America’s modern
War on Drugs is actually an internalized continuation of America’s involvement in
the Vietnam War, with the former being an even bigger quagmire than the latter.
As Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg have pointed out, closing the door on Ho Chi Minh in
South Vietnam meant opening the door to heroin in America. Evans and Goldberg explain:
“During the Vietnam
War, the CIA aided the heroin producing Hmong tribesmen in the Golden Triangle
area. In return for cooperation with the U.S. government’s war against the
Vietcong and other national liberation forces, the CIA flew local heroin out of
Southeast Asia and into America.”[i]
A decade later, Oliver North would use the lessons
of Vietnam to bypass the U.S. Congress and provide support for the Contras in
Nicaragua.
Having the CIA ship heroin into the
United States allowed President Nixon to declare a “war on drugs” in June 1971.
That declaration of war allowed him to dramatically increase “the size and
presence of federal drug control agencies,” and push “through measures such as
mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants.” He likewise “temporarily placed
marijuana in Schedule One, the most restrictive category of drugs, pending
review by a commission he appointed led by Republican Pennsylvania Governor
Raymond Shafer. In 1972, the commission unanimously
recommended decriminalizing the possession and distribution of marijuana for
personal use. Nixon ignored the report and rejected its recommendations.”[ii]
(Emphasis added)
Between 1973 and 1977, however,
eleven states decriminalized marijuana possession and in January 1977, "President
Jimmy Carter was inaugurated on a campaign platform that included marijuana
decriminalization'” Ten months later, in October 1977, “the Senate Judiciary Committee voted
to decriminalize possession of up to an ounce of marijuana for personal use.” Within
just a few years, though, the tide had shifted.[iii]
By the 1980’s, cocaine from Columbia
was increasingly finding its way into the United States. That cocaine came by
way of Central America, which was the strategic halfway point for air travel
between Columbia and the U. S. The Contra War against Sandinista Nicaragua, as well
as the war against the national liberation forces in El Salvador,” according to
Evans and Goldberg, “was largely about control of this critical area.”
Oliver
North, who was a platoon commander during the Vietnam War, decided that defeating
the communist Sandinistas in Nicaragua meant he would have to do with the Contras what the
CIA had done with the Hmong tribesman of the Golden Triangle. In order to defeat Communism, in other words,
America would have to deal drugs. As Evans
and Goldberg explained further;
When congress cut off support for the Contras,
Oliver North and friends found other ways to fund the Contra re-supply
operations, in part though drug dealing. Planes loaded with arms for the
Contras took off from the southern U.S., offloaded their weapons on private
landing strips in Honduras, and then loaded up with cocaine for the return
trip.[iv]
With drugs once again being brought into
the U.S. by the U.S., Ronald Regan would follow Nixon’s lead, and again declare
a “war on drugs.” The result, naturally, was the increase in spending to
protect the American people from their own drug pushing government.
Twice in the latter half of the twentieth century, in other words, the “war on
drugs” was declared by presidents who presided over the shipping of drugs into America. And
both times, the "war" on drugs was simply America’s internalization of a war on
communism abroad.
The Racism of a Moral Imperative
Of course, all of this simply explains
the mechanics of the war on drugs, not the moral justification that politicians
used for pushing the war to win votes and re-institute slavery. That justification came, as it almost
always does, in the form of racism masquerading as a means of national security and morality.
As Maia Szalavitz pointed out in 2012:
[I]t’s useful to
remember that the nation’s vehement anti-drug rhetoric is rooted in explicit racism.
For example, the first state laws banning cocaine were passed in response to
media reports about how the drug made black men homicidal, prone to raping
white women and, worst of all to the police, impervious to bullets. An article
about the issue in the New York Times in 1914 was headlined “Negro
Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace.”[v]
Unfortunately, such racism still exists, despite what many people
believe. As Szalavitz further points out, “The American
Coalition -- an anti-immigrant group -- claimed as recently as 1980:
"Marihuana, perhaps now the most insidious of narcotics, is a direct
byproduct of unrestricted Mexican immigration."[vi]
A media blitz
that nightly prophesied about the coming of an almost apocalyptic “crime wave” would
soon follow. And the only way to stop it,
many were then duped into believing, was by means of prohibition and punishment. This meant protecting America’s moral
virtues with a chastity belt and a bullwhip.
