Censored Minds

A Short Outline of the Dope Wars

(part 3 of 4) by Gary Stimeling

 

Copyright 2004 Psychotropics Cornucopia, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

 

The Criminal Justice-System

      Rookie New York City policeman Edward Byrne was murdered while sitting in his patrol car guarding the home of a drug-case witness on the night of February 26, 1988, five days after his 22nd birthday. While one man distracted him with a question, another put five bullets in his head. The hit had been ordered from prison by crack baron Howard “Pappy” Mason in random retaliation for his arrest a few days earlier.

      The Dope War puts honest police in an impossible position. On one hand it makes them sworn enemies of millions of peaceful citizens. On the other, it sets them up as conspicuous targets for dealers whose only morality is the obscene profits the law perversely provides them. As is often the case in war, the privates do the dying while the generals do the lying.

      The Dope War inevitably creates a police state, because that’s the only way it can be enforced. More than 3.5 million Americans are on probation or parole, and well over 2 million are in jail, a larger percentage of the population than in the Soviet Union during its gulag days. While we constitute 5 percent of the world’s population, we incarcerate 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, about three-fifths of them due to the drug war.

      Wholesale renunciation of the Bill of Rights under the PATRIOT Acts was prepared by steadily weakening the Amendments with anti-drug legislation. These include the First (freedom of speech, press, assembly, and the right to petition against grievances), the Fourth (freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, right of privacy), the Fifth (right of due process and protection against self-incrimination), and the Fourteenth (right to equal protection under the law).^[12] Even before 9/11, federal agents had gained the power to enter a person’s home or workplace, steal or copy anything they found, and spring it at trial, in the name of fighting drugs.

      Donald Scott had his first, and last, Dope War experience at 8:30 am on October 2, 1992. That’s when 32 DEA agents and local police broke down his front door and climbed in his windows without announcing who they were. Thinking his house was being invaded by some sort of gang, the 61-year-old Malibu, California, rancher lurched from bed in his pajamas with his bedside pistol pointed at the ceiling, yelling to ask his wife, Frances Plante, if she was OK. The narcs told him to drop the gun, then shot him as he began to do so. In the aftermath, reporters learned that cops apparently had acted without further investigation on an informer’s tip that Scott was growing marijuana, in hopes of seizing his $5 million ranch. There was no marijuana.^[13]

 

We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men

who would clip the wings of the American eagle

in order to feather their own nests.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

 

      Confiscation of assets upon arrest, before trial or conviction, has long been a favorite way for police to enrich themselves and hobble the defense. Anyone who has looked at the multicolumn full-page lists of legally stolen property and bank accounts up for auction, printed in the newspapers in really tiny type, has some idea of the extent of the practice in the drug war—but not a complete idea, as much of the loot stays with the agencies in the form of boats, airplanes, helicopters, weapons, electronics equipment, and cash.

      Combined with the for-profit prison industry, the Dope War is creating a modern system of slave labor. Many prisons now give inmates the “opportunity” to  do subcontracted work—data-entry is the most common—at 10¢–50¢ an hour to buy food, toothbrushes, toilet paper, phone time and other “luxuries” at prices far above normal retail. The profits go to prison owners. The Dope War has created a dirt-cheap Third World pool of captive labor right here at home, with a strong financial incentive to deny parole and maximize arrests and term lengths.^[14] Since felons are barred from voting in many states, often permanently, and since the majority of felons are drug prisoners who are probably less likely than others to vote for repression of any kind, the Dope War also skews elections