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July 8, 2023
Some interesting "war on drugs" stories making headlines
I have seen a number of interesting "drug war" pieces in recent days, and I figured this round-up would provide an efficient way to spotlight some of them:
From Bezinga, "DEA Turns 50: Unveiling The Ineffectiveness Of The Ongoing War On Drugs, Now What?"
From The Hill, "Justice for all: It’s time to end the discrimination between crack and cocaine sentencing"
From The Hill, "A simple solution to save lives — and money — in the war on drugs"
From NBC News, "Costs in the war on drugs continue to soar"
From the New York Times, "U.S. Raises Pressure on China to Combat Global Fentanyl Crisis"
From Reason, "After 50 Years, the DEA Is Still Losing the War on Drugs"
From Vice News, "The War on Drugs Has Failed And It's Time to Decriminalise, Scotland Says"
From the Washington Post, "Once hailed for decriminalizing drugs, Portugal is now having doubts"
July 8, 2023 at 08:51 PM | Permalink
Comments
Let's assume arguendo that the war on drugs is a failure (of course we'd also have to assume that the war on crime generally is a failure, since many more crimes are committed now than 50 years ago -- so should we give up the war on crime too?)
Anyway, making that assumption, can we think of something even more of a failure than the war on drugs?
Sure we can: The war on the war on drugs. For FIFTY LONG YEARS, the war on the war on drugs has made its fevered pitch and, except for simple possession of small amounts of pot (which was largely accepted 50 years ago, too) it has made zero headway. Indeed, as the Reason article notes, the DEA's budget (that would be Joe Biden's DEA) is bigger than ever. And with the horrific surge in fentanyl deaths, opposition to fighting drugs is getting, ummmmmmmmmmmm, quieter.
If raucous opponents of the drug war want to see failure up close, they have but to look in the mirror.
Posted by: Bill Otis | Jul 8, 2023 9:22:19 PM
Bill, there is a mountain of evidence and data to document the success of the war on the war on drugs, though I do not believe these are assembled in any one place. Let me provide just a few highlights that I can rattle off just from the top of my head:
At one extreme level, consider LWOP federal sentences for drug offenses. They have dropped dramatically from 1990 to 2020 as detailed in a report my Center produced: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4043137. This reflects one part of a big and broader (and underdiscussed) trend of the nations' prison populations shifting away from the incarceration of drug offenders (which, I believe, not too long ago composed about 30% of the total prison population and are now closer to 15%)
At the other extreme, marijuana sales and use are legal in all but a handful of states. Businesses fronted by the former GOP House Speaker and many other prominent individuals now help produce and traffic "legally" more marijuana to Americans than any foreign cartel ever did. And the number of marijuana arrests have shrunk while the number of Americans using marijuana have grown --- and now rivals, at least in some US communities, the use of America's most popular drug, alcohol.
The success of marijuana reform has led to a major reform movement for psychedelics that has now decriminalized the use of many such drugs in many US jurisdictions. And wide-spread legal availability of psychedelic drugs in many part of the US seems likely in the coming decade. Once that occurs, reform advocates are likely to look to still other drugs to exempt from the "war on drugs."
I could go on and on and on and on and on --- eg, focusing on sentence reductions at the federal level via the Fair Sentencing Act and the First Step Act AND through reduced drug sentencing guidelines and less use of drug MMs due to charging memos; OR focusing on state level reforms via statutes lowering crack penalties and reducing MMs and broader decriminalization efforts AND progressive prosecutors' elections and policy choices and data showing state judges sending drug defendants to prison far less; OR focusing on presidents and governors commuting and pardoning many more drug offenders than other types of offenders.
The fentanyl problems we have faced in recent years is tragic and anyone who think they have a winning "war strategy" fails to understand how hard these problems are. But to assert that the war on the war on drugs has made "zero headway" would be almost like saying Donald Trump made "zero headway" during the 2016 campaign. Of course, he made lots of headway, which led him to becoming a President who advocated for, and then signed into law, the biggest federal statutory drug sentencing reduction (with massive support from a Congress controlled by the GOP at the time) in roughly half a century.
Posted by: Doug B | Jul 9, 2023 11:29:37 AM
The War On The War On Drugs is a success as Doug has pointed out. However, we still have much work to do. In Federal prison, 44.5% of inmates are serving sentences for drug offenses. However, at the state level, drug offenders make up a much smaller percentage. The widespread acceptance of drug use in this country will lead to more lenient sentences and hopefully major drug reform where few if anyone will serve a sentence for a drug offense.
