I just finished watching the much-acclaimed series “Narcos” on Netflix. What a fantastic program. And what an excellent depiction of the futility and corruption of the war on drugs.
The series is a true-life account of Pablo Escobar, a Colombian drug lord who headed up the Medellin drug cartel, a black-market drug group that smuggled hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. Smuggling an estimated 80 percent of the cocaine into the United States, Escobar became known as called the “King of Cocaine,” attaining in the process a net worth of $30 billion by the early 1990s. According to Wikipedia, Escobar was the wealthiest criminal in history.
Amidst much acclaim and publicity, the U.S. government and the Colombian government, working together, targeted Escobar with arrest or killing. Escobar retaliated by effectively declaring war on the government, a war that consisted of assassinations and bombings. Every time the DEA (which was operating in Colombia, along with the U.S. military and the CIA) and Colombian officials tightened the noose on Escobar’s operation, Escobar responded with bullets and bombs, killing a multitude of government officials and private citizens.
The logic of the drug-war crackdown was clear: By eradicating Escobar, officials thought they would be eradicating 80 percent of the cocaine being shipped into the United States. So, all the death and destruction resulting from the crackdown on Escobar was considered worth it in the long run.
But that’s not what happened. The more they tightened the noose around Escobar, the more his cocaine competitors—that is, the ones who were supplying the 20 percent, expanded their operations, gaining them a larger market share. Among the principal beneficiaries of the crackdown on Escobar was the Cali Cartel, which, not surprisingly, became the next big target of the U.S. and Colombian drug warriors, with similar results—the more they cracked down on the Cali Cartel, the more their competitors stepped into the breach and gained a larger market share.
In 1993, they finally caught up to Escobar and killed him in a shootout. You can imagine how U.S. and Colombian officials trumpeted that drug-war victory. Another “milestone” in the war on drugs, the term they have used for decades whenever they kill or capture some big drug lord.
But of course it was all to no avail. Even though they killed Escobar and ultimately smashed the Medellin and Cali cartels, amidst great fanfare and publicity, other suppliers quickly took their places and continued providing cocaine users in the United States with their drug.
In other words, all those people who lost their lives in the drug war on Escobar died for nothing. Absolutely nothing.
There is something else to consider: what the drug war against Escobar did to law-enforcement agents, both American and Colombian. It corrupted them to the core. Frustrated over all the death and destruction that Escobar was wreaking across the country and over their inability to apprehend him, officials began employing brutal and illegal tactics in return, such as torturing prisoners for information and then murdering them so that they couldn’t talk about what the officials had done to them.
Of course, there was also widespread bribery that was taking place within the Colombian police. In fact, that was one of the reasons they had such a hard time catching up to Escobar—his informants within the police and Colombian military would alert him to whatever was going on.
The pathetic thing about all this death, destruction, mayhem, and corruption is that there was a much simpler way to have put Escobar, the Cali Cartel, and all the other black-market drug suppliers out of business, a way that would not have involved assassinations, bombings, torture, and corruption. All that the U.S. and Colombian governments had to do was legalize drugs.
If they had done that, Escobar and the rest of the black-market suppliers would have been put out of business instantaneously. That’s because of the difference between legal markets and black markets.
In legal markets, suppliers compete against each other by providing better goods and services to their customers. Think CVS, Walgreen, and other pharmacies. Notice that they are not out bombing and assassinating each other and other people.
It’s totally different in black or illegal markets. Competitors in these markets deal with each other through violent turf wars that involve murder, kidnapping, bombing, and mayhem. While people like Escobar are able to thrive in a black market, they inevitably go out of business in a legal market because they lack the skills that are necessary in legal markets.
A good example of this phenomenon is alcohol. We don’t see alcohol dealers killing each other to get a larger share of the market. That’s because booze is legal.
But it wasn’t that way when booze was illegal. During Prohibition, there were people like Al Capone involved in the sale and distribution of alcohol, along with killing, mayhem, and corruption.
This same principle, of course, applies today. Notwithstanding all the hoopla to which all of us are subjected when the feds or state drug warriors make a drug bust, the result is no different than it was 20–30 years ago with Escobar. The minute they make the bust, the supplier is replaced by someone else.
There is only one way to eradicate drug lords and illicit drug dealers, along with all the death, destruction, and corruption that comes with them: End the war on drugs by legalizing drugs.
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
On Monday, protesters — reacting to the violence in Charlottesville over the weekend — brought a ladder and some rope to North Carolina and tore down a near century old statue of a Confederate soldier. Unsurprisingly, nothing changed. However, the Durham Police Department and the Durham County Sheriff’s Office announced that they will be seeking criminal charges for those involved in the destruction of the statue.
Watching people wage violence against their fellow human in the name of protecting or tearing down some arbitrary government artifact is as disheartening as it is frustrating. The future cannot be changed by attempting to erase the past.
A statue holds no magical power to make people racists. If anything, the monuments to former racists serve as reminders that the state can and always will be open to the influence of bigotry — and only the state has the power to enforce racism.
An ignorant racist is exactly that — however, if society grants that ignorant racist a political position or a badge and a gun, this ignorant racist now has power over you. Removing or keeping a piece of concrete will never change this.
Jim Crow laws weren’t overturned because people went around town tearing down statues.
Racist government laws were brought to an end because people refused to obey them. Had Rosa Parks used her time and energy lobbying to take down a statue instead of disobeying a racist law, rest assured Browder v. Gayle, which ruled that segregated buses were unconstitutional, would’ve never happened.
Had the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s not organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott, rest assured, desegregation would’ve taken much longer.
Society has the amazing ability to force positive change through nonviolent and nondestructive means. However, all too often, we let emotions rule our thoughts and take to yelling and fighting in the streets and destroying property. This only serves to create more divide and empower the ranks of the racists.
If we really want to put the brakes on a racist system, fighting with other citizens (even if they are devout racists) will never work.
Boycotts, refusal of service, shaming, exposing — these are the tools we as citizens have against other citizens who are spreading hate and racism.
