The War on Drugs is a War on All of Us

I have a lot on my mind today, but I cannot articulate it all here.  It is all too much to put on paper.  But I have been meaning to post a paper I wrote about the War on Drugs a couple years ago, because I feel like it deserves more exposure than it has had thus far.  There's no need to preface it with anything...it speaks for itself.  (Names have been changed to protect the individuals involved)

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On November 22nd, 2011 at 11:03PM, 23-year-old *Taylor Hopp got the best heroin of his life.  Taylor had been hooked on heroin for over two years, but in the months leading up to that night he had attempted to quit using several times.  He tried to get into treatment programs for months, and finally did in June 2011.  But, after three months in a suboxone program, Taylor’s girlfriend of three years left him.  Taylor began to drink daily, and eventually he lost his job and his insurance, and subsequently, his suboxone program.  He had to move back in with his parents.  It didn’t take him long to end up back on heroin.  On November 20th, Taylor went on a family hunting trip where he admitted to his little brother that he had overdosed more than ten times, but that friends had always been able to revive him.  He told his brother he wanted to quit, and that he was on another waiting list for treatment.  In the meantime, however, Taylor would have to continue using heroin just to function, and to avoid crippling physical withdrawals.  That’s what Taylor Hopp was doing the night before Thanksgiving of 2011- getting what he needed to feel normal.  Nine hours after he picked up that high-quality heroin, Taylor’s step-father found him in his basement bathroom.  He was on the floor, blood crusted around his nose and mouth, with a needle still buried in his arm.  He’d been dead for two hours, and would never need heroin to function again.

    Flashback to December 11th, 2005.  21-year-old *Adam Passante had been out of jail for three weeks, after serving five months in the Milwaukee County House of Corrections for heroin possession. Although clean and sober throughout his incarceration, Adam hoped to get into a drug treatment program after his release in order to maintain his sobriety.  He was referred to a county agency to assist him in finding treatment, and to help him get treatment for his mental health issues. Adam suffered from anxiety and panic disorders.  He was place on a waiting list for treatment and given a three month supply of clonazepam upon his release and then sent on his way.  On December 11th, two of Adam’s friends showed up at the house he shared with his mom, step-father, and little brother.  Firm in his resolve not to use drugs, Adam says goodbye to his mom and leaves with his friends.  At 7:16AM on December 12th, a detective with the Milwaukee Police Department knocked on the door to Adam’s house and was let in by his mom.  The detective told her that Adam’s friends had driven to a drug house in the inner city to get high.  The two friends had gotten in a fight and taken off, leaving Adam in a house full of drugs and strangers.  They never returned for Adam.  A tenant of the house agreed to find Adam a ride home the next morning, then asked Adam if he would trade some of his anxiety medication for more heroin.  Adam agreed and they continued to get high until Adam eventually fell asleep on the couch.  What no one realized was that Adam wasn’t asleep.  He was dead.  It was five hours before anyone noticed his body was cold and his lips were blue, and when they called the police, no one could even remember his name.

    I will always remember Adam’s name, because he was my best friend.  And I know the exact time that Taylor got his fatal dose of heroin because he got it from me.  That’s why I’m completing this course from prison instead of from a college classroom.  And I’m not complaining.  Adam, Taylor, and all the others I’ve lost to drug-related deaths don’t have another chance to live their lives and face down their demons, but I do.  I’m grateful for that.  But, at the same time, I am terrified of failing, because if I lose this fight I will lose my life in the process.  My parents will lose a daughter, my son will lose his mother, and the world will lose a person who really wanted to make a difference and change lives for the better.  But that may never happen, and I’m afraid that somewhere down the road I’ll be screaming out for help…and no one will hear me.

    For the past 40 years our country has been pouring money into an international effort to eradicate drug supplies, end drug trafficking, and reduce drug consumption using punitive approaches.  But now, not only have levels of drug production, trafficking, and consumption remained steady; but drugs are now cheaper, purer, and easier to find (Newman, 2013).  In essence, it’s almost like we’ve dumped $400 billion each year, a combined total of 2.5 trillion dollars (TIME, 2014), into the world’s largest toilet bowl and flushed it away.  And while our fearless leaders are busy fighting over debt ceilings and NSA leaks and foreign policy, people like Adam and Tyler are dying.  They are dying by the hundreds and by the thousands, and they are dying preventable deaths.  And that’s saying nothing about the millions of people who can’t get treatment who live as slaves to their addictions, or the half a million addicts being warehoused in jails and prisons (Newman, 2013), or the millions of families and children who are repeatedly victimized because our society has turned a public health issue into a paramilitary nightmare.  We all shed tears reading about Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Corey Monteith losing their personal battles with addiction, but where are the tears for the living casualties, the hurting families, the broken communities?  This paper takes a look at how addiction and the War on Drugs affect our families, our schools, our communities, and our society as a whole.

