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1. War on Drugs
Welcome to the first episode of our series called Actually Making America Great! Thank you so much for tuning in and I hope you enjoy listening to this as much as we enjoyed putting this series together. Before we begin, a few mentions need to be made. Thank you to Naser Al-Fawakhiri, who contributed greatly to the research and crafting of the content for these episodes you hear. Also my greatest appreciation needs to be given to my good friend Oscar Gregg, who crafted this intro music you’re hearing as well as the music at the end. His own single, Acrobats, which is absolutely phenomenal, is out everywhere which you should check out and will be linked in the podcast notes below. With that out of the way, our first topic, The War on Drugs, really shows how previous actions having lasting impacts on the world we live in, so without further adieu, let’s get into it
BROAD OUTLINE
A. Intro
B. History
C. Impact Today
D. Back to history: the prohibition (Why did the Drug War fail?)
E. So how do we fix it?
The murder of George Floyd led to the biggest popular movement in American history. Up to 26 million Americans participated in Black Lives Matter protests across the nation. People flooded the streets demanding to see police reform and calling out the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless other African Americans who have wrongfully died at the hands of police in America. The political uproar was unprecedented and it seemed that Floyd's death was just the tipping point for meaningful change.
But Floyd was immediately smeared with drug use which was designed to undermine calls for change in how policing happens in our country-- calls for using police department money to fund education and build up communities, and reforming the police training and hiring process, and diverting funds to unarmed mental health professionals to ease the workload of overstressed police departments, but it all could be brushed off if George Floyd could be seen as a dangerous druggee.
(But was he?)
He simply wasn't -- Floyd had 19 nanograms per mL of meth and 2.9 nanograms per mL of THC (Marijuana) in his blood. Those numbers mean he probably hadn't taken either in many hours, possibly up to a full day.
If you have a glass of wine at dinner the night before and then get arrested the next day, no one bats an eye... but if you've smoked a blunt in the last few days, now that's an illustration of who you are as a person....
But marijuana wouldn't have made Floyd violent. Marijauna calms you down, relaxes you. It basically puts you to sleep. And, for those of you who actually watched the full video of his death, you can see he wasn't resisting arrest or being belligerent. He was quite calm and coherent, while the officer cut off his airway with his knee. Bottom line: George Floyd wasn't some dangerous druggee that the police needed to take out for our safety.
So if the narrative that Floyd was high when he was killed is false, why did the media put it out there? another question: if black and white Americans use drugs at the same rate, why are black people 4 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana use and 2.6 times more likely to be arrested for all other drug offenses especially when white people are more likely to be drug dealers
Smearing black people as drug users isn't a bug-- it's a feature of the system we live under, and part of a wider problem that is the single most spectacular policy failure the modern world has ever seen. It's the war on drugs
HISTORY
When we're talking about the war on drugs we have to talk about the history behind the war on drugs. In the early 20th century most drugs were legal, and there wasn't chaos or rampant crime. Then the world changed when the drug war started. There's a really informative book about the drug war called Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari, where he not only gives the background to how the drug war started, but talks about the psychology behind managing drug use and how other countries like Portugal have handled their country's drug use way better than we have (Spoiler: they did it by ending their drug war). It's a fascinating read, and I won't have enough time to go through all the specifics here
Harry Anslinger, newly appointed head of the Federal Department of Narcotics, was looking to make his office into something big. The Department used to be the Department of Prohibition, but with prohibition over and with the Supreme Court ruling that drug addicts should be dealt with by doctors, not cops, the Department of Narcotics' budget was slashed. All of Anslinger's work to get to be the head of a government agency would be for nothing if his department got shut down.