One amazing private solution to racism actually just happened on Tuesday in Washington. Richard Spencer, the ostensible leader of the white supremacists, was forced to hold his press conference in his own house because businesses refused to allow him to rent their hotels. This campaign of public shaming and refusal of service is far more effective than tearing down a statue or attempting to use the government to ban hate speech.
But what do we do when the state is perpetuating a racist system and prolonging the suffering of minorities? Again, the answer to that question is not to tear down a statue, but to realize where the power of this racism rests.
In America, the area of government that is most responsible for maintaining a racist system, allowing racist actors to oppress their targets with impunity, and perpetuating the suffering and plight of millions through the persecution of morally innocent individuals — is the war on drugs.
The drug war, from the police departments to the court systems, unequivocally targets and punishes minorities harder for the same victimless crimes for which their white counterparts receive slaps on the wrist.
As TFTP reported last year, a scathing report in Harper’s Magazine, written by Dan Baum set the record straight and relieved all doubt over the intentions of the drug war. John Daniel Ehrlichman, counsel and domestic policy chief to President Richard Nixon, came clean on the real reason behind the war on drugs — to criminalize blacks and hippies.
According to Baum, he tracked down Ehrlichman in 1994 at his engineering firm in Atlanta, Georgia.
“You want to know what this was really all about?” Ehrlichman bluntly asked Baum of the war on drugs. “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.”
To this day, the racist intentions behind the war on drugs serve to further oppress black communities. The war on drugs is still creating criminals out of otherwise innocent individuals who’re caught in possession of arbitrary substances, removing their opportunity for employment by giving them criminal records, and guaranteeing a difficult future within the working class.
It is no coincidence that the ACLU refers to the drug war as the new Jim Crow.
The war on drugs subjects the United States to much of the same harm, with much of the same economic and ideological underpinnings, as slavery itself. Just as Jim Crow responded to emancipation by rolling back many of the newly gained rights of African-Americans, the drug war is again replicating the institutions and repressions of the plantation. And like slavery and Jim Crow, the drug war garners appalling levels of support. Each has its own rhetoric, each its own claims to unassailable legitimacy. The brutality of slavery was justified on economic and paternalistic grounds. Jim Crow pretended that separate but equal treatment sufficed, even as blacks faced daily lynchings and every form of overt discrimination. The drug war claims morality and protection of children as its goals, while turning a blind eye to the racial injustice it promotes. And with all three systems of oppression, much of society sits idly by, accepting the rhetoric that later will seem so unbelievably corrupt. We will one day understand that the war on drugs was a war on people and communities.
If we really want to deal a blow to this racist system we must strike the root. The drug war is one such root. Until we eliminate the cause of this strife, tearing down all the statues in the world will do nothing. Until we realize that we are financing our own oppression and refuse to support the government programs that keep us in the days of Jim Crow, the tyranny will remain.
It is high time we realize this real solution to this real problem before the entire country is so divided that we enter a new American civil war.
As more and more people drop prescription drugs for medical cannabis, reports like this explain why Big Pharma is scrambling to keep prohibition in place. It also explains why the DEA has such close ties to the pharmaceutical industry.
The question of why cannabis remains illegal becomes more unavoidable by the day, as scientific evidence mounts for its medicinal powers and states continue to decriminalize the plant. The legal drugs of alcohol and nicotine kill hundreds of thousands every year and have little to no medical value – but the ingestion of cannabis kills no one, and heals many.
The war on drugs itself is an utter failure by the metrics it was supposed to address – drug availability, drug prices and drug use. With the absence of any rational basis for prohibition, it begs the question of what actually sustains it.
We know the State profits immensely from the drug war, acquiring wealth and power by arbitrarily naming certain substances “illicit.” In the modern-day corporatocracy, certain industries profit as well, most notably prisons and various entities involved in State oppression.
In the area of cannabis, perhaps the biggest beneficiary to prohibition is the pharmaceutical industry. Big Pharma tried and mostly failed to defeat the groundswell movement of cannabis legalization in many states. But it seems to have a friend in the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which against all reason decided to keep cannabis a Schedule 1 Controlled Substance.
Big Pharma admitted that legal cannabis poses a threat to its profit, and that reality is underscored in a new analysis from New Frontier Data. If medical cannabis were adopted in all 50 states, it would siphon about $4.5 billion a year from the pharma industry.
“New Frontier Data identified nine conditions in particular to assess the impact of the legalization of cannabis would have on prescription drug use.
Among those, spending on treatments for chronic pain and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) represented about 60% of the total. Overall in 2016, it was estimated that patients spent nearly $14.3 billion and $10.6 billion, respectively, to treat chronic pain and PTSD. The costs to treat sleep disorders, anxiety, epilepsy, nerve pain, chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting (CINV), Tourette syndrome, and glaucoma collectively accounted for the other 40% dedicated toward treatments.
There is significant savings to be realized in the health care system both to consumers and the U.S. government. It is estimated that cannabis and related products can replace between $4.4 billion and $4.9 billion of current annual spending on those existing treatments.”
In a press release, New Frontier CEO Aguirre De Carcer said, “Looking at these numbers, it would appear that medical cannabis would be a drop in the bucket when it comes to impacting the total pharmaceutical industry. However, when you start to break down the numbers by specific sectors of the industry, like chronic pain or symptoms associated with chemotherapy, which are very lucrative markets for pharmaceutical companies, you will certainly see cannabis have a major impact.”
They referenced a July 2016 study which found that, on average, about 11 percent of patients in legal weed states are successfully replacing prescription drugs with medical cannabis. This, along with other studies, prompted New Frontier Data to look further into the dynamic of medical cannabis and pharmaceutical drugs.
A National Academies of Science study identified nine specific conditions where medical cannabis can have a beneficial role – including chronic pain and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – which were used by New Frontier Data for their analysis. Another report showed that taxpayers could save $1.1 billion on Medicaid prescriptions annually if medical cannabis were legalized nationwide.
“Any opportunity for alternatives that could result in reduced pharmaceutical drug use might present a compelling point of discussion from a public policy standpoint,” said John Kagia, executive vice president of industry analytics at New Frontier.