    To get a good idea of exactly what we’re dealing with when we talk about addiction, the drug war, and how they affect our society, we have to look at the statistics.  In our country, over 20 million people are addicted to drugs, including alcohol.  Drugs kill more people than any other natural cause: about 365 Americans per day, and over 135,000 per year.  That rate has doubled since the early 80s, and it does not include over 100,000 additional deaths, in which drugs played a role but were counted as suicides, homicides, auto and other accidents, heart attacks, strokes, infectious diseases, HIV/AIDS, liver and kidney diseases, septicemia, etc., etc. (Sheff, 2013).  In addition to death, drug use leads to more illnesses than any other preventable health condition, which overwhelms the American healthcare system.  Addiction contributes to more ER visits and hospital admissions (4.6 million in 2009, an 81% increase since 2004) than any other single cause, thereby driving up healthcare costs significantly (Sheff, 2014).  Addiction also affects our communities because it often coincides with mental illness, and this combination is present in up to 60% of the homeless population.  Then there are the ridiculous measures we as a nation have taken to curb addiction and drug-related crime.  Drugs are the number one cause of crime.  Over half of federal prisoners in the U.S. are in on drug convictions.  Over half of all burglaries are committed by people high on drugs or seeking money to buy drugs.  85% of the U.S. prison population in 2010 was locked up for crimes either motivated by or related to drugs.  Drugs are involved in between one-half to three-quarters of all incidents of violence; including child abuse, domestic abuse, homicide, assault, rape, and almost 100 percent of date rapes (Sheff, 2013).  With 2.3 million people in U.S. prisons we are the world’s greatest incarcerator, incarcerating over four times more inmates than all of Western Europe combined (Newman, 2013).  Mandatory minimum sentences for drug convictions contribute to roughly a quarter of those incarcerations, and one in every 31 adults in the U.S. is now under some type of correctional control (Pew Center on the States).  These numbers are staggering on their own, but they become even more serious when considering the affects they have on our populace.

    It should go without saying that this tendency toward mass incarceration has greatly contributed to the instability of American families.  Over half of all prisoners (52-63 percent) have minor children (Sheff, 2013), and 45 percent of those parents were living with their children right before they were locked up (Western, 2010).  As a result, over 2 million kids are growing up without parents.  Incarceration is also strongly linked to divorce and separation, and formerly incarcerated men are about four times more likely to assault their partners than men who have never been incarcerated (Western, 2010).  So how does this affect our children in the grand scheme of things?  Well, first off, children of incarcerated parents have higher rates of developmental delays and behavioral problems (Western, 2010), but what’s even more tragic is that the stigma that is applied to incarcerated men and women is actually inherited by their children.  Justice Strategies, a nonprofit research organization, says that kids who lose parents to prison endure a pain similar to those who lose parents to death and divorce, but whereas death and divorce are looked on by society as acceptable and are viewed in a sympathetic and understanding light, having incarcerated parents is not.  Children then develop feelings of shame based on their parent’s situation, and they grow up in environments of low expectations because other adults assume they will fail or follow similar paths as their parents did.  And in many cases, that’s exactly what happens.  Kids with incarcerated parents, or drug-addicted parents, are at a much higher risk of becoming deviant in their adult lives than other children.