In other words, Anslinger had a lot of work to do in order to make a name for himself and his department. He knew one way to do it, and it was at the expense of a black singer whom Anslinger had decided was his worst enemy, Billie Holiday. Anslinger hated jazz, and especially hated black musicians like Billie, who was the rising star of jazz. Anslinger was also a huge racist, and believed that black people were violent, uncivilized, and addicted to drugs. So he took up a crusade to eradicate the country of all drugs, well, except for alcohol and tobacco of course), while pursuing a personal vendetta against Billie Holiday and jazz musicians like her. Anslinger managed to concoct a campaign of fear, racism, and misinformation, by ignoring scientific experts and data, and, by lying and race baiting, sound familiar? And through this he managed to make many Americans believe that drugs would turn the whole of society into chaos. His argument was that drugs made black people violent, posing a huge threat to white Americans. The public was scared, and the government had no choice but to crack down on drug use.
Harry's Department was saved and he sent out its agents to harass drug users and lock them up. Meanwhile, the US started bullying its allies into
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adopting similar drug war policies, exporting Anslinger's vision to a global stage. Anslinger had made it big. The Drug War was born and Anslinger was winning.
And, more than a political victory, Anslinger had his personal triumph when Billie Holiday succumbed to withdrawal in a hospital bed, while his agents blocked her hospital room door and made her final days a living hell.
The story of what happened to Billie Holiday is horrible and I encourage everyone to read Chasing the Scream, or watch the upcoming drama "The United States vs Billie Holiday" if you want to learn more.
But we have to remember, Anslinger's crusade was only the beginning of the drug war. Billie Holiday died in 1959. The Controlled Substances Act, which established the current schedule system for ranking and banning drugs, was passed in 1971, 12 years later. And 1971 is when most experts would say the Drug War really kicked off. After Anslinger got the ball rolling, the Drug War became a brilliant political tool, not for curbing drug use, but for crushing your political enemies like Anslinger crushed Holiday.
If you want to see what the Drug War was really about, you can ask John Ehrlichman, former White House Counsel under Nixon:
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
IMPACT ON TODAY
And disrupt their communities they did. If you're still wondering why you're more than 2 and a half times as likely to get arrested for drug use when you're black than if you're white, even though both use drugs at the same rate, it's because that's what the Drug War was designed to do. And the political ramifications are huge: 20% of inmates in the US are nonviolent drug offenders. And, not surprisingly, according to the Sentencing Project, we lock up African Americans at 5x the rate we do whites, a disparity driven by a disparity in how drug laws are applied to white defendants vs black defendants. We can't overlook the fact that arrested blacks are far more likely to be imprisoned than arrested whites due to a biased judicial system, nor can we overlook the impact of systemic and generational poverty and educational inequalities and their effects on criminal justice. But on top of the system being biased against black people, the Drug War itself was designed to target black people and so does a fair deal to explain *why* African Americans are more likely to be arrested and convicted for drug crimes.
Black Lives Matter stems from the reality that black people
are treated unfairly by police. The fact of the matter is, the Drug War encourages police officers to go more harshly after black people for drug use than whites, despite equal rates of use. The media demonizes black victims of police brutality, like George Floyd, as drug addicts. Police officers are led to believe that black people are more criminal, because they are trained to focus on their drug crimes more than anything else. And all of that feeds bias, locking up thousands upon thousands of black Americans for nonviolent drug offenses. It manages to keep the police quite busy and well-funded, and fills up prisons.
We have 1.3 million nonviolent drug arrests annually.
The United States, which is only 4% of the world population, houses 25% of the world's prisoners, which is what taxpayers like you and me end up paying for. So, for the conservatives listening to this, if you want to cut taxes, end the drug war. It'll cut the cost of policing because instead of being preoccupied with nonviolent drug offenses they'd actually be "tough on crime" and pursuing actual criminals. Police departments can't be tough on crime when they're bogged down with 1.3 million nonviolent drug offenses. Instead of paying for massive, overcrowded jails filled with nonviolent drug offenders, we'd only pay for prisons housing actual criminals. The federal and state court system budget could also be cut-- because they wouldn't be overburdened hearing nonviolent drug crime cases. In terms of reducing the size of the government, ending the drug war would be a massive win for conservatives everywhere. Ending the drug war would put 18 billion dollars back in the pockets of taxpayers annually (American Progress).