The problem is, public policy is largely controlled by interests that have no desire to reduce profits by reducing prescription drug consumption, and have no desire to relinquish power by decriminalizing a medicinal plant that harms no one.
Judging by DEA chief Chuck Rosenberg, his agency will continue taking the lead in government’s war on people. Only a few days ago Rosenberg reminded us of the staggering, willful ignorance that guides the drug war, stating, “Marijuana is not medicine.”
We are told that the “War on Drugs” is being waged, on our behalf, by our governments and their armed bureaucracies and police forces, to save us from ourselves. “Potential for abuse and harm” are supposed to be the criteria by which the use of drugs is suppressed—the greater a drug’s potential for abuse and harm, the greater and more vigorous the degree of suppression, and the more draconian the penalties applied against its users.
In line with this scheme drugs are typically ranked into a hierarchy: Schedules I, II, and III in the US, Classes A, B, and C in the UK, and so on and so forth all around the world. Thus, to be arrested for possession of a Schedule I or Class A drug results in heavier penalties than possession of a Schedule III or Class C drug. Generally if a drug is deemed to have some currently accepted medical use it is likely to be placed in a lower schedule than if it has none, notwithstanding the fact that it may have potential for abuse or harm. In the absence of any recognized therapeutic effects, drugs that are highly addictive, such as heroin or crack cocaine, or drugs that are profoundly psychotropic, including hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, or DMT, are almost universally placed in the highest schedules and their use attracts the heaviest penalties.
The notable exceptions to this system of ranking according to perceived “harms” are, of course, alcohol and tobacco, both highly addictive and harmful drugs—far more so than cannabis or psilocybin, for example—but yet socially accepted on the grounds of long customary use and thus not placed in any schedule at all.
The Failed War
When we look at the history of the “War on Drugs” over approximately the last 40 years, it must be asked whether the criminalization of the use of any of the prohibited substances has in any way been effective in terms of the stated goals that this “war” was supposedly mounted to achieve. Specifically, has there been a marked reduction in the use of illegal drugs over the past 40 years—as one would expect with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money having been spent over such a long period on their suppression—and has there been a reduction in the harms that these drugs supposedly cause to the individual and to society?
It is unnecessary here to set down screeds of statistics, facts, and figures readily available from published sources to assert that in terms of its own stated objectives the “War on Drugs” has been an abject failure and a shameful and scandalous waste of public money. Indeed, it is well known, and not disputed, that the very societies that attempt most vigorously to suppress various drugs, and in which users are subject to the most stringent penalties, have seen a vast and continuous increase in the per capita consumption of these drugs. This is tacitly admitted by the vast armed bureaucracies set up to persecute drug users in our societies, which every year demand more and more public money to fund their suppressive activities; if the suppression were working, one would expect their budgets to go down, not up.
Inventory of Harm
Such matters are only the beginning of the long inventory of harm caused by the “War on Drugs.”
Western industrial societies, and all those cultures around the globe that increasingly seek to emulate them, teach us to venerate above all else the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness that is particularly appropriate to the conduct of science, business, war, and logical inquiry, and to such activities as driving cars, operating machinery, performing surgery, doing accounts, drawing up plans, accumulating wealth, etc., etc., etc. But there are many other states of consciousness that the amazing and mysterious human brain is capable of embracing, and it appears to be a natural human urge, as deep-rooted as our urges for food, sex, and nurturing relationships, to seek out and explore such “altered states of consciousness.” A surprisingly wide range of methods and techniques (from breathing exercises, to meditation, to fasting, to hypnosis, to rhythmic music, to extended periods of vigorous dancing, etc.) is available to help us to achieve this goal, but there is no doubt that the consumption of those plants and substances called “drugs” in our societies is amongst the most effective and efficient means available to mankind to explore these profoundly altered states of consciousness.
The result is that people naturally seek out drugs and the temporary alterations in consciousness that they produce. Not all people in every society will do this, perhaps not even a majority, but certainly a very substantial minority—for example the 2 million Britons who are known to take illegal drugs each month3 or those 20 million people in the US who have been arrested for marijuana possession since 1965. And these of course are only the tip of the iceberg of the much larger population of American marijuana users, running into many more tens of millions, who have, by luck or care, not yet fallen foul of the law and are thus not reflected in the arrest statistics.
Needless to say, it is of course exactly the same urge to alter consciousness that also impels even larger numbers of people to use legal (and often extremely harmful) drugs such as alcohol and tobacco—which, though they may not alter consciousness as dramatically as, say, LSD, are nevertheless undoubtedly used and sought out for the limited alterations of consciousness that they do produce.
For the hundreds of millions of people around the world whose need to experience altered states is not and cannot be satisfied by drunken oblivion or the stimulant effects of tobacco, it is therefore completely natural to turn to “drugs”—and, since the “War on Drugs” means that there is no legal source of supply of these substances, the inevitable result is that those who wish to use them must resort to illegal sources of supply.
Herein lies great and enduring harm. For it is obvious, and we may all see the effects everywhere, that the criminalization of drug use has empowered and enriched a vast and truly horrible global criminal underworld by guaranteeing that it is the only source of supply of these drugs. We have, in effect, delivered our youth—the sector within our societies that most strongly feels the need to experience altered states of consciousness— into the hands of the very worst mobsters and sleazeballs on the planet. To buy drugs our sons and daughters have no choice but to approach and associate with violent and greedy criminals. And because the proceeds from illegal drug sales are so enormous, we are all caught up in the inevitable consequences of turf wars and murders amongst the gangs and cartels competing in this blackest of black markets.
Instead the powers that be continue to pursue the same harsh and cruel policies that they have been wedded to from the outset, ever seeking to strengthen and reinforce them rather than to replace them with something better. Indeed the only “change” that the large, armed bureaucracies that enforce these policies has ever sought since the “War on Drugs” began has, year on year, been to demand even more money, even more arms, and even more draconian legislative powers to break into homes, to confiscate property, and to deprive otherwise law-abiding citizens of liberty and wreck their lives. In the process we have seen our once free and upstanding societies— which used to respect individual choice and freedom of conscience above all else—slide remorselessly down the slippery slope that leads to the police state. And all this is being done in our name, with our money, by our own governments, to “save us from ourselves”!
