War on Drugs: Apparently, We've Got Money to Burn

[Joanne98]

By Alison Holcomb, Drug Policy Director, ACLU of Washington

Last Thursday, the AP ran a ground-breaking piece of investigative journalism. It spelled out how U.S. taxpayers have financed a $1 trillion "War on Drugs" that, 40 years after its launch, has failed to meet any of its declared goals.

ACLU's diary :: ::
That's putting it mildly. While the favored "drug du jour" varies over time, overall illicit drug use in America, by and large, has remained steady at the same time arrests of drug users have skyrocketed. Drugs are cheaper, purer, and more available than ever. Meanwhile, the U.S. is suffering a crisis of mass incarceration fueled most significantly by the War on Drugs. The racially skewed way in which the war is waged has devastated our communities of color, as described so well in recently published books by former Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Butler and Michelle Alexander, former director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. And while the U.S. continues to throw money at ineffective supply-side strategies aimed at stopping drugs at their source or intercepting them at the border, international cartels have set up shop in our own national parks, and Mexico bleeds.

Could it be that D.C. finally gets it? "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified." Those are the words of Gil Kerlikowske, Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP).

Apparently not. The rhetoric still sounds good, just like it did a year ago in Director Kerlikowske's first interview with the Wall Street Journal as the new "drug czar":

WSJ: One of the programs you support strongly is "Fight Crime: Invest in Kids." How would you take those crime-prevention efforts and use them at ONDCP?

GK: ... I would take that model, which I believe has been unbelievably successful and tell my colleagues they should advocate strongly for treatment and rehabilitation.

WSJ: Why do you see the drug problem as a public-health issue?

GK: ... I think we moved, not as much from an administrative standpoint but a collective-wisdom standpoint. We moved from 'it's a police problem' or 'a criminal justice problem' to 'it's a criminal justice, public health and social policy problem' to 'it's a public-health problem.' ...

Really? Why, then, does the 2010 National Drug Control Strategy released last week still allocate 64 percent of federal drug control dollars to "supply reduction" law enforcement strategies and only 36 percent to "demand reduction" strategies like treatment and prevention? Adding insult to injury, ONDCP altered its accounting methods in 2003 to omit the cost of warehousing drug offenders in federal prisons, counting only the costs of programs provided to the inmates. As explained by Peter Reuter, who founded the RAND Corporation's Drug Policy Research Center:

The major difference between the budgets is the exclusion of almost all costs associated with the incarceration of federal drug prisoners and the exclusion of most prosecutorial expenditures. These amounted to about $4.5 billion, according to estimates by John Carnevale, former ONDCP budget director. The only Bureau of Prison expenditures that are included in the new budget are those that try to lower drug abuse among prisoners. Thus, the Bureau appears, by function, only as a treatment agency.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/5/18/867602/-War-on-Drugs:-Apparently,-Weve-Got-Money-to-Burn

[Autumn]

1. As long as we don't blow it on those pesky entitlement

programs like SS, welfare queens, and national health care.

[Mike K]

2. Marijuana is a primary source

of bribery of public officials.

It occurs as legal bribery in the form of PACs from a number of major industries whose bottom lines would be seriously affected by legalized marijuana and hemp. Also, if marijuana is legalized it will put an end to the multi-billion dollar illegal trade. So it's anybody's guess how many cash-filled attache cases change hands in public toilets.


"Americans will know they have an honest President when he or she aggressively promotes the legalization of marijuana and a review of the War on Drugs!" (Federal Judge Robert W. Sweet)

Any doubts about Obama's honesty?