The Ecology of Drugs makes Winning the War Impossible

Prohibition Gave Us the Mafia

The 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act made the manufacture, distribution, sale, and consumption of alcohol a crime. The alcohol industry went underground, smuggling lines were set up, speakeasies were opened and the manufacture, distribution, sale and consumption of alcohol went its merry way, except with a vicious twist. With the disappearance of the legitimate alcohol industry with its normal business taxes, a bootleg industry arose without social restraint or government regulation which literally shot and bribed its way into existence laying the business foundation of organized crime. Territorial and other business disputes were settled with Thompson submachine guns, which incidently were against the law to possess. Once territories were settled everything calmed down with the Mafia emerging as the winner. The Mafia made enough money during prohibition to finance all their future activities including their entrance into drug trafficking. They have been joined by the Colombians in the drug trade but are really looking forward to the formation of the European Community—with a Europe sans borders and with a common banking system. Its just made to order for the way they do business. The success of the Mafia in prohibition and drugs, and the Colombians in drugs, is due to the willingness of millions of middle class Americans—then as now—to purchase the services offered and to ignore the law.

The Prohibition on Drugs Is Giving Us the Drug Wars

Last year the homicide rate in the District of Columbia ran at a rate of more than one murder a day. It is running higher this year. The media went bonkers, Drug Czar Bennett went bonkers and recommended $80 million more for District of Columbia law enforcement.

President Bush vowed to fight. The DC Chief of Police was be sieged as was the Mayor. Almost with disbelief the Chief of police asked what more can we do? We arrested more than 40,000 people last year on drug charges. The picture is the same in all the major cities of the United States.

The Free Market in Drugs

The traffic in drugs is described as a mature market. Incidental events such as the seizure of drug shipments or the arrest of drug kingpins have not slowed the entry of drugs into the nation and have not even affected the price which has been dropping as the quality of the product improves.

$1 Billion a Ton

To give an idea of the magnitude of the trade consider some recent drug busts. In Los Angeles a cache of 2 metric tons of cocaine was discovered in a warehouse. At sea a Coast Guard Cutter stopped and boarded a freighter and discovered 10 metric tons of cocaine. This is not the hollow Mercedes drive shaft in the French Connection or the false bottom of a suitcase or even the innards of a cadaver. These shipments are commercial shipments of commodities like coffee or sugar. In each case the authorities set the value of the shipments at $1 billion per metric ton. Other sources indicate that the United States spends $150 billion, per year, on cocaine and heroin. In shipping terms this amount to 150 tons of drugs. A trifling amount by international shipping standards. If the cocaine were carried in railroad coal cars it would take only three to carry a years supply for the U.S. In a cargo vessel capable of carrying 10,000 tons of cargo it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack to find it. There are too many willing buyers and way too many ways to ship 150 tons of cargo to the United States. The money generated and in the hands of the unscrupulous drug dealers is ample to bribe anyone or get any one executed or to buy any method of conveyance of shipment, with lots of profit left over. Who can be found among the drug dealers? Why—professional employees of the National Security Agency, the most highly secretive of all U.S. intelligence agencies, and their children. Lots of money to be made without much in the way of moral risk. That is to say who is harmed by the use of cocaine?

Lung Cancer and Emphasema

Tobacco is one of the most highly addictive substances in use in modern society. In the United States alone 130 million smoke tobacco which results in 300,000 deaths annually. By those who use it and by society at large tobacco is considered relatively harmless. Kids use tobacco to prove they are grown up and more and more young women seem to be addicted. Very little violence is connected with the smoking of tobacco.

Alcohol Kills

Alcohol kills 40,000 people a year. Many acts of violence in the United States are preceded by imbibition of alcohol. Many babies who will be handicapped for life are born with alcohol syndrome in curring costs that society will pay for decades. Alcohol is considered a relatively safe drug and many parents were delighted in the '70s when their kids switched from marijuana to alcohol.

Less than 3000 ODed

Fewer than 3000 deaths were attributed to cocaine and heroin last year. There is lots of violence attributed to the illicit drug business but it is almost all confined to the distribution end of the business and to procuring the wherewithal to purchase—not to consumption. Lots of crime is associated with drugs since many of the clients of the dealers cannot afford the drugs. On the other hand a vast number of the middle class buy drugs and seem to be able to afford it without jeopardizing the kid's college education. Cocaine, heroin and marijuana are desired by people in sufficient numbers to make the drug industry worthwhile and worth the risks. There is just too much money to be made and the profits are directly proportional to the amount of enforcement effort. The more cops the higher the price, the better the profit. Shipment interceptions have not noticeably reduced the supply.