    Since we are talking about the affects that having incarcerated parents have on our children, we’d be remiss not to include the affects on children who use drugs themselves.  Addiction does not discriminate based on age.  One in twelve Americans over 12 years old is hooked on drugs.  Despite decades of D.A.R.E. programs and strict zero tolerance policies, drugs are flooding our schools.  American teens use drugs at higher rates than any other country in the world (Sheff, 2013), and over 80 percent of kids in the juvenile justice system are there for drug related troubles.  Thousands of teens are being subjected to traumatic experiences with law enforcement, where cops pose as high school kids and conduct ruthless undercover operations to bust kids with drugs.  These “stings” even target learning disabled students, and students like 17 year old Jesse Snodgrass who has Asperger’s Syndrome.  Jesse’s condition, which is a type of autism, severely inhibits his social skills and makes it difficult for Jesse to make friends, so when a kid named Daniel approached him at school and wanted to hang out, Jesse was thrilled.  When Daniel asked Jesse to find him pot, Jesse originally said no.  Having never used or bought drugs before, Jesse didn’t know the first thing about how to find them.  But Daniel kept pestering Jesse about getting him some pot.  Fearing he would lose his only friend if he didn’t help Daniel, Jesse found a way to get him what he wanted.  When Jesse was arrested in the middle of class by police clad in full S.W.A.T. gear, he was in total shock.  Jesse and 21 other students were arrested at school that day, half of which had been set up by Daniel, an undercover cop.  Because of his condition, Jesse was ill-equipped to cope with being betrayed, arrested, and detained.  He regressed significantly in his ability to function as a result of the experience, and now suffers from PTSD related to what happened.  When asked about it, his distrust is evident.  “They were actually out to get us,” he remarks, referring to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department in his corner of California.  And that rings true, considering that Jesse is the only one of the 22 kids arrested who is still getting a traditional education, and only after his parents filed suit against the school and the county.  These law enforcement measures against our youth push kids out of school and into the criminal justice system (Erdely, 2014), a process known as the “school-to-prison” pipeline.  And what valuable lessons are kids like Jesse Snodgrass learning from this?  “The County Sheriff’s Department taught me how to buy pot,” he says.  Beautiful.

    Families and individuals are shattering as a result of failed drug policy.  Right now, millions of people in the U.S. are living without a mother, father, husband, wife, brother, sister, son, daughter, etc. because they are locked up on a drug charge.  And nothing we are doing is putting these people or families back together; in fact, we’re making the problem worse.  Collateral sanctions imposed on those convicted of drug crimes seriously limit their ability to care for themselves and their families when they rejoin the community (ELCA, 2012).  The 1998 Higher Education Act delays or denies federal financial aid to those convicted of drug offenses.  Also, studies show that a criminal record reduces the number of prospective employer callbacks for those seeking employment by 50 percent (Western), and many jobs are completely off limits to those with a criminal history.  When you consider that education and employment are two of the most important factors in lowering recidivism rates, it’s easy to see how collateral sanctions prevent convicts from succeeding.  Having a drug charge also makes many people ineligible for housing assistance and food stamps, and prevents them from exercising their constitutional right to vote.  And that’s not nearly all- with police breaking into homes of the guilty and innocent unannounced, with private property being seized without due process, and with millions of U.S. citizens being subjected to urine tests without cause, we might as well run the Constitution right through the shredder.

    That brings us to the political end of things.  Typically, the War on Drugs and its focus on law enforcement, production control, and incarceration were Republican-supported measures.  But now things are beginning to shift, and reform movements are being spear-headed by people like Kentucky Republican Senator Rand Paul, who recently spoke out on the matter at a gala event for social conservatives.  “As Christians,” he began, “we believe in forgiveness.  I think the criminal justice system should have some element of forgiveness.”  Furthermore, to a party that is supposed to be fiscally conservative, the cost of such massive failure is unjustifiable.  “We’ve gone too far,” says Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake.  As more of the effects are made known, more politicians agree that it’s time to fix the broken system and end the War on Drugs, which has really become a war on people.  President Obama’s stance against enforcing federal marijuana laws in Washington and Colorado is setting the tone for future reforms, and marks a significant shift in the drug war.  Some groups have protested the ideas of legalization and decriminalization, mostly law enforcement and private corrections groups that profit from the current system, but even members of these groups are beginning to open their eyes.

