By Katherine Powell
It’s no secret the war on drugs has failed. But there’s more to it than that. The drug war is actively harming an American public it’s supposed to be protecting.
The first anti-drug legislation in the United States – passed by San Francisco in 1875 – was rooted in anti-immigrant sentiment: it banned opium smoking, a habit unique to the Chinese.
Comparably, former Richard Nixon administrators have openly confessed racism was one of the reasons for the president’s declaring a war on drugs in 1971.
“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,” Nixon’s domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper’s magazine.
Nixon launched a war on drugs despite knowing that drug treatment works and incarceration doesn’t, according to Dan Baum in his book “Smoke and Mirrors.”
Before long, prison numbers skyrocketed. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, America’s incarcerated population in 1970 was 196,441. By 1980, it was 503,600; by 1990, 1.2 million; and by 2014, 2.2 million.
It was in that shift that police became a militarized, numbers-driven group. Communities came to see police not as protectors but as potential prosecutors.
Highly incentivized to make arrests, police go after the easiest targets: minorities. According to data from the Prison Population Initiative, blacks in 2010 accounted for 13 percent of the U.S. population and 40 percent of our prison population. Whites, on the other hand, accounted for 64 percent of the country’s population and 39 percent of those incarcerated. Demonstrating a similar trend, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People tells us that blacks are arrested at nearly six times the rate of whites.
Worst of all, the war on drugs that institutionalizes discrimination doesn’t even address the pills most lethal to society: prescription opioids.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opioid deaths continued to surge in 2015, surpassing 30,000 for the first time in recent history.
CDC Director Tom Frieden told the Washington Post’s Christopher Ingraham, “the epidemic of deaths involving opioids continues to worsen. Prescription opioid misuse and use of heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl are intertwined and deeply troubling problems.”
Over the last decade, prescription opioid overdose rates have grown exponentially — annual quotas have quadrupled since 1999. Informatively, so have opioid prescribing rates.
The American pharmaceutical system is unique. In most advanced economies, the government bargains for and buys pharmaceuticals. U.S. law, on the other hand, bars the process from negotiation.
Capitalizing on the available market, pharmaceutical companies — at the expense of citizens’ health — make drugs readily accessible. Subsequent abundance makes prescriptions ripe for abuse. Because of their effect, opioids in particular have a high probability of being misused.
But the pharmaceutical industry banks off of you not necessarily knowing that. As a result, drug companies are willing to do whatever it takes — lie, cheat, schmooze — to convince consumers of either requiring or desiring their pills.
When Purdue Pharma first began to market OxyContin in 1996, it advertised the drug as a non or less addictive opiate, knowing good and well that wasn’t true. They contended that the narcotic, “because of its time-release formulation, posed a lower threat of abuse and addiction to patients than do traditional, shorter-acting painkillers like Percocet or Vicodin.”
That lie eventually landed the major drug manufacturer in court, where they settled the case with $600 million in fines — a sum equivalent to 21 percent of their profit off OxyContin in the first six years of sales alone.
Guiding these inconsistent systems to how we respond to drugs is similarly incredulous policy.
Back in 1970, alongside declaring drug abuse America’s public enemy number one, Nixon signed into law the Controlled Substances Act to regulate the manufacture, importation, possession, use and distribution of certain substances.
As federal law has it, cannabis, which has not once been linked to death, is more hazardous of a drug than benzodiazepines like Xanax, which were involved in 30 percent of prescription drug overdoses in 2013, second only to opioids. Meanwhile, 8.5 million die annually from alcohol and tobacco, according to the World Health Organization.
This way of inaccurately labeling drugs has blurred the lines of what is right and what is wrong when it comes to drug use. One would think that if a drug is illegal, it must be dangerous; and if a drug is legal, it must be safe. Clearly that is not the case.
People are going to do drugs regardless of what anyone else says or does. That is not going to change.
In place of laws that allow corporations to play the American people as pawns in a crooked, real-life game of monopoly, we need accurate policies that keep big pharma and its huge profits in check. Until such regulation is achieved, the self-inflicted war will continue to linger.
Austin Urban Post 