WHY THE DRUG WAR FAILED
But more importantly, the drug war just doesn't work. If the goal was to curb drug use, it doesn't do that. If the goal was to reduce crime, it doesn't do that either as cartels have grown *because* of the drug war. However, if the goal was what Ehrlichman said, to disrupt black communities, it does just that, it locks them up and keeps them in a cycle of poverty, which encourages drug use.
So is our government just colossally incompent? Since the Controlled Substances Act, the Drug War has cost us $1 trillion. Did our politicians really not know how spectacularly the drug war would fail? Actually they knew it would fail. Everyone knew it would fail. Remember Anslinger? His Department of Narcotics used to be the Department of Prohibition. Let's take a look at how Prohibition predicted the spectacular failure of the drug war.
In the late 19th century, the temperance movement argued that alcohol abuse was a moral stain on society and caused violence. Their solution, instead of treating alcoholism medically like we do now, it was to ban alcohol outright, for the good of society.
They won in 1920, and SO started Prohibition. But to the dismay of the Temperance Movement, alcohol use didn't stop. People still found alcohol and, with legal brewing companies now prohibited from operating, the Mafia had a monopoly on supplying the country’s alcohol. And since there were no regulations on alcohol other than "it’s illegal", nothing stopped the mafia from selling alcohol that was dangerously poisoned with contaminants. Thousands of Americans died from bad alcohol, and the government couldn't regulate the quality of the alcohol being provided (like we do now) because it was *illegal*. It's kind of like if you try to pretend alcohol consumption isn't happening because it's banned, you end up overlooking people literally dying of poisoned alcohol. Oh what? People are dying? I thought we made that illegal!
Meanwhile, the Mafia got rich. The thing about organized crime is that it's organized. That is, it's organized to be good at crime. So while the Mafia was in charge of supplying the country's alcohol, the Mafia got better at crime, because they had more power. Instead of making society safer by removing the "scourge of alcoholism", Prohibition strengthened the Mafia to commit more crimes.
Now wait where have I heard this story before: people died because of bad drugs laced with toxins, and some "cartel" organization stirs up lots of crime, and the use of the drug doesn't go down even though lots of people get arrested for using the drug, costing lives and money. Oh yeah that's the current drug war. We knew it would happen. It's an exact repeat, one century later.
WHAT DO WE DO NOW?
So if you're worried about immigration from Latin American countries and Mexico, let me tell you, it's because the drug war has given cartels a lot of money because they have a monopoly on the drug supply, and so, like the Mafia in prohibition, organize crime allows them to get away with it and find ways to evade border security to slip drugs into our country. The drug war is making our country unsafe because it feeds the cartels. And the drug war gives them all this power because no one can make drugs legally in the US. Meanwhile, the cartels also make their own countries unsafe, and civilians find their lives threatened by the cartels and so they flee to the US. In terms of addressing illegal immigration in this country, get rid of the need felt by illegal immigrants to cross the border fearing for their lives at the hands of the cartels. End the drug war, and you take out a huge portion of the cartels' revenues, and reduce the number of illegal immigrants coming across the border. Conservatives: your border wall would cost $21.6 billion and be completely ineffective. Ending the drug war would actually combat the issue, and *save* us $18 billion. The real border wall should be ending the drug war.
More importantly, if we get rid of the drug war, how do we deal with drug users? Let's turn to the supreme court on this one:
It is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment to criminalize drug addiction because it is a disease, status, or condition rather than a specific act. (Robinson vs California 1962)
That's
right: before the drug war ramped up, the Supreme Court ruled that drug addiction was a disease, one better suited to treatment by doctors, not the court system, which we know already doesn't treat it. Pew research found that 67% of the country supports treatment for drug addiction instead of criminal prosecution, and that includes a majority of Republicans. This is a bipartisan issue. If you're in that remaining 33%, I'm talking to you: you've been lied to about drugs. Ending the drug war won't cause more overdoses or increase crime.