Freedom of Consciousness
What is Western civilization all about? What are its greatest achievements and highest aspirations?
It’s my guess that most people’s replies to these questions would touch—before all the other splendid achievements of science, literature, technology, and the economy—on the nurture and growth of freedom.
Individual freedom.
Including, but not limited to freedom from the unruly power of monarchs, freedom from the unwarranted intrusions of the state and its agents into our personal lives, freedom from the tyranny of the Church and its Inquisition, freedom from hunger and want, freedom from slavery and servitude, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought and speech, freedom of assembly, freedom to elect our own leaders, freedom to be homosexual—and so on and so forth.
The list of freedoms we enjoy today that were not enjoyed by our ancestors is indeed a long and impressive one. It is therefore exceedingly strange that Western civilization in the twenty- first century enjoys no real freedom of consciousness.
There can be no more intimate and elemental part of the individual than his or her own consciousness. At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are—to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either. So it has to be highly significant that, far from encouraging freedom of consciousness, our societies in fact violently deny our right to sovereignty in this intensely personal area, and have effectively outlawed all states of consciousness other than those on a very narrowly defined and officially approved list. The “War on Drugs” has thus unexpectedly succeeded in engineering a stark reversal of the true direction of Western history by empowering faceless bureaucratic authorities to send armed agents to break into our homes, arrest us, throw us into prison, and deprive us of our income and reputation simply because we wish to explore the sometimes radical, though always temporary, alterations in our own consciousness that drugs facilitate.
The reason the anti-marijuana campaigns have failed is that millions of users know from their own direct, long-term experience that marijuana does not do them any great harm and (with reference to the most recent anti-marijuana propaganda) most definitely does not drive them mad.
Other than being against arbitrary rules that the state has imposed on us, personal drug use by adults is not a “crime” in any true moral or ethical sense and usually takes place in the privacy of our own homes, where it cannot possibly do any harm to others. For some it is a simple lifestyle choice. For others, particularly where the hallucinogens such as LSD, psilocybin, and DMT are concerned, it is a means to make contact with alternate realms and parallel dimensions, and perhaps even with the divine. For some, drugs are an aid to creativity and focussed mental effort. For others they are a means to tune out for a while from everyday cares and worries. But in all cases it seems probable that the drive to alter consciousness, from which all drug use stems, has deep genetic roots.
Other adult lifestyle choices with deep genetic roots also used to be violently persecuted by our societies.
A notable example is homosexuality, once punishable by death or long periods of imprisonment, which is now entirely legal between consenting adults—and fully recognized as being none of the state’s business—in all Western cultures. (Although approximately thirteen US states have “anti-sodomy” laws outlawing homosexuality, these statutes have rarely been enforced in recent years, and in 2003 the US Supreme Court invalidated those laws.) The legalization of homosexuality lifted a huge burden of human misery, secretiveness, paranoia, and genuine fear from our societies, and at the same time not a single one of the homophobic lobby’s fire-and-brimstone predictions about the end of Western civilization came true.
Likewise, it was not so long ago that natural seers, mediums, and healers who felt the calling to become “witches” were burned at the stake for “crimes” that we now look back on as harmless eccentricities at worst.
At the deepest level, our consciousness is what we are—to the extent that if we are not sovereign over our own consciousness then we cannot in any meaningful sense be sovereign over anything else either.
Perhaps it will be the same with drugs? Perhaps in a century or two, if we have not destroyed human civilization by then, our descendants will look back with disgust on the barbaric laws of our time that punished a minority so harshly (with imprisonment, financial ruin, and worse) for responsibly, quietly, and in the privacy of their own homes seeking alterations in their own consciousness through the use of drugs. Perhaps we will even end up looking back on the persecution of drug users with the same sense of shame and horror that we now view the persecution of gays and lesbians, the burning of “witches,” and the imposition of slavery on others.
Meanwhile it’s no accident that the “War on Drugs” has been accompanied by an unprecedented expansion of governmental power into the previously inviolable inner sanctum of individual consciousness. On the contrary, it seems to me that the state’s urge to power has all along been the real reason for this “war”—not an honest desire on the part of the authorities to rescue society and the individual from the harms caused by drugs, but the thin of a wedge intended to legitimize increasing bureaucratic control and intervention in almost every other area of our lives as well.
This is the way freedom is hijacked—not all at once, out in the open, but stealthily, little by little, behind closed doors, and with our own agreement. How will we be able to resist when so many of us have already willingly handed over the keys to our own consciousness to the state and accepted without protest that it is OK to be told what we may and may not do, what we may and may not explore, even what we may and may not experience, with this most precious, sapient, unique, and individual part of ourselves?
If we are willing to accept that then we can be persuaded to accept anything.
We’re winning: More progress has been made toward enlightened drug policies and treatment in the past five years than in the previous 25. Here’s an advocacy agenda to take us even closer to the future we need.
There has never been a more exciting time to be writing and thinking about drugs and addiction. For most of the ‘80s through the ‘00s, policy and treatment debates were stagnant, with all sides taking hardened positions and often repeating the same tired talking points. But now change is in the air and those who would like to see reform have a chance to make a real difference. By looking at where we’ve come from, we can see where we need to go.
Until 2011 or 2012, the war on drugs, while much bemoaned, was simply a fact of life, with pretty much everyone agreeing both about its failure and, simultaneously, about the impossibility of doing anything significantly different because of the “tough on crime” arms race between the Republicans and Democrats.
The science didn’t matter: No one seemed to care that marijuana was objectively less harmful than alcohol or tobacco or that our drug laws originated both in the time of Jim Crow and, quite explicitly, as a way of oppressing people of color by other means. In fact, merely stating these facts, as I did many times, would often get me in trouble with editors who wanted to “balance” them with a prohibitionist claim to prove that the publication was “objective”! No one ever seemed to consider balance when a drug warrior made a demonstrably untrue statement.
