Subject: Arguments to End Drug Prohibition
Issue: Drug Policy
Date: October 3, 2004
Author: Michael A. Greene

"There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; and that is an idea whose time has come."
- Victor Hugo

The civil rights movement was a social movement because "we the people" said it was time for a change. Our country is ready for a change in politics. We have so little to choose from the dominant two-party system. The circular ideology of the Democratic - Republican parties represents two sides of the same coin.

I'm a candidate for House of Representatives, District 35; part of a growing idea in politics, the Personal Choice Party. The Personal Choice Party believes that each individual is sovereign; that each of us is best guided by our own free agency, not by some government agency. The Personal Choice Party gives voters a new choice - the power to make our life choices without government interference.

There are areas of our lives that government has removed our personal choices. America is founded on the principle of "the consent of the governed." As a nation of free-thinking people our most fundamental value is the right to be left alone.

The War on Drugs ignores this fundamental aspect and grants government authority over our bodies and minds. We've lost our personal sovereignty including the right of cognitive liberty. See http://www.cognitiveliberty.org.

Many Drug Prohibition advocates say that any change from what we've been doing for the last 30 years is an admission that America is failing in its efforts to stop illegal drug use. I say America isn't failing, we never stood a chance to begin with. The objective is wrong. The whole premise of Drug Prohibition is unconstitutional, unjust, and irrational. It's only natural that it fails to accomplish its objective.

I'm concerned for the destructive effects that our drug policies are having on our children, our families, our communities, and the moral fabric of our nation. I'm speaking about our drug policies, not drug use per se. Clearly, it's the manner we've chosen to deal with drug use that creates our problems.

It's a myth that our drug policies prevent drug use. This policy of Drug Prohibition is the same one we tried in the 1920s. You would think that after our failure of Alcohol Prohibition we would know the effectiveness of our current policies.

With this in mind, a government sponsored study was conducted to determine whether U.S. policies actually reduce drug use. According to the study, no definitive answer was possible. Maybe they work - maybe they don't.

We can't blame drugs for our social problems, and we can't solve any of our problems until we stop trying to solve them in ways that haven't worked.

This much is clear, our policies impose ever increasing fines, longer incarcerations, and a criminal record to those who use illegal drugs. Yet the rate of marijuana use by individuals ages 18 to 24 hasn't changed in over 25 years.

The U.S. Drug War budget was roughly $ 33 billion in 2002. With this kind of investment, drug use should be going down, yet it increases with every effort to end it. Year after year, we pay for a policy that has never worked from the day it began.

"Just Say No" was supposed to be enough to enable jobless inner city kids to resist easy money. America was supposed to be "Drug-Free" twice now. It's called the "War on Drugs," but the American people are the enemy.

I'm going to let you in on a secret - our drug policies aren't about reducing drug use, they're about maintaining the vast sums of money that illegal drugs create - both in the black market and legitimate economy.

If we're ever going to find solutions, we need to understand how drugs affect all of our lives, not just the lives of those who use illegal drugs.

We need to know how governments are corrupted by illegal drugs. We need to know about the vast sums of drug money that get laundered through U.S. banks. That money has to go somewhere, and America just happens to be one of the world's richest nations.

We need to know about America's fastest growing, most lucrative business - the prison industrial complex. With over two million prisoners, the U.S. has the largest incarcerated population of any other nation. One in 75 American males is incarcerated with 60 percent serving time for a nonviolent drug offence. One in three black males in America are in some way involved with the criminal justice system - either in prison, in jail, on parole, in foster homes, or in court appointed drug treatment. More black men are in prison today than are in college. Add the growing population of women drug law violators, women with children, and we have a social catastrophe of huge proportions.

The crucial element missing in our drug policies is the objective to reduce harms from drug use. Why is it criminal for someone to be a heroin addict, but acceptable to be a tobacco addict? While tobacco is highly regulated and subsidized, it kills over 430,000 U.S. users every year; more than all the deaths from alcohol, cocaine, heroin, homicide, suicide, auto accidents, fire, and AIDS combined.

Yet heroin mortalities are due to the user not knowing the quality of the drug. In addition, the reuse of non-sterile needles among heroin users contributes significantly to the AIDS epidemic. The U.S. refuses to implement the progressive harm reduction policies that are in effect throughout much of the European Union and Canada - nations with much smaller rates of drug related harm than the U.S.

We need to know about the ecological destruction our drug policies are having in South America; this includes the long-term effects of spraying powerful herbicide on indigenous farmer's coca-fields, and in the process destroying sensitive rain-forest habitats.

Why are we ruining the livelihoods of South American families for our drug use here in North America? We would never allow another nation to crop-dust American tobacco farms to prevent American tobacco growers from producing a plant that kills millions of people worldwide, every year.

It's the manner we've chosen to deal with drug use that creates our inability to solve the problems related to drug use.

