I recall Harry Browne, Libertarian Party presidential
candidate in the 1990s, repeatedly saying, “We have to end this war on drugs”. The argument was facile: by making drugs
illegal, we make it profitable for people to try to make, sell and traffic them
underground.
I also remember Richard Nixon’s announcing his “War on Drugs”
in 1971, and the NYC subway signs in 1973 warning people “don’t get caught
holding the bag” when New York State passed a tough new drug law.
I remember Nancy Reagan and her pious “Just say no.”
I remember Oliver North, on his radio talk show in the
1990s, saying that people who buy drugs are responsible for the wrongs of the
world. Get rid of the demand by
criminalizing it. That has long been a
way of looking at “moral” issues. If you
could cast every illicit desire to transcend one’s reality as a character flaw,
and enforce laws against it, everything wrong with the world, all the
unfairness, would be fixed. It’s all
about individual morality, right?
Remember “The Moral Majority”?
The new documentary by Eugene Jarecki, “The House I Live In”,
starts with a brief retrospect of a family surviving the Holocaust, and his
determination that he owes something back to the world for the life he was able
to lead after all. He quickly moves to
the “War on Drugs”, as it emerged in the early 1970s, as an attack on “immoral
individuals”. He gives a sound-bite of
former NYC major Giuliani talking about “personal responsibility”. But then he moves to the ghetto, and shows
how drug trafficking is the only “employer” in the inner city ghetto, which is
like a “one company town”.
He traces how individual drugs became illegal. Opium was criminalized in order to put down
Chinese immigrants who competed for American jobs. A similar history exists for marijuana and
Latinos in the 1930s, although much of the criminalization seems to have been
motivated to keep hemp from competing with other forest products in big
business. Cocaine was seen as a drug of
African Americans (although it was also a source of pleasure for the idol
rich), and crack cocaine was especially so.
Therefore, criminalizing use (possession, sale, distribution) of a
substance could be seen as a way to imprison and contain many members of a minority. Finally the same thing happened with meth,
which tended to attract poor working class whites and gays. (I have yet to meet a gay person addicted to
meth, so that idea may be an exaggeration.)
The practice of mandatory minimums continued, as was illustrated with a
white man in Iowa who, after layoff, sold a little meth and got sentenced to
life without parole. (ABC 20-20 had
covered a Montana couple that grew marijuana inside to protect its ranch from foreclosure
during the farm crisis, even at the urging of the couple’s bank.)
Toward the end, the film shows prison, often being taken
over by private companies, as big and profitable business. So there is a temptation to take the “bottom
15%” of people whom the workforce doesn’t “need” and keep them in prison (that
is, concentration camps) as “business”. Jarecki concludes by showing that this kind of
thinking helped create Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Find and enemy and make money putting it
away.
The film interviews a judge in Iowa who sees the fallacy in
mandatory minimum sentence laws.
The official site (starts Shockwave) from Charlotte Street
films is here
I saw this Friday afternoon at the West End Theater in
Washington DC before an almost sold out audience.
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