It didn’t matter that the data on needle exchange was overwhelmingly in favor—and that no study had ever found that it encouraged drug use or prolonged addiction. A quote by someone who was ideologically opposed had to be obtained, even though they had no data to back their concerns about these programs to prevent infection with HIV and hepatitis C “sending the wrong message.”
The failure of drug enforcement either to prevent or to reduce “drug epidemics” and the ineffectiveness of incarceration at fighting addiction was irrelevant, too, even as the necessity of such punitive efforts was simply accepted without question.
Nor did it matter that harsh, confrontational treatment was known both to backfire and to be incredibly common—Dr. Drew, Intervention, Beyond Scared Straight and similar shows even portrayed it as exemplary.
At the same time, 12-step supporters were adamant that their way was the only way—or at least the best way. Drug warriors were convinced that criminalization of both possession and sales was the only way to avoid addiction Armageddon—and even many people in recovery bought into the idea that law enforcement must always play a role in policies related to illegal drugs.
In 2000, for instance, during the fight over California’s Proposition 36, which gives drug users three chances at treatment before jail becomes a sentencing option, the Betty Ford Center was among the opponents. Speaking for a coalition that included the rehab, actor and sobriety advocate Martin Sheen wrote in an op-ed, “Without accountability and consequences, drug abusers have little incentive to change their behavior or take treatment seriously.” (He didn’t explain how Betty Ford gets alcoholics, whose drug is legal, to comply with care.) But Prop 36 passed anyway, an early sign of the drug war’s waning hold.
And so, even when reforms would actually send patients to rehabs, treatment providers remained firmly aligned with drug warriors on the necessity of harsh criminalization, while they begged for crumbs of financing from the abundant table of law enforcement and argued that treatment is better than jail.
Now, though, the winds have shifted. Four states and Washington, DC, have legalized recreational use of marijuana. President Obama has directed the justice department not to interfere with these experiments and said last week, “My suspicion is that you are going to see other states start looking at this.” California, which rejected recreational legalization as recently as 2010, may pass it in an expected 2016 ballot initiative. National polls show majority support for legalization.
Neither Colorado nor Washington—the first two states to legalize—has seen anything near the predicted disaster in the first year after the passage of the law. In fact, in Colorado, crime is down, auto fatalities are down and teen use is stable or declining. (Because Washington took longer to implement its regime, good statistics aren’t yet available).
All of this is excellent news for reformers. So what should be next on the agenda? Here are a few things I’d like to see, which I think could build on the increased openness to more effective policy:
1. Over-the-counter naloxone
Naloxone, an opioid antagonist that can reverse opioid overdose, is now widely available to first responders and, through many harm reduction agencies, to friends and families of people at risk. No adverse effects have been reported; just more and more lives saved. The FDA should make naloxone available over the counter, and sales should be subsidized or prices capped to make it affordable. This safe, effective lifesaver should be in every first-aid kit.
2. Expand access to medication-assisted treatment
As I noted recently, it’s outrageous that any doctor who discovers that a patient has an opioid problem can’t simply prescribe the most effective treatment: maintenance with Suboxone or methadone. Federal limits on the number of patients a doctor can have on maintenance and laws that literally ghettoize methadone treatment should be repealed. Insurance limits on prescribing also should be challenged: These exist for no other medical condition.
3. Decriminalize personal possession of all drugs
Now that even once-staunch prohibitionists like Kevin Sabet no longer argue strongly for arrest and incarceration of those who possess marijuana, why does it still make sense for heroin, cocaine or other illegal drugs?
82% of all drug arrests are for possession, and half of these are for marijuana. According to the ACLU, the US spends $3.1 billion annually arresting and adjudicating marijuana possession cases, and at least as much is likely to be spent on the other half of possession arrests for all other drugs. And yet no data suggests that arresting drug users for possession fights addiction or reduces crime: In fact, addicted people often get worse due to incarceration, with very little treatment available in jail.
Moreover, Portugal’s 10-plus-year experience of complete decriminalization has found it to be associated with less crime, more treatment and less disease. What’s not to like? The World Health Organization recently came out in favor of decriminalization. Drug reformers should not make marijuana arrests the only focus of their abolition campaign. Arrests for use are expensive, harmful and ineffective: They need to stop.
5. Reform treatment
People with addiction and their loved ones are often shocked at what occurs in treatment: Evidence-based care is so hard to find that even leading addiction researcher and former deputy drug czar Tom McLellan didn’t know where to turn when his son needed help in 2009. Anne Fletcher’s Inside Rehab, David Sheff’s Clean and this 2012 report from the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse all demonstrate the need for better accountability from treatment providers.
To start, private and public insurers should simply refuse to pay for treatment that is little more than indoctrination into 12-step groups, which can be had for free at many church basements. Instead, treatment time should be devoted to evidence-based therapies like motivational interviewing and cognitive behavioral therapy, which aren’t free—and provider reimbursement should be based on results, respectful and empathetic care and genuine fidelity to evidence-based therapies.
And this isn’t a change that only opponents of 12-step programs should favor. Even those who are helped by the steps know that such treatment clearly violates the Eighth Tradition, which states that AA should be “forever nonprofessional” and that the 12th-step work of trying to bring others into the program should be unpaid. Both 12-step groups and treatment will ultimately be better off disentangled.
5. Reframe addiction
As I’ve argued here before, addiction is better characterized as a learning or developmental disorder than as a brain disease. While those who support the brain disease concept see it as a way of reducing stigma, in actual fact, this idea can increase fear and hatred of addicts because the notion of “brain damage” suggests permanence and poor odds for recovery.
What addiction actually does in the brain is similar to what love does—it strongly wires in new memories and pushes us to seek certain experiences. This is not “damage” or “destruction.” When we understand addiction as one more type of neurodiversity—not always a disability, sometimes even a source of strength—we’ll really cut stigma.