A Limitless Supply

All the cocaine consumed in the United States is grown on 700 square miles of tropical landscape. The amount of land on which cocaine can be grown is 2,700,000 square miles in Latin America alone. U.S. drug consumption has brought the benefits of capitalism to more rural farmers in third world countries than any other agricultural AID program we have ever launched. Talk about infusing cash into the rural third world economies—there's nothing like it.

Because marijuana is bulky it is easier to detect crossing the borders than cocaine or heroin. As a result the United States is now one of the leading producers of high quality marijuana in the world. It is a major cash crop in California.

Injectable Drugs and AIDS

The disease AIDS has spread rapidly among intravenous drug users. In many places free needles are being distributed to slow the spread of the disease. AIDS is also congenitally transmitted and many babies are born in the world only to succumb to the dread disease. The disease is moving into the heterosexual community as well.

Crack Babies

Crack is a highly addictive form of cocaine. It has resulted in numerous overdose deaths. The most insidious social cost of crack is not the shattered lives of adult users but congenitally addicted crack babies. They are born handicapped and their condition will require social costs for the duration of their lives. In many cases the babies are born to mothers concerned only about their drug habit. Recently a mother of a crack baby in the District of Columbia wanted to sell it for $20 in order to buy more crack.

Where Else Can a Kid Make 7 to 10 Grand a Week

The drug trade is not only a social problem but it is an ecological system problem. Since it's a system it responds like a system. When one part of the system is perturbed the whole system responds and adjusts. When one part of the system changes the whole system changes. The system is self-duplicating and self-replicating and there is no doubt it is a decision system. The rewards outweigh the risks many fold and recruits are easy to come by. The threat of incarceration has not inhibited the influx of willing participants. Where else can kids make $7 to $10 thousand a week. Nothing—not even substitutes like methadone—have diminished the ardor of the addict.

We Live with Tobacco

We live with tobacco addiction with its huge death toll. We even subsidize the growth of the crop with tax dollars and we tolerate the largest national smuggling operation of moving untaxed cigarettes out of North Carolina to New York and New Jersey where they are sold illegally to avoid the local taxes. The State of North Carolina cooperates with the smuggling operation or it wouldn't work. These are some of the same organizations that distribute cocaine, marijuana and heroin. A Federal tax on cigarettes that was refunded to the state where the tobacco was consumed would help solve the problem. Eliminating the subsidy on tobacco would also help a lot.

We Live with Alcohol

We live with alcohol addiction with its annual highway slaughter almost equal to the Vietnam war death list. No state in the United States has a drinking and driving law as tough as the one in the Soviet Union or Sweden. In Sweden they do no blood or breathalizer test. The authorities simply want to know were the driver was drinking.

If the bartender says the driver had more than two drinks that all the evidence required and the driver loses the right to drive. In the United States a drunk can be back on the road as soon as the bail bond is posted. Many is the High School Senior Prom marred by a car load of drunk kids getting killed.

Legal Drugs

What would the United States be like with legal drugs? Any cigarette manufacturer could manufacture cigarettes made of marijuana instead of tobacco. I doubt if they would have to alter their machinery. Marijuana would be handled like alcohol. One would have to be of legal age to purchase and all the alcohol laws about public drunkenness, driving while under the influence etc. would be in force. A package of marijuana cigarettes might cost as much to manufacture as a pack of tobacco cigarettes—maybe a nickel and could sell for about $20—the $19.95 being tax, state, local and Federal. The Federal tax receipts could be split between addiction treatment and retiring the national debt. To begin with only marijuana could be legalized to gain the experience necessary to administer a Federally regulated drug market and to use the revenue to put the proper infrastructure in place to handle the harder drugs, production, manufacturing, distribution, taxation, all to FDA and AMA specifications.

The Social Use of Addicting Drugs is a Medical Problem

The social use of cocaine and heroin could be monitored in a clinical setting. The drugs could be dispensed as prescriptions and the users could have available to them medical services to monitor their addiction. While no one should be coerced into treatment programs, except as a judgement imposed by a court of law, the treatment programs should be readily available. The drugs could be taxed and made available on a prescription basis such as those used by large medical plans. The taxes could be partitioned between medical research, addiction treatment, and the national debt. The taxes from alcohol and tobacco could be pooled with the taxes from marijuana, cocaine and heroin to provide the basis of a national addiction prevention and treatment program and to reduce the national debt.

There would be several immediate benefits from such a program.

• The crime rate should drop.

• We won't need as many jails since we will have fewer burglars and fewer drug users in jail.

• The $150 billion which is now enriching the drug lords and providing the bribes for vast numbers of police and judges would evaporate. In its place would be taxes which could be used responsibly to alleviate the drug problem and reduce the national debt.

