The
Drug War Racket
Every
great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually
degenerates into a racket.
Eric
Hoffer
The Temper of Our
Time
The
history of Prohibition clearly follows the arc of Hoffer's aphorism. Prohibition started as a religious and moral
movement early in the nineteenth century, it developed into a business in the
mid-twentieth century with laws prohibiting drugs other than alcohol. Finally, the failed War on Drugs has
degenerated into a racket.
Prohibition
started as a religious movement early in the nineteenth century when the
secular republic of the Revolution turned to religion in the Second Great
Awakening. As it developed, it merged
three different religious traditions.
The older Puritans, who had faded a century earlier, bequeathed the idea
that society had a moral obligation to closely constrain public
conformity. The Evangelists who arose
after about 1810 focused on sanctification, or that each person must lead a
godly life to achieve salvation. By the
end of that century they were joined by the practitioners of the social gospel
who believed in a mission to better social conditions and society itself. The common thread holding all three together
was an insistence on absolute sobriety.
They were able to impose their religious vision (whichever form it took)
on the nation as a whole with the ratification of the Prohibition in 1919. When Prohibition was repealed, the Dry true
believers simply switched their allegiance to the new drug prohibition that
developed in the 1920s. Some even
continued giving the same speeches, merely substituting the word “drugs” for “alcohol”. Even today this absolute moralistic core
resonates with many Drug Warriors who still see all drugs (or at least selected
“bad” drugs) as evil and who insist on total, nationwide sobriety.
When
Prohibition – of both alcohol and other drugs – came into effect in the 1920s,
the moral crusade for total sobriety morphed into a business of enforcement. The commercialization actually started in the
late nineteenth century with the opening of inebriation asylums and sobriety
clinics. In the twentieth, they were
joined by healers working against drug addiction – in fact the term ”addict”
itself grew from those efforts. They
grew from city clinics to institutes trying to break the grip of drugs on their
users. In the mid-30s even the prison
system joined in this professional effort with the opening of the federal “narcotic
farms” in Lexington and Fort Worth.
These, in turn, became the foundation of the medical profession’s work
in the field of drug abuse. The
professionalization of rehabilitation and drug medicine was joined by that of
drug policing. By 1930 both the
Prohibition Bureau (later merged into the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agency)
and the Bureau of Narcotics (forerunner of the current Drug Enforcement Agency)
had become regular civil service bureaus.
The
new business of Prohibition slogged along unsuccessfully for a half a century
(that’s right: more than fifty years elapsed between the Harrison Narcotic Act
and the Controlled Substances Act) before it was supercharged by the War on
Drugs and greedily expanded into a racket.
Over a trillion dollars has been thrown to greedy sharks, and drug use
is more wide-spread than ever.
From
1970 to 2010 prison population expanded from under 500,000 to over 2,000,000 –
most of it from drug arrests. Private
for-profit corporations rushed in to build prisons and operate them under state
contracts – and they insured those profits gained with massive campaign
contributions and lobbying. The
California Corrections Officers association quickly became one of the richest
and most powerful political associations in the state. Dependence therapy and rehabilitation, a
small medical specialty since the 1920s, blossomed into a nationwide industry
with major chains of treatment organizations, often run by hucksters and
quacks.
The
federal government also poured two massive torrents of money into Prohibition
that turned policing into a for-profit racket. The
first was a series of grants, both money and military surplus equipment (which
is why even small town police have tanks).
These were primarily based on numbers of arrests, and marijuana arrests
are easy to make[1]. The second War on Drugs innovation was civil
forfeiture of any assets used in the commission of a crime or acquired through
criminal proceeds[2]. Those funds go directly to the police
agencies (federal and local) outside of their normal budgetary procedures and
constraints. One Texas sheriff uses part
of his forfeited assets to throw regular beer and barbeque gatherings for his
deputies. This process has also allowed
major drug kingpins to bribe their way into much shorter prison sentences.
Hoffer’s
map traces the trajectory of Prohibition from crusade to business to racket,
but it is incomplete. Every arc comes to
an end, but Hoffer gives no clue to what that end may be. Like a fly ball, it could fall outside the
fence for a score or into a fielder’s glove for an out. Like a cannonball, it could bury itself in
the dirt or blow up a fort. Like a
meteor, it could burn out as a fiery streak across the sky or crash into the
Gulf of Mexico destroying the dinosaurs and most other life. The arc of Prohibition must end. It is up to us to make sure its end comes
quickly and does as little harm as possible.
