The Drug War

by Alexander Cockburn

The statements to which the signatories put their names are mostly unimpeachable common sense, as in "drug-war politics impede public health efforts to stem the spread of HIV, hepatitis and other infectious diseases. Human rights are violated, environmental assaults perpetrated and prisons inundated with hundreds of thousands of drug law violators." All true, and every phrase repeated, proven and doubly proven year after year.

So why does the drug war grind on, decade after decade, immune to reason, often grotesque in its hypocrisy? How can one listen without laughing to the solemn posturing of the U.S. government about the recent sting on Mexican banks for their washing of drug money, without a word about corresponding drug-money laundering by U.S. banks? Small wonder Mexican politicians deride the Clinton administration for its double standard.

The answer is plain enough, particularly if one takes a look at the history of drug wars over the past 150 years. These drug wars are either openly avowed or tacit enterprises that expand the drug trade, or they are pretexts for social and political repression. In either case, the aim of halting the production, shipment and consumption of drugs is not on the agenda.

In the mid-19th century, the British fought two opium wars to force the Chinese to accept imports of opium from India. Nearly a century and a half later, as it contemplated intervention against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the Carter administration initiated the spending of covert billions on what was, if we view it realistically, another drug war, as one of President Jimmy Carter's own advisers predicted. As he later recalled, David Musto, a White House member of the president's council on drug abuse, told his boss that "we were going into Afghanistan to support the opium growers in their rebellion against the Soviets."

As covert U.S. military aid soared, so did Afghan opium production, tripling between 1979 and 1982. By 1982, on U.N. and Drug Enforcement Agency figures, the Afghan heroin producers -- romanticized by U.S. politicians and press alike as "freedom fighters" -- had captured 60 percent of the heroin market in Western Europe and the United States. The heroin producers had of course the all-important asset of being anti-Communist, just like their drug-trafficking counterparts in Southeast Asia, also in receipt of U.S. support.

All the millions sent by the United States to Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico allegedly to battle drug lords have never made a dent in the drug trade. But they have helped Latin American armies and police crush down peasant insurgencies and murder labor organizers. The true political priorities were graphically underlined by the CIA's Inspector General Fred Hitz, who disclosed this to the U.S. Congress on March 18 of this year: In 1982, the agency extracted from Ronald Reagan's attorney general, William French Smith, clearance so the CIA would not have to report any knowledge it might have of drug dealing by CIA assets. This clearance was only fully rescinded in 1995.

Domestically, the "drug war" has always been a pretext for social control, going back to the racist application of opium laws against Chinese laborers in the recession of the 1870s when these workers were viewed as competition for the dwindling number of jobs available. The main users, middle-class white men and women taking opium in liquid form as "tonics," weren't harassed. By 1887, the Chinese Exclusion Act allowed Chinese opium addicts to be arrested and deported.

In the 1930s, the racist head of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, Harry Anslinger, was renaming hemp as "marijuana" to associate it with Mexican laborers and claiming that marijuana "can arouse in blacks and Hispanics a state of menacing fury or homicidal attack." By the 1950s, Anslinger had pushed through the first mandatory drug sentences.

As so often, Nixon was helpfully explicit in his private remarks. H.R. Haldeman recorded in his diary a briefing by the president in 1969, prior to launching of the war on drugs: "Nixon emphasized that you have to face the fact the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

So what was "the system" duly devised? The RICO conspiracy laws, the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, with its 29 new minimum mandatory sentences, and the 100-1 sentencing ratio between possession of crack and powder cocaine. It became a system pushed by Republicans and Democrats alike for locking up a disproportionate amount of black people, just as Nixon required.

So, to call for a "truly open and honest dialogue" about drug policy, as all those distinguished signatories in the advertisement requested, is about as realistic as asking the U.S. government to nationalize the oil industry or to require the top-10 U.S. banks to plow all their profits into urban revival. Essentially, the drug war is a war on the poor and the dangerous classes, here and elsewhere. How many governments are going to give up on that?