• With a Federally regulated drug program the vast majority of addicts would be known. They would have medical histories and our Public Health authorities could begin to grapple with the problem in a meaningful fashion.

• With a regulated drug industry it should be much easier to protect the children from the harmful effects of drugs, particularly the babies that would otherwise suffer the serious effects of congenital addiction.

• The deaths from bad drugs and drug overdoses should diminish greatly as the substances come under FDA regulation and medical supervision.

• We will get back our criminal justice system. It may be tough for a while for crooked police and law enforcement officials to live on their salaries again — but thats the luck of the draw.

• A concerted medical effort on drugs could result in the training of a great many more doctors than at present. It may even result in the establishment of new medical schools. Maybe the drug doctors could be put on salaries to begin the trend to contain medical costs which are largely personnel costs. For a more detailed analysis of the problem of drug prohibition I would refer you to, "Drug Prohibition in the United States: Costs, Consequences, and Alternatives," by Ethan A. Nadelmann, published in Science for September 1, 1989.

And Now for the Kicker

The sufferer is tremulous and loses his self-command: he is subject to fits of agitation and depression. He has a haggard appearance....As with other such agents, a renewed dose of the poison gives temporary relief but at the cost of future misery.

A crack head waiting for another pipe? A heroin junkie looking for another fix? An alcoholic looking for a hair of the dog that bit him? None of the above. The description quoted by Stanton Peele in The Sciences, a publication of the New York Academy of Sciences in an article entitled "Ain't Misbehavin'," July/August 1989, came from the work of early 20th Century English pharmacologists Clifford Allbutt and Walter E. Dixon who were describing withdrawal from caffeine.

Peele's article asks the question, what is addiction? The answer he gives is not a comfortable certainty, but more the agonizing uncertainty that says addiction is more a state of mind than a physiological condition with a specific set of symptoms. He strongly disagrees with the notion that addiction is a disease in the commonly accepted definition of that word with a causative principle, a set course of development and a specific cure. He at once removes the comfort of having addiction properly pigeon-holed and therefore understandable, and replaces it with the hope that with a different approach addiction need not be seen as a desperately hopeless situation.

• In the mid-twenties at Philadelphia General Hospital a team of medical researchers gave heavy doses of morphine to experimental subjects to determine what if any physiological changes occurred in the patients as a result of the morphine. Near the conclusion of one of their experiments, a patient who had been very aggressive in demanding additional morphine, refused to continue with the experiment after 36 hours of withdrawal unless he was given additional morphine. He was given a placebo — sterile water where upon the man went to bed and slept peacefully for 8 hours never knowing he had been given "the sugar coated pill."

• American soldiers in Vietnam were heavy users of narcotics particularly heroin. The Defense Department had this nightmare of thousands of heroin addicts hitting the streets of Main Town, America. What to do? They commissioned a study. A sample of 500 men who tested positive for heroin in their urine were selected for follow-up study when they returned to their homes. The were checked 1 and 3 years after their return. After three years only 1/8th had become readdicted, in spite of the fact that over half had used narcotics upon their return.

• In a controlled experiment in England a group of researchers found that alcoholics given a single session of what to do to combat their problem did as well as a similar group admitted to a hospital for treatment.

• In another experiment involving alcohol, subjects were given drinks where it was not possible to tell if they contained alcohol. Some were told they had alcohol in their drinks others were told they did not. The group that thought they had alcohol drank more than the group that thought they did not when if fact some who were told they had alcohol did not and some who were told they did not have alcohol in fact did have it.

Since the drug problem is costing us $150 billion in lost foreign trade, since cigarettes kill 300,000 people a year and alcohol 40,000, and since there seems to be no hope of stanching the flow of illegal cocaine and heroin, the least we can do is take the profit out of it for criminals and use that money to research the ecology of drug use. We, as a society, need to look at the underlying social relationships and the real uses to which the drugs are being put. Is drug use an aspect of the pursuit of happiness? Is the lack of fulfillment in our daily life the root cause of seeking the euphoria of drugs. John Denver sang a song about passing a joint around with his fiends and his old lady. He sang another song about a Rocky Mountain high. In the Netherlands drugs are legal but regulated. They think in time the drug users will get bored with drugs, especially since the thrill in obtaining and surreptitiously using the drug is gone.

The drug problem is a classic case of prohibition v regulation. Prohibition is a loser. We found that out with alcohol. If we think about it we know its true with cocaine, heroin and marijuana. With regulation the problem be comes tractable. The violence and the criminal element are reduced and a sensible approach to the ecology of drug use can lead to minimizing the downside of the problem.

. . .Ted Sudia . . .

© Copyright 1989
Institute for domestic Tranquility