Most of the people I know in the US have lived their entire lives after the War on Drugs started.
John Ehrlichman, Counsel and Assistant to President Nixon:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar Left, and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
Interviewed in 1992 by journalist Dan Baum, author of Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure, full quote in “Truth, Lies, and Audiotape” by Dan Baum (2012). You can read the book’s first chapter here. The first chapter covers some interesting side topics, including the genesis of Cheech and Chong. It also covers Lloyd Johnston’s annual survey of 2,200 high school students:
What drugs have you used? Johnston’s survey asked. Have you used them in the last year? The last month? The last week? How accessible are drugs? Johnston also included questions about alcohol and tobacco.
When the questionnaires were processed, it emerged, unsurprisingly, that tobacco was the-most widely used drug among high school students and about a third of them smoked it every day. Alcohol was next, predictably, with about one-fifth of the students drinking once or twice a week and another fifth once or twice a month.
What surprised Johnston was that nearly 80 percent of the group had never smoked marijuana. Barely I percent smoked every day. Other drugs were hardly visible; neither heroin nor cocaine had ever been tried by nine-tenths of the sample. The kids were pretty clean: black, white, rich, poor, grind, and dropout.
This was news, Johnston thought. In the book he and his team rushed together, Johnston wrote that “there certainly was not a widespread “epidemic, of illegal drug use among these high school students as the popular press had suggested.” His interpretation: American youth are “less radical” and “more traditional” than their public image would indicate. “In fact, their continuing adherence to traditional practices—namely, the-widespread use-of alcohol and cigarettes—may ultimately be the most important fact about youthful drug practices to emerge from this study” (emphasis in the original).
Now, granted, I was eight in 1968, but it sure seemed like things went obviously truly crazy for a few years between then and 1974 or so.
The photo, where President Nixon met with Elvis Presley after Elvis requested to be made a federal agent at large to help fight the war on drugs. Irony, of course, given the role of drugs in Elvis’s own shortened life span.
One of the books that formed my thoughts on America’s drug policy was Thomas Szasz’s Our Right to Drugs., which is basically a libertarian look at drugs (and suffers from many of the libertarian perspective problems, granted). What stuck with me is one of the analogies he used. When someone injures themselves skiing, we don’t call it ski abuse. When they injure themselves with a chainsaw, we don’t say they have a chainsaw problem. But if they injure themselves with drugs, it’s abuse. Why should one get special pejorative language?
Julaine says
May 16, 2015 at 2:45 pmBillions upon billions spent to fight a futile “War on Drugs”. Placing the emphasis on criminalizing the behavior instead of treatment. sigh. Whenever I have to jump through hoops and made to feel like I am engaging in some sort of shady practice every time I have to fill a necessary prescription because “criminal” drug use has skyrocketed here in Florida I get more and more frustrated. I could drag out my virtual soapbox but I have already exhausted myself explaining the politics of this particular “War” to my nearest & dearest. Suffice to say that that this is an unwinnable fight given human nature and the law of supply and demand.
Those of us that have been diagnosed with any type of chronic disease that requires long term prescription usage knows that the “War” was lost long ago and the combatants are now just locked into a policy of mutual self-destruction. When my 61 year old mother was diagnosed with lymphoma in 1999 her oncologist told her and us that frankly the most effective drug to combat the side effects of chemotherapy was THC (the active ingredient in marijuana) but he was unable to prescribe it legally in any of the 50 states at that time even though there was no scientific evidence that it had ANY harmful side effects or addictive qualities. Which led to the hillarious scenario of my mother-in-law (the most conservative Southern Baptist Republican Tennessee Belle you will encounter) embarking on a quest to procure a safe source of the drug for my mother. A story which will go down in the annuals of our family history for generations to come.
BankerPup says
May 16, 2015 at 4:28 pmAmen!
And the anti-left, racist aspects of the WoD are still with us.
Deirdre says
May 16, 2015 at 6:22 pmYep, they sure are.
I was going to add my note about the Thomas Szasz book in this comment, then decided to add it as the final paragraph in the original post.
Deirdre says
May 16, 2015 at 6:10 pmMy former boss, not long after he sold the business where I worked for him, went to the doc with what turned out to be Kaposi’s Sarcoma, aka an early marker of AIDS for many. The treatments he had for AIDS made him violently nauseated, so my then bf smuggled pot into the hospital (there was an outside smoking area, and they didn’t care if patients smoked pot there). Most of the AIDS and cancer wards were using pot.
What always kind of bugged me about it was the idea that maybe the drug regimen might need to be adjusted if the hospital “officially” knew that? Like what if combo A was better if you used pot instead of combo B?
But no one could do the research because of the war on drugs. Bah.
The most interesting site I’ve seen about pot legalization is Marijuana Majority. Some of the conservative names (e.g., Pat Robertson) surprised me.
Julaine says
May 16, 2015 at 7:01 pmI was astonished by the number of people who have to resort to some truly backdoor methods of getting the meds the needed to survive chemotherapy when my husband had a stem cell transplant in 2005. People barely able to hold themselves upright but shuffling out to the garden area because they needed to light up. The doctors and nurses actively encouraged illicit drug use while turning a blind eye but weren’t willing/able to confront the issue head on. Politics over humanitarian needs once again.
This doesn’t even address the issue that our prisons of full of non-violent felons who were convicted under draconian drug laws. If even 1/10th of the resources were diverted toward addiction services, education & humanitarian aid we would be so far ahead of this vicious cycle and our law enforcement personnel could turn their attention to more crucial matters.
Deirdre says
May 16, 2015 at 7:42 pmI think this picture (via @thereaIbanksy on Twitter) says it all.
azteclady says
May 17, 2015 at 7:19 amHave you read this?