity and political utility were plain for all to see. Lawmakers that were opposed to some or all of its far-reaching facets either kept their mouths shut or jumped on board to reap the political benefits.
William Rehnquist, the Supreme Court Judge known for his right-wing anti drug stance and appointed by President Reagan, admitted being addicted to the drug ‘placidyl’. Because his choice of addiction was legal, no fuss was made about it, even though prescription drugs kill people at 19 to 1 the rate of all illegal drugs. He was a drug addict for 9 years.
In Congress’s haste to pass the new drug bill, nobody on The Hill foresaw what would happen when the new mandatory minimum sentences coupled with the new 1984 omnibus drug policies became law at the same time and parole was simultaneously abolished. The federal prison system was already at 150% capacity, a condition that would soon be looked back upon with nostalgia.
In 1986, the budget for the Federal Bureau of Prisons was $227 million. By 2000, the budget was $4.7 billion, a 1700% increase. At this time, 60% of all federal inmates are non-violent drug law offenders.
At the time of the 1986 drug bills’ passage, the House judiciary chairman Peter Rodino said, “We have been fighting a war on drugs, but now it seems to be a war on the Constitution.”
Quoted in Life Magazine, 1987, Justice Thurgood Marshall said, “If it’s a dope case I won’t even read the petition. I give no breaks to any drug dealer.”
In 1985, the nation uncovered an 11-year-old congressional memo revealing C.I.A. deals with drug runners as far back as the early 70’s. After George Bush became the C.I.A. director in January 1976, the memo said the agency had squelched at least three big drug investigations or indictments to protect C.I.A. operatives.
Violence in the inner cities has been largely blamed on drugs for years. Paul Goldstein, author of the study of addict economics “Taking Care of Business” was an inveterate skeptic. When he examined the circumstances of 218 drug-related murders, he found the psychological effects of drugs caused only 31 of them. In two-thirds of those cases, moreover, the drug was alcohol. The effects of crack cocaine would be blamed for only 5 murders- and in 2 of those alcohol was involved. In only one case could crack alone be said to have driven the killer to his deed. Only 2% of the drug related killings were committed by people stealing to buy drugs. All the rest, fully three quarters, were committed by dealers battling over territory.
In 1988, D.E.A. Judge Francis Young wrote, “Marijuana in its natural form is one of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.” Having read and heard the testimony of dozens of doctors, patients, and public health administrators, Young concluded that, “It is clear beyond any question that many people find marijuana to have accepted medical use in treatment in the United States. Aids, cancer, glaucoma, and paralysis have been successfully treated with marijuana, and unquestionable evidence indicates that marijuana was being used therapeutically by mankind 2,000 years before the birth of Christ.” If marijuana had been legalized, the ‘drug problem’ would have been reduced by 90% and the budget of this country’s drug enforcement agency would likely have been tailored accordingly.
William Bennett became the Drug Czar under President Bush in 1988. By medical definition, Bennett was a drug addict himself. He was so addicted to nicotine after giving up his smoke able form of nicotine, that he carried a pack of nicotine chewing gum everywhere, up to 40 milligrams a day- about a 2 pack-a-day habit.
Alcohol and tobacco were a minefield that Bennett tiptoed through. Aside from cirrhosis of the liver and highway deaths attributed to drunk drivers, booze was implicated in violent crime to a much greater degree than any illegal drug. The Justice Department found that half of those convicted of homicide in 1989 were using alcohol at the time of the killing, while fewer than 6% were on drugs alone.
One of William Bennett’s reasoning was that marijuana, cocaine, and heroin are immoral because they are illegal. Why are they illegal? Because they are immoral. Compliance, not health was the real issue. “The drug crisis,” Bennett would say, “ is a crisis of authority, in every sense of the word ‘authority’.”
Bennett would speak at schools often telling children to inform on friends who use drugs. The school authorities would then in turn expel the offenders. “Turning in ones’ friends is an act of true loyalty, one of true friendship,” Bennett would say. After 18 months as Bush’s drug czar, William Bennett resigned.
A democrat, Bill Clinton won the election for the Presidency in 1992. Many drug war critics hoped the sax-playing baby boomer would be America’s liberator from the shackles of the failed drug war policies of past Presidents’ Nixon, Reagan, and Bush. He was not.
ESTIMATED ANNUAL DEATHS IN THE UNITED STATES: (These facts can be found in the D.R.C. Library) Tobacco: 400,000 deaths Alcohol: 110,000 deaths Prescription drugs: 100,000 Suicide: 30,000 Murder: 15,000 Aspirin and related pain killers: 7,600 Illegal Drugs: 6,000
Written by Rusty, H.A.M.C., B.H.C. (January, 2003)