Ending the drug war would save lives ruined by untreated drug addictions. In Northern England, prescribing heroin helped people quit their drug addiction. In Portugal, after they decriminalized and started regulating drugs, drug use went down, as drug users were rehabilitated into society and their reasons for using drugs went away or were treated. This could be huge for the US. If instead of criminalizing drug addiction, we treated it medically, the opioid epidemic could be fixed, saving thousands of Americans lives. I'm talking to you, rural America: the opioid epidemic you're facing could be relieved by ending the drug war and setting up methadone clinics.
No one is saying to let everyone have access to extremely dangerous drugs. Moonshine is still illegal because of how dangerous it is. The same could be done to crack cocaine. Alcohol still can't be legally purchased by people under 21. Age restrictions could still be placed on any drug.
Instead, ending the drug war means legalizing, taxing, and regulating the drug industry
Importantly, when the drug industry is legal, the government can put regulations on the quality of drugs being sold so that dangerous products don't end up killing people. 10,000 people died of poisoned alcohol during prohibition. Now, that number is zero because breweries have to follow strict guidelines about the quality of their alcohol. And now, the alcohol industry adds $70 billion to our economy annually, employing 4 million people. Legalizing, taxing and regulating drugs is a huge boost to the economy, and would create millions of jobs. Do you really want all that revenue going to the cartels, selling unsafe products and spreading crime? Or would you rather have it circulate through our economy and create jobs?
Meanwhile, since drug users don't get locked in jail, they aren't stuck in a cycle of poverty that might force them to turn to drugs to help deal with the stress of poverty. As a result, crime goes down, communities grow, and poverty is reduced.
As Billie Holiday put it in her memoir:
Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them, then sent them to jail. If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs
Conservatives: The drug war *is* big government. It infringes on our liberties, and has the government telling us what we can and cannot do with our free time. The solution to drug addiction is treatment, not jail. And for the people who aren't addicted, marijuana use is just as good a way to unwind as a beer. The government doesn't get to pick for us.
The Drug War failed spectacularly. It cost us $1 trillion, in a policy that was doomed to fail but succeeded in locking up and disrupting black communities, keeping them in a cycle of poverty and baking racial bias into the judicial system, while taxpayers foot the bill on everything from bloated police budgets, drug cases that shouldn't waste the courts' time and overpopulated prisons. The cost is huge, and the damage the drug war inflicted on American society is even bigger. Now we see the country erupting in protests for Black Lives Matter, as people are fed up with a system designed to disproportionately target black people and keep them down. The death of George Floyd put the spotlight on the failures and consequences of our drug war.
Ending the drug war would put billions of dollars back in taxpayers pockets, help the economy by growing a legal drug industry, reduce our prison populations, help grow black communities, allow police departments to focus on real crimes instead of being overburdened chasing nonviolent drug crimes, reduce illegal immigration, help combat drug abuse and the opioid epidemic, and give Americans greater liberty and making our country a safer, richer and happier place. And that would actually Make America Great Again.
This is the first of 5 episodes in our series on Actually Making America Great. We aren't Democrat or Republican, but we try to find some common ground as we analyze 5 policies that we believe would have the most impact on the lives of the average American. These are typically issues you won't see talked about on the news or by your Congresspeople, but they should. Our goal with this series is to make the case for these policies so that America can actually be Great. That only happens with your support. If you agree with this, pls like, subscribe and share this just about everywhere.
And if you really really liked it, call your Congressional representatives and make them get behind these five issues:
1. End the Drug War
2. End the Foreign Wars
3. Universal Healthcare
4. Hand the Economy Back to the People
5. Get Money Out of Politics
Thank you.
*play drugs by UPSAHL during the credits, you wont*