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Who's for the War?

Two decades into the War on Drugs, prisons are filled, the deficit is ballooning and people still do drugs

By Ami Chen Mills

Joseph McNamara, former San Jose police chief and current fellow at the Hoover Institution--along with conservative pundits like economist Milton Friedman, former Secretary of State George Schultz and William F. Buckley Jr.--has denounced the ongoing war on drugs as expensive, ineffective and inhumane. While the public is mostly afraid of violent crime, he says, "we're filling our prisons with nonviolent drug offenders: There are 1,100,000 drug arrests per year, 70 percent of which are for possession. Even the other 30 percent are not big-time dealers. We're wasting police time.

"The marijuana issue illustrates how illogical and emotional the drug war really is. The myth the government keeps hitting on is that marijuana causes violent crime. Maybe it does because it's illegal. But there's never been a record of a marijuana murder [from intoxication]. The reality is that if people switched from alcohol to marijuana, the assault and criminal rate would probably drop by half," McNamara asserts.

If the drug war is such a farce and a failure, why does it go on? Bill Clinton refuses to discuss it, and he requested a $14.6 billion anti-drug budget for 1996. "There are vested interests," McNamara says. "It's not a conspiracy, but the government always promotes government growth. There are vast programs springing up for mandatory treatment; there's the drug-testing industry as well as the DEA and other enforcement agencies. The military is involved as well. Then you have the prison industry, which is the fastest growing government sector."

Paranoia, you ask? Pro-drug reform organizations like the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws and the Drug Policy Foundation have long hinted that there's more to the drug war than a benevolent interest in the nation's well-being. More than one activist I interviewed made a point of noting that the Partnership for a Drug Free America's main funding sources are, in order of importance, pharmaceutical companies, the tobacco industry and the alcohol industry--their inference being that legal drug industries, by denouncing illegal drugs, might increase their market share.

"We do take some money from Anheuser-Busch and RJR Nabisco, but they also make cookies and crackers," says Steve Dnistrian, vice president for Partnership. "That [funding] makes up less than 3 percent of our annual budget." The bulk of the money, Dnistrian asserts, comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, named after the founder of heath-care giant Johnson & Johnson. Pro-reform groups say the Johnson Foundation represents the interests of pharmaceutical companies, a claim the foundation disputes.

"Our top funders are health-care and health-insurance organizations," Dnistrian asserts, adding that the amount of money received from legal-drug lobbies "hardly supports the conspiracy" advanced by reformers.

Nonetheless, there is some evidence that decreased marijuana use leads to increased alcohol and other drug consumption. The New York Times reported in 1992 that in studies by the UC-Irvine in conjunction with Princeton, and by graduate students at Harvard, data showed that as penalties for marijuana use increased, alcohol consumption did too. And as marijuana penalties decreased, so too did other drug- and alcohol-related emergency-room visits.

Another theory advanced by reform advocates is that organizations like the Drug Enforcement Agency and even treatment centers and clinics have been the beneficiaries of windfall budgets and profits from the sale of confiscated property and possessions with each attack in the war on drugs. As such, they have little interest in actually solving the drug-abuse problem.

This view is supported by a somewhat obscure Rand report, released in 1994 and titled "A Systems Description of the Marijuana Trade." The report was contracted by the U.S. Army to assist with drug interdiction efforts. Yet, the report observes that if current estimates by various government drug agencies on marijuana imported into the U.S.--combined with domestically grown dope--are correct, then all reported current users (the figure used was 20 million for 1991, as estimated by the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse) would have to smoke almost one and half joints every day to consume all that marijuana. According to the Household Survey, most regular users report not smoking within the week and many not within the month.

Because of this inconsistency, Rand re-supposes that, in order to match user demand with estimates of current supply, there would have to be 39 million regular users, all of whom smoke a joint a day each.

Governmental figures, then, on marijuana imports and domestic production may just possibly be wildly incorrect. Rand's attempts at constructing an analysis of the drug market, including margins of error and reasonable use-rates, landed all estimates of marijuana-smoker numbers somewhere between 100 million and 160 million. Rand asserts that if estimates of marijuana availability are correct, the amount of users in the United States falls around 130 million, or over half of the U.S. population.

Granted, marijuana trade and use, because it is covert, is hard to assess. But given these reports, it's safe to assume that governmental agencies are vastly overestimating the amount of drug flow into the U.S. "for their own bureaucratic purposes," according to Michael Childress, author of the study.

"People can draw their own conclusions," he says. "My guess is that those agencies inflate their figures in order to justify and rationalize their budgets." The statistician drew no hard or embarrassing conclusions in the report, except to point to the "great incongruence" between numbers.

Childress, who now works for the Long Term Policy Research Center in Kentucky, says the report never got much publicity. "You are the first reporter to call me," he says.

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