Also, it’s impossible to fight stigma while the legal system enforces it: The whole point of criminalizing drug possession is to stigmatize it. Without changing both criminalization and the view of addiction as the only disease treated by prayer and repentance, stigma reduction won’t get very far.
There’s much more, of course, but these are areas where real progress can be made. Never before have I seen more openness in this area: Now people who used to blanch at the words “harm reduction” are singing its praises and those who were once horrified by needle exchange are calling for naloxone. We still have a long way to go—and there’s always the chance of backlash—but as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Fancy yourself a connoisseur of all things weed? Then see whether this trip from ancient China to modern Alaska takes you anywhere unexpected.
What do Sarah Palin, Barack Obama, Justin Bieber, Maya Angelou and well over 100 million Americans all have in common? They’ve all smoked pot. Throughout its history, marijuana has attracted plenty of unexpected users and proponents. And much of the history of greenery is now familiar to us—thanks to History Channel specials, the burgeoning legalization movement and the popularity of anti-pot propaganda films like Reefer Madness. But even if you’re intimately familiar with the plant in all its forms, we’re willing to wager that some of these facts will surprise you.
1. The first known potheads lived in ancient China, circa 2,727 BC. Emperor Shen Nung helpfully compiled an encyclopedic list of drugs and their uses, which includes “ma,” or cannabis. But ancient Chinese weed consumption is indicated by more than just written records: Six years ago, archaeologists on a dig in the Gobi Desert found the world’s oldest pot stash in the grave of a shaman of the Gushi tribe. The purpose of the cannabis was easily identified because the male plant parts, which are less psychoactive, had been removed.
The Chinese certainly weren’t the only ancient culture to enjoy toking. The Greeks and Romans used marijuana, as did the citizens of the Islamic empires. In 1545, Spanish conquistadors introduced it to the New World when they began planting cannabis seed in Chile to be used for fiber.
2. You probably heard that a bunch of the Founding Fathers grew weed, but did you know the details? Technically, you can’t really classify them as pot farmers because they were growing hemp, which is not the same cannabis variety that you’ll find in a joint. Hemp and pot are the same species—cannabis sativa—but the hemp variety has a lower THC content and was useful instead as a source of fiber for those distinguished dudes’ duds.
But debate continues about whether the Founding Fathers actually smoked cannabis in addition to growing it. While many traditional sources say there’s no evidence of it, other, less buttoned-down ones—including, predictably, High Times—contend that there is.
One factor that muddies the water and the Internet is an oft-repeated Thomas Jefferson “quote” that experts agree is not legit. Although he was a hemp farmer, Thomas Jefferson never said: “Some of my finest hours have been spent sitting on my back veranda, smoking hemp and observing as far as my eye can see.”
Admittedly, that’s a pretty difficult image to forget.
3. Hashish, which is a compressed or purified form of pot resin, became faddish in the mid-1800s, as a result of its prominence in popular novels of the era, including two classics: The Count of Monte Cristo and Arabian Nights, an early English translation of One Thousand and One Nights.
In one scene fit to make any DARE instructor shudder, the Count of Monte Cristo virtually coerces another character into a mind-bending hashish adventure, urging, “Taste the hashish, guest, taste the hashish!”
Arabian Nights meanwhile contains multiple references to hashish, including the story “The Tale of the Hashish Eater.” Both Monte Cristo and Arabian Nights found wide audiences due to their exotic settings, foreign cultures and adventure plots that heightened the allure of the drug described on the pages. Contemporary readers who would never had the opportunity to go Persia could at least cop a little bit of Persia off seafaring vessels from foreign ports.
4. Pot’s reputation began to go south when the first English-language newspaper started in Mexico in the 1890s. Sensationalized stories of marijuana-induced violence gave the drug a bad rap, although pot didn’t really hit the US until after the Mexican Revolution in 1910, when a flood of Mexican immigrants moved north, bringing their favorite weed.
US groups began spreading stories of violence induced by the drug, playing on anti-immigrant sentiment, and referring to the drug by the Mexican-sounding name “marijuana.” This highly racialized propaganda led to widespread fear of the drug, which grew into a panic in the early 1930s when government research “determined” that marijuana-induced criminal acts were “primarily committed by ‘racially inferior’ or underclass communities.”
Interestingly, some of the accounts of violence and crime may not have been entirely fabricated. Just as the myth of the unicorn may have been based on early and inaccurate descriptions of the rhinoceros, the tales may have partly been the result of some confusion regarding plant names. Some media stories of the era conflated marijuana with locoweed, a type of poisonous plant. So it’s just possible that some of the horror stories held a grain of truth—relating to a completely different plant.
5. There is no consensus about where the word “marijuana” came from. The word sounds like a Spanish language cognate, but some etymologists trace its origins to China or India. The plant itself originated in Central Asia, and China and India were the first two regions to begin cultivating it.
One theory is that Chinese immigrants brought the phrase ma ren hua—which translates more or less as “hemp seed flowers”—to Mexico, where it became Spanishized into “marijuana.” Another theory is that Angolan slaves brought the Bantu word for cannabis—ma’kaña—to the Americas via Brazil and Spanish-speakers later adapted it. Yet another theory traces the word back to the Semitic root mrr.
Whatever its origins, there is some agreement that the first recorded use of a similar term was in a feature called “The American Congo” published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1894. In the article, author John G. Burke used the word “mariguan” to refer to a species of plant included in his description of the flora on the banks of the Rio Grande River between Texas and Mexico.
6. But we do know that the term “pot” entered the lexicon in the 1930s as a shortened form of the Spanish potiguaya, an alcoholic drink in which cannabis buds have been steeped. A literal translation of potiguaya or potacion de guaya is “the drink of grief.”
Other terms are also far easier than “marijuana” to trace. “Ganja,” for example, likely entered the English lexicon in the 1800s when it was borrowed from a similar Hindi word. While words like pot and ganja endured, other terms for cannabis—such as “gage” (17th-century word for a pipe) and “muggles” (used in the 1920s by the New Orleans jazz crowd)—have sadly fallen by the wayside.