    Part of the reason these people are converting is because they are sick of seeing whole communities decimated and so much blood being spilled as a result of drug prohibition.  Most drug-related violence is not about drug use, it’s about illegal enterprise.  History tells an all too familiar story of the days of alcohol prohibition:  Cops engaged in deadly shootouts with bootleggers, illegal speakeasies churning massive profits and funneling them into organized crime, and gangsters like Al Capone facilitating countless acts of violence to protect their financial interests.  Now history is repeating itself.  With illicit drug sales accounting for $320 billion dollars annually, it’s no surprise that cartels and organized crime entities are willing to kill to keep their revenue source.  Gang turf wars over drugs make U.S. inner city streets unsafe, but that’s nothing compared to the bloodletting in places like Mexico, Columbia, and Afghanistan, where drug production makes up a significant portion of the economy, and mass killings related to the industry are the norm.  Mexican President Felipe Calderon makes a valid point when stating that his country shares a border with “the biggest consumer of drugs in the world and the largest supplier of weapons in the world” (TIME, 2014), and that if America wants to fix its drug crisis, it needs to do something about America’s “unquenchable thirst” for illegal drugs.  Walter McCay, head of the nonprofit Center for Police Certification in Mexico City, couldn’t agree more.  “For every drug dealer you put in jail or kill, there’s a line up to replace him because the money is just so good,” he says (AP Impact, 2010).  And that’s true all over the globe.  When production of a drug is impeded by eradication efforts in one country, production is just pushed to another country.  This is known as the “balloon effect.”  Police in Shawano County have noticed this on a smaller scale.  When dealers are being in targeted in one county, they just move their operation to a neighboring county.  Their frustration is apparent.  People like Walter McCay and the 13,000 cops, judges, prosecutors, prison wardens, and other members of the Massachusetts-based Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (L.E.A.P.) know this frustration all too well.  They are advocating for the legalization and regulation of all drugs, and an end to the catastrophic madness of this 40-year-old, unwinnable war.

    This war is costing our society and our world so much more than money- it’s costing us our integrity as human beings.  As though the lengthy list of negative consequences put forth in this paper were not enough to turn your stomach, this war is also encouraging rampant racial and economic injustice.  African Americans are locked up at rates thirteen times higher than whites, despite equal rates of drug use and sales, and that rate is as much as 57 times higher in some states.  African Americans and Latinos make up only 29 percent of the U.S. population, but they account for 75 percent of inmates in state and federal prisons (Newman, 2013).  We also lock up the poor at higher rates, because those who are economically disadvantaged do not have the means to pay for adequate legal representation (Walker, 2009).  This is not a war on drugs- it is a war on the poor, on families, on minorities, and on the American values we hold most dear.  And it has a 90 percent rate of failure.  This is not acceptable.

    Abraham Lincoln, our most celebrated President, had this to say about prohibition: “Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.”  We’d be wise to mark his words and acknowledge that this problem is a problem of demand, not supply.  The War on Drugs has not stopped people from wanting drugs, and as long as people want them, they will always be able to find them.  We can’t even control drug use within our prisons, so can we really expect to control the drug use of free citizens.  It’s laughable to think so.

    So what do we do?  Well, for one thing, we could take direction from countries like Portugal, who recently decriminalized ALL drugs (Drug Alliance, 2014).  Drug addiction, overdoses, and drug-related HIV transmission have all decreased in Portugal, with no significant increase in drug use.  Legalization would drop the street value of drugs to a mere fraction of what it is now, thus eliminating the incentive to push them.  Whether we legalize or decriminalize, either option is better than what we are doing now, and either option will free up money that can be better spent on the things that work, like prevention and treatment.

    Treatment is the key.  We need to recognize that we CAN have an impact on demand if we concentrate out efforts on the right areas.  The text is right when it says that the criminal justice system cannot fix the problem itself, because the problem is not rooted in the acts of “bad people,” but reflects the operation of our society as a whole.  We have to throw away this idea that people who use drugs are immoral and adopt the reality of things, which is that these people have a medical problem.  We must accept that addiction is an illness, but also that it’s usually a symptom of underlying problems, like mental illness and trauma.  Most drug use is really about life, and when we treat both the addiction and the causal factors behind it, people not only recover, they thrive.  Unfortunately, there are not nearly enough effective treatment programs available to those who need them.  Most people have to get arrested just to get treatment, and even then, many still fall through the cracks.  For some reason, our government keeps dumping money into things that don’t work instead of investing in things that do.  The benefits of treatment are innumerable.  Not only do addicts who complete treatment go on to be productive employees and capable parents, they also become positive and inspiring examples within our communities.  And yet more than half of the people in the U.S. who need treatment are ignored by society and left to fend for themselves.  Imagine an AIDS patient being denied the care he needed- it’s a death sentence.  And it’s the same for addicts.  When society refuses to treat addiction, people die.

    I wonder- how many people need to die for our society to wake up and say enough is enough?  How many lives need to be broken before a change takes place?  People tell me to be hopeful, but I have every reason to be afraid of the future.  The odds are stacked against me at every turn.  My friends are dead, victims of their disease and society’s ignorance.  And I can’t help but worry that I’m on my way to join them.  

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I am still worried...but I am still fighting.
Peace to all of you.