Held to answer

The media love anniversary stories, and this month they have been revisiting the War on Drugs, which just turned 40.

The gist of many of these stories is: The war on drugs has been a war on black men, and it’s time to end the war. Many stories cite the racial inequities of harsher penalties for dealing or using crack cocaine (the “black” variety) vs. powder cocaine (the “white” variety). What would the ghost of Billie Holiday say?

By the mid-1940s the black jazz singer had been arrested numerous times for using drugs, and at one point even asked to go to a federal rehabilitation center in West Virginia for a year to get clean. When she died in 1959, Holiday was under arrest in her hospital bed for illegal possession of drugs.

Her ghost might ask, “What war on drugs?”

Back then, nobody cared that drug dealers made money off of getting people addicted to narcotics because most of the people getting addicted were black.

Drug addiction has long since moved to white America.

Many of these anniversary stories don’t differentiate between drug users and drug dealers, and many repeat the lie that most American prison inmates are incarcerated for “nonviolent” crimes including simple drug possession. Sentencing is more complicated than that. It takes into consideration other factors, such as criminal history. (In Oregon, no one goes to state prison just for drug possession.)

If we free drug dealers from prison, do we also repeal all drug laws? Are we going to end the war on drugs the way we ended the war in Vietnam, with some desperate souls left behind so others can make a getaway?

I think about some of the prostitutes I met in Southern California. Anonymous women abused by pimps, their customers and sometimes police.

One black prostitute in San Bernardino described perfectly the despair of her addiction: “Last night I was eating some chicken, and I got the wishbone. I held it in my hands. In one hand I wished to get off drugs. In the other I wished for drugs.”

I’m not sure how drug addicts like her will be helped by unleashing more drug dealers, particularly dealers who sell adulterated – and more dangerous – drugs. (How many black prostitutes equal one Len Bias?)

The usual answer for drug addiction is “treatment.” Consequently, we have a substance-abuse industry that rivals our prison-industrial complex. We have drug treatment centers and programs, public and private, some of them very expensive and often with mixed results. If ending drug addiction were simply a matter of treatment, we wouldn’t have the levels of drug abuse we now have, which has spread to pharmaceuticals. Drug rehab is almost a form of addiction itself.

Humankind has a long history of using and misusing drugs. Had our politicians – and religious leaders – accepted that and worked within that framework, our war on drugs might have been more successful. It’s not as if they weren’t warned.

At about the same time that President Nixon was declaring a war on drugs, Edward M. Brecher and the editors of Consumer Reports were finishing a 623-page book called “Licit and Illicit Drugs.” They had expected this to be a slim handbook explaining the effects of various illicit drugs. The more they learned, the more they realized that what was also needed was a look at drug laws and policies and public attitudes towards all drugs – legal and illegal.

Ultimately the Consumers Union recommended that opium, morphine, and heroin as well as methadone be made available to addicts under well-planned experimental conditions.

“(This) is based in part on the unassailable fact that an addict is personally far better off on legal, low-cost, medicinally pure opium, morphine, or heroin than he is on exorbitantly priced, dangerously adulterated, and contaminated black-market heroin.”

The Consumers Union based its recommendation on the lessons of history. In 19th Century America, small quantities of opium, morphine, heroin and other drugs were available over the counter, and larger quantities were prescribed by physicians. (At the time, physicians referred to morphine as “G.O.M. – God’s Own Medicine.”)

That all came to an end with the passage of the Harrison Narcotic Act in 1914, which was promoted with missionary zeal by Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, a prohibitionist.

The result: Doctors stopped writing prescriptions for opiates. The next year this editorial appeared in “American Medicine”:

“Narcotic drug addiction is one of the gravest and most important questions confronting the medical profession today. … Abuses in the sale of narcotic drugs are increasing. … A particular sinister sequence … is the character of the places to which (addicts) are forced to go to get their drugs and the type of people with whom they are obliged to mix. The most depraved criminals are often the dispensers of these habit-forming drugs. … In respect to female habitués the conditions are worse, if possible. Houses of ill fame are usually their sources of supply, and one has only to think of what repeated visitations to such places mean … .”

The Republicans and Democrats who guided the war on drugs didn’t pay any attention to the Consumer Union’s warnings.

Here’s one that politicians today can still learn from: “A nation that has not learned to keep away from some drugs and to use others wisely cannot be taught those essential lessons merely by repealing drug laws.”

– Pamela Fitzsimmons