Posted by: Anon | Jul 9, 2023 1:33:39 PM
Even on that front, Anon, there has been tangible and significant progress made. BJS reported in Sept 2011 that 53% of federal offenders were in for drugs, and that totaled just short of 100,000 federal incarcerated for drugs. The latest USSC data shows now less than 66,000 federal prisoners in for drug offenses.
Posted by: Doug B. | Jul 9, 2023 2:36:59 PM
Doug --
After 50 years of the war on the war on drugs, can you name a single drug that was illegal under federal law 50 years ago but is legal now?
Yes, the length of sentences has gone down in the last few years (as crime has gone up -- a coincidence I'm sure), but that is a general phenomenon covering many, many crimes, not just drug crimes. And lower sentences are not legalization, which is what the war on the war on drugs is all about at its base.
And yes, some one-party jurisdictions have elected pro-criminal prosecutors (although San Francisco recalled theirs in a landslide), and those prosecutors have de-emphasized or tanked some drug prosecutions, but that was merely the formal ratification of the long-existing status quo ante in those jurisdictions in which there were few or no possession-only drug prosecutions anyway.
And according to the Huffington Post poll (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/drug-legalization-poll_n_5162357), the public by huge majorities -- 70 and 80 percentage points -- remains opposed to legalizing any drug but pot. If the war on the war on drugs were successful, nothing like that would be the case. The opposite would be the case.
The reason that the public broadly supports keeping drugs (again, except simple-possession pot) illegal is easy to see. The health effects of drugs range from bad to lethal and the public knows it. If we increase access to fentanyl, through legalization or anything else, we'll get even more than the record 100,000+ overdose deaths we've had in each of the last two years. Those 100,000 victims were human beings. How many thousands of them were young people deluded about what they were really getting into because the war on the war on drugs kept telling them that drug use is "liberating" or whatever the line is now?
As I was saying, Joe Biden's DEA is the biggest and most expensive in history, and DeSantis's will be bigger still. And wasn't Donald Trump the fellow who wanted death sentences for drug dealers?
When you're massively losing the (very liberal) Huffington Post poll, and you're losing the leading presidential contenders from both major parties, and you have an historic overdose catastrophe on your hands, you're losing.
Posted by: Bill Otis | Jul 9, 2023 2:56:46 PM
Bill O,
While we are often in agreement, this is one area where we diverge greatly. I see overdose deaths as a benefit rather than cost of drugs, I would prefer that we make it as inexpensive and simple as possible for people to kill themselves. I would certainly offer a guaranteed lethal dose of opiates or barbiturates to any prisoner that requested it. Were I designing policy with a free hand the _only_ drugs that would be regulated at all are those like antibiotics where aggregate use affects individual efficacy. And for those substances the controls I would enact would actually be far tighter than is currently the case.
Posted by: Soronel Haetir | Jul 9, 2023 7:24:19 PM
Soronel Haetir --
You're right, we don't agree on this one, but I appreciate your contributions here. You don't play politics and you don't play to the crowd.
Posted by: Bill Otis | Jul 9, 2023 9:05:36 PM
Many, if not most, folks fighting against the drug war seek de-escalation and not full legalization as the most important goal of the fight. That goal has had many successes (and broader reductions to all sentences have often been catalyzed by drug war retrenchment success). Indeed, I cannot readily think of any other CJ reform movement that has been as successful as the war on the war on drugs over the last 20 years.
As we see with legal drugs like tobacco and alcohol and prescription drugs, even legal substances have all sorts of associated criminalized activity. So the size of the footprint of criminalization is a sensible way to assess the size and trends of the war, and I still see the war on the war continuing to score victories there.
But it is true that there remains widespread support for criminalization because, as you note, people see many harms in illegal drug use and society has long failed to effectively address these harm in other ways. I still want to believe we can do better than mass criminalization and mass punishment, but I agree that the anti-war folks will only find greater success when they can show how to “win the peace.”
Posted by: Doug B | Jul 10, 2023 1:24:26 AM
I believe those, “…fighting against the drug war,…,” who say they are for de-escalation are the same lying bastards who wanted LWOP in order to fight the DP. Or, just look at the conditions of our once great cities. Could anyone have imagined 10 years ago that we would practically legalize robbery? Of course they didn’t advertise it. They chipped away piece by piece until we got here.
I’m not talking about the casual voter, but those organizations and people fighting on the front lines. I bet some of the Soros DAs would say they want full legalization publicly and the rest if forced to be honest.
It’s all a slippery slope. I know it is supposed to be a fallacy, but in criminal justice matters it always ends up being a sheet of ice.
Posted by: TarlsQtr | Jul 11, 2023 7:48:11 PM