7. Henry Ford experimented with the invention of a car that was possibly partially made of hemp. Some pro-pot sites claim that Ford actually developed a hemp-based automobile, but the evidence suggests that they are blowing smoke.
In the early 1940s, Ford developed a plastic car intended to be a lighter, stronger and more affordable alternative to traditional metal vehicles. Newspaperarticles stated that the new car was a combination of resin binder and cellulose fiber supposedly drawn from pine fiber, hemp, soybean and ramie. However, The Henry Ford, a museum in Michigan, says that the exact ingredients for the car’s recipe have been lost, so they can’t confirm that hemp was in the mix.
Whether or not Ford’s car contained hemp, current scientists have apparently drawn inspiration from the concept as they work to develop cars made of plant fibers such as hemp and elephant grass.
8. Marijuana was initially criminalized by the federal government in an indirect, de facto way: a 1937 tax act. The act set such high taxes on the purchase of weed that it discouraged people from going through the proper legal channels. And because arrest was the penalty for non-compliance, the tax act essentially criminalized marijuana possession.
In 1969, the act was ruled unconstitutional because paying the federal tax required admitting to the possession of something already made illegal by some state laws—and thus violated the right against self-incrimination spelled out in the Fifth Amendment. The following year the law was repealed and replaced with a measure that fully criminalized marijuana. Prior to the federal bans, though, many states had adopted the Uniform Narcotics Drug Act in the early 1930s, which made pot and other drugs illegal under state law.
Today, in a reversal of that situation, marijuana remains illegal on a federal level but two states—Colorado and Washington—legalized recreational use in 2012. More are likely to follow soon.
9. Popular urban legend has it that the term “420” is a reference to a 1970s police code, but in fact a group of high school kids coined the term. In 1971, five California high school students heard about a plot of pot plants whose owner could no longer tend them. Eager to find the green, sticky treasure, the students agreed to meet outside the school at 4:20 pm to look for the plants until they found them. They never did, even after weeks of hunting.
But their fruitless search would be immortalized. Because their school was in Marin County, a counterculture hotspot, and because the treasure hunters had an indirect contact with Grateful Dead member Phil Lesh, the term 420 gradually became a part of drug culture throughout California and then the country.
10. Alaska effectively legalized marijuana 39 years ago. You might have thought otherwise—especially considering the viral video of Alaskan reporter Charlo Greene quitting on-air last month in order to campaign for marijuana legalization. And policy wonks would insist that pot is technically decriminalized, rather than legalized, in the state. But marijuana in Alaska occupies an interesting legal gray area.
In 1975, the Alaska Supreme Court decided that the state’s constitutional right to privacy protects the right of adults to use and possess small amounts of marijuana in their own homes. However, Alaskan criminal law currently bans the possession of even small amounts of pot. As a result, Alaskans can be charged with possession for having pot in their homes—but technically courts should throw out the charges for amounts under four ounces.
This confusing state of affairs may be cleared up very soon, though: Next month, Alaskans go to the polls to vote on an initiative to officially legalize marijuana for recreational use.
It may be an off-year election, but it’s a big one for drug policy reform. In seven weeks, voters across the country will have a chance to accelerate the unprecedented momentum to legalize marijuana and end the wider drug war. In fact, there are more drug policy reform questions on the ballot this November than ever in American history. Voter initiatives — primarily reforming or repealing marijuana laws — appear on the ballots in seven states, at least 17 municipalities and one U.S. territory. To help you keep score at home, here’s an overview, starting with the highest-profile measures.
Oregon: Passage of Measure 91[3] will make the Beaver State the third to legalize marijuana for adults outright. Like the historic laws adopted in Colorado and neighboring Washington two short years ago, this initiative would legalize possession of small amounts of marijuana for adults 21 and older and create a statewide system to regulate production and sales. And similar to Colorado’s law, Measure 91 would allow adults to cultivate small amounts of marijuana under controlled circumstances. In this entirely vote-by-mail election, the initiative has already been endorsed by the Pacific Northwest’s largest daily paper[4] and would likely boost efforts across its southern border to end marijuana prohibition in California two years from now.
Alaska: The other statewide marijuana legalization initiative, Measure 2[5], is closely modeled on Colorado’s Amendment 64 and tracks many of the elements in Oregon’s prospective law. Alaska was something of a marijuana reform pioneer as possession and cultivation of small amounts for personal use in a private residence has been protected under the Alaska Constitution since the 1970s. Alongside Oregon in 1998, Alaska was among the first states to legalize medical marijuana. With a deep-rooted respect for personal freedom, Alaska would become the first red state to legalize marijuana for adult use, no doubt raising eyebrows across the political spectrum.
Florida:Amendment 2[6] is the only statewide medical marijuana initiative on the ballot this year, and it’s one to watch. Victory would make Florida, with its huge population and bell weather status in American politics, the very first southern state to adopt a medical marijuana law. With 23 other medical marijuana states and super-majority support[7] nationally, passage of Amendment 2 would effectively settle any lingering questions on public acceptance of marijuana as medicine. It’s going to be a challenge, though, since Florida law requires 60% to pass a voter initiative. While polls indicate enormous support[8], casino mogul Sheldon Adelson contributed a few million dollars[9] to stop it as Amendment 2 is associated with Charlie Crist’s comeback gubernatorial campaign. Adelson’s intervention has created the first well-funded opposition to a statewide marijuana reform campaign ever.
California: On the heels of reforming its harshest-in-the-nation Three Strikes law in 2012, Californians are now poised to refine six low-level, nonviolent offenses, including simple drug possession, from felonies to misdemeanors. Proposition 47[10]would then dedicate the savings — likely more than $1 billion a year — to schools, victim services, and mental health treatment. With retroactive sentencing and expungement provisions, the impact of Prop 47 in California on wasteful corrections spending and individual lives would be profound and surely resonate across the country.