Rather than irresponsibly blaming drugs for our problems, we need policy makers who have the courage to look at alternatives to the failures of the past. We don't need more futile "tough on crime" legislation; what we need is legislators who will implement real solutions. Solutions that actually reduce the harms from drug use rather than merely produce more criminals serving longer and longer prison terms on the taxpayers' tab.

Because I want something better than the mess we've got now, if I'm elected, I'll work hard to solve the problems created by our drug policies here in Utah.


Here are some of  the problems that do not result from a drug's effect on the user but, are instead, the result of how we've chosen to deal with drug use.

* Easy access to a variety of uncontrolled drugs. The amount of illegal drugs stopped at our borders is estimated to be, at most, 12%, at a cost over $33 billion a year. Imagine what it would cost to stop the remaining 88% from entering our country.

* The illegal drug user never knows if the drug he/she acquires is free of harmful impurities, that it's in a suitable dosage, or that the drug is what was expected. All of this leads to health problems and mortalities associated with illegal drug use.

* Creation of a criminal class whose only offence is participation in consensual drug use. This makes illegal drug use a crime even though the user doesn't cause the loss of another's property or inflict personal injury on others.

Even more egregious, drug conspiracy laws only require that an individual be suspected of involvement with an illegal drug to be subjected to an unconstitutional action such as a search or property seizure. Such individuals are often subjected to a violent home invasion raid; a penalty imposed even if the individual is never convicted of a crime.

* The persistent efforts of our legislators to nullify the civil rights of those using, or suspected of using, illegal drugs. Some examples:

- Legislation has been drafted to make it a crime for simply having a mental state produced by the drug ecstasy; that is, no drug or paraphernalia need be present or any criminal act need be committed for a conviction (California Ecstasy Bills of 2001, SB 1103 and AB 1416).

- Merely dispensing information related to the manufacture of a drug (Methamphetamine Anti-Proliferation Act of 1999). Again, no drug or paraphernalia need be found nor any criminal act need be committed for a conviction.

- The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law in 2002 allowing families, including children, to be evicted from government housing if a family member or any of the friends or visitors of the residence is charged with a drug crime. The family member who signed the housing lease needn't be aware of the drug involvement or have it occur within the dwelling.

* National economies become dependent on black market drugs. This includes the corruption of national leaders, their agencies, and these country's legal/justice systems - as with Columbia and Afghanistan. This also includes the corruption of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's complicity in the well-documented and uncontested trafficking of cocaine (i.e. arms smuggling and cocaine trafficking in the Iran-Contra affair).

* The funding of international terrorist groups and criminal syndicates with the profits from illegal drugs. As of this writing (2004), the U.S. Government is allowing the Afghanistan opium poppy crop to proceed, which is expected to be one of the largest opium harvests in history. How much more terrorist activity will these drugs purchase?

* Police corruption by association with the profits of an invisible drug market. A 1998 report by the General Accounting Office documents incidents of drug-related police corruption in Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Savannah, and Washington, DC. The Los Angeles Rampart Division gang unit and the DEA narcotics scandal in Tulia, TX are recent examples.

* Fostering of the violence inherent in drug dealer warfare. Our inner cities have experienced the explosive growth of gangs and the culture which idolizes this lifestyle. A central theme of this culture is a disregard for those who enforce the law.

* Inflicting violence on those being apprehended for consensual drug use. These include harassment of innocent citizens merely suspected of drug involvement and of innocent families in "no-knock" house raids.

* Criminal penalties imposed predominantly on drug users in minority groups creating an inmate population predominately of racial minorities. This unequal application of justice also involves the withholding of federal financial aid to any student convicted of a non-violent drug crime as is done under the Higher Education Act in the Drug-Free Student Provision of 1998.

An estimated 15,600 students were denied financial aid in 2001-2002 for drug-related convictions. Another 10,000 students who refused to answer the question of a drug conviction have been denied financial benefits and hence a college education. This law does not apply to students convicted of murder, rape, perjury, or burglary. Funding is allowed for these crimes.

* Enormous waste of taxpayer funds in futile Drug Prohibition programs. The ever-expanding Drug Prohibition budget consistently fails to produce results that would justify the manpower, prison space, court time, and resources devoted to it.

Drug Czar, John Walters, admitted to the failure of U.S. anti-drug advertising campaigns stating, "the latest evaluation of ONDCP's National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign is disappointing ... the ads aimed at teens appear not to have had any meaningful effect on their attitudes and decisions about drug use," yet this failure costs the taxpayer millions of dollars a year.

You can learn to imagine a world without the crime, violence, and corruption of Drug Prohibition by visiting these resources:

Center for Sensible Drug Policy
Drug Coordination Network
Drug Policy Alliance
Reconsider



Michael A. Greene, candidate for Utah House District 35