Ensuring Americans would not become victims of this fantasy crime wave required victimizing poor African American’s and re-enslaving them by the thousands. However well-intentioned the War on Drugs
may have been in theory, it amounted to nothing more than slavery by another
name in practice. Eventually, the profit motive produced a
momentum too hard to resist, and the propaganda machine such motives produced would surpass even the efforts of Joseph Goebbels.
“The
corporate mass media had learned that drug war imagery was good for sales, and
so the nation was hit not only with presidential warnings but with offerings
such as “American Vice: The Doping of a Nation,” 48 hours on Crack Street,” and
“Cocaine County.” Televisions and print media produced several stereotypical
tropes in this era, notably the “crack house” the “crack mother” and “crack
baby” to scare the reading and viewing public into demonizing the crack user as
a diabolical criminal. In fact, the three major networks and the New York Times
and Washington Post quadrupled their news coverage of crack between 1983 and
1986; at the height of this frenzy, in April of 1986, public opinion polls
found 2 percent of the population who considered drugs to be the nation’s
number-one problem, but six months later, in September, 13 percent of Americans
polled by the same NY Times/CBS news poll said drugs were the number-one
problem facing the country. That same month, ABC released its own poll that found
80 percent of respondents believed that U.S. faced a national drug crisis.
“Despite
this hysteria, crack use was primarily isolated to just a few metropolitan
areas, like Los Angles, and New York. Still, the message from the media and the
White House screamed of a crack tide flooding across the shores of the U.S.
Jimmie Reeves and Richard Campbell have studied this period of media
bombardment, concluding that it produced a “siege paradigm” in which the drug
user was “treated as an alien Other on the order of a space invader” This
otherworldly invader was of course made proximate by drawing upon longstanding
racial stereotypes, thus producing a “color-coded mob of dehumanized inner-city
criminals [that] threaten the suburbs, small towns, schools, families, status,
and authority of Middle America.”[vii]
Reagan’s declaration in 1986 that crack cocaine was
an “uncontrolled fire” would be echoed by George H. W. Bush’s announcement in September
of 1989 that “the gravest domestic threat facing our nation is drugs.” That the "threat" was mostly
self-imposed was left out. Drugs in America is obviously
an internal demon. But the fact that so many of those drugs were deliberately imported into the U. S. by the U.S. means the War on Drugs is like
the final climatic scene from William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist.
In the final scene of Blatty’s tale of demonic possession, a priest
named Father Damien Karras, frustrated by the death of a fellow priest during
the failed exorcism of a young girl named Regan MacNeil, attacks the girl
violently while screaming at the demons inhabiting her to “Take me! Come into
me! God damn you! Take me! Take me!” The
demons oblige, and Karras, who subsequently manages to wrestle temporary control of himself
from the indwelling spirits, saves the girl by throwing himself out of a window.
Like Father Karras, America, frustrated by its inability to expel
communist influences from places like Vietnam and Central America, opted to import heroin and cocaine into the United States. The only
difference is that today, politicians boast of their moral superiority, not for their ability to exorcise the demon of drug addiction, but for their willingness to demonize those who suffer from such an addiction before gladly throwing them all out a window to win an election.
[i] The War on
Drugs in The PID and the Global Economy by Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg. Pg. 10
[ii] http://www.drugpolicy.org/new-solutions-drug-policy/brief-history-drug-war
[iii] Id.
[iv] The War on
Drugs in The PID and the Global Economy by Linda Evans and Eve Goldberg. Pg. 10
[v] http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/27/did-marijuana-use-sentence-trayvon-martin-to-death/
[vi]
Id.
[vii] Pg 90 of
Challenging the PIC by Stephen Jon Harnett.
Chap 3 and Daniel Mark Larson
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