District of Columbia: Earlier this year, the D.C. Council adopted the nation’s most far-reaching marijuana decriminalization law[11]. In November, voters in the nation’s capital will decide whether to go even further. Initiative 71[12] makes it legal for adults over the age of 21 to possess and cultivate small amounts of marijuana. While District law prevents the ballot initiative from addressing the sale of marijuana, the D.C. Council is considering a bill that would tax and regulate marijuana within the District. D.C. has the highest per capita marijuana arrest rates in the U.S. with enormous racial disparities as police target African Americans for 91 percent of these arrests. Initiative 71 will be the first marijuana reform campaign fought primarily on the issue of the drug war’s ongoing toxic impact on black communities.
Other races: Voters in municipal elections from the Northeast to Micronesia will weigh in November 4th on a range of marijuana focused issues.
Guam: Voters could make this U.S. territory the first to adopt medical marijuana. The binding referendum[13] would allow for dispensaries regulated by the Department of Public Health and Social Services.
Maine: By a wide margin in 2013, Portlanders chose to eliminate criminal penalties for adult possession of up to an ounce of marijuana. In seven weeks, voters in York, South Portland, and Lewiston[14] will tackle the same question.
Michigan: In the last two years, residents of seven cities have voted to remove local penalties for adult possession of small amounts of marijuana in a private residence. As of now, a whopping 11 other cities[15] (with apparently more to come) will have the chance to follow suit this year.
New Mexico: Last month, the City of Santa Fe became the first in the state to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana. On the ballot in November, voters in Bernalillo (Albuquerque) and Santa Fe Counties will decide[16] if their county should affirm decriminalization efforts.
Public opinion has shifted dramatically over the last decade in favor of reforming marijuana laws and dismantling the egregious excesses of the drug war. And elected officials have begun to take notice. The U.S. House has voted five times in recent months to let states set their own marijuana policies while Senators Rand Paul and Cory Booker have introduced similar bi-partisan legislation in the U.S. Senate in addition to a cluster of other long-overdue criminal justice reforms. When the dust settles on November 5th, the momentum for change in this country will only have accelerated.
Anyone who’s seen Zardoz knows how well weed and sci-fi go together. Now, like something out of a Kevin Smith movie, Jaymen Johnson brings Denver Chromic Con. One half expects Bluntman and Chronic to make an appearance. Inspired by his long history of attending conventions while high, Johnson, decided to bring this once illicit activity out into the marijuana friendly Denver and Colorado Springs weed club scene. Three such clubs will serve as venues for the con which includes sci-fi, fantasy and comic books along with the presumably non-requisite weed. Johnson himself owns one of the clubs, Speak Easy Vape Lounge, and promises “light saber [sic]whiffle ball” among the con’s attractions.
I’ve attended more than a couple of cons in an altered state and always had a great time. Any con-goer knows about party floors dedicated to themed libations patrolled by the drunken ranks of Barfleet Personnel. The first con I attended in such a state featured a gay Klingon wedding. In the aftermath, as the sun crept through the hotel windows in the ballroom, one could see a host of Klingons passed out under tables, atop the DJ machine, behind curtains. It looked rather like the aftermath of a battle until one of them threw up. But cons and partying have a long history as do altered states and creativity. SF/F, in particular, has always lent itself to those on the fringes of normalized demographics. Just as the “nerd” has popularly typified fandom, so too do the legions of those who enjoy altered states with their creativity. Artists too, have long espoused the virtues of blended artistic creation. Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles is practically a catalogue of psychoactive trips the writer himself took. Thomas Pynchon claims writing large sections of Gravity’s Rainbow higher than an esoterically referential kite. Drugs and the creative process behind SF/F has a long history.
Chromic Con [the logo divides the M so that you can read the word “chronic”] offers the first Alchemical Wedding of the outsider art of comics and the outsider recreation of pot smoking. But this begs the question: are either really outsider anymore? Chromic Con’s inception suggests they are not. In much the same way “geek” culture has become mainstream, so too has pot culture. Recent polls suggest those who like to toke-up are as legion as those who flocked to theaters to see The Avengers, some likely high at the time. Pot has become mainstream. The days of Reefer Madness are largely behind us. It’s only a matter of time before Wil Wheaton takes up the pot banner and becomes fandom’s Tommy Chong. The licensing alone might bring Disney into the fold. Imagine smoking some great skunk out of R2D2 or Darth Vader’s head? A Millennium Falcon bowl can’t be far behind.
William Gibson has suggested that there are no more Bohemias. As soon as a sub-culture pops up these days, it’s co-opted by the mainstream and commodified. While Chromic Con is still an indie event [as evidenced by its site, a kind of throwback to 90s web design], I can’t help but think that it’s the first step in a corporatization of the weed-SF Rainbow Bridge that’s always existed behind the scenes. Soon, I can imagine Comicon rife with glazed-eyed James Franco types promoting their latest movie and their favorite strain of California’s best. What kind of pot does Wolverine smoke in those blunts he calls “cigars?” Marvel could partner with a major pot corporation and let you know!
To be fair, Chromic Con is still very much a small event. The website suggests almost no celebrity guests have yet signed up [presumably unwilling to commit to the weed association just yet], and the event list is scant. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be a full con in sense most of us think of when we hear the term. Yet, where Jaymen Johnson may not produce much more than a fun curiosity this time out, he may presage the marriage of pot and mainstream conventions.
I’m all for the open enjoyment of comics, science fiction and weed, but I can’t help but feel that something is being lost. The stamp of the establishment on anything, however putative, takes away some of the exclusivity of the activity. Chromic Con’s site features its weed friendly sponsors prominently. Fandom is still alive and well, but the mainstreaming of genre favorites like Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings does carry with it a certain deference to the larger culture. It’s been recently announced that John Constantine won’t smoke in the upcoming NBC TV adaptation. A small thing, perhaps, but a significant one. Once we open the fringes to the doors of corporate America, there is always a period of sanitization. When the sub-culture and the root culture merge, it’s almost always the former that has to change some of its DNA. Chromic Con isn’t that. It isn’t close to that, but it is, I think, in the same neighborhood. You can see Snoop Lion endorsing San Diego Comic Con’s toking booth from here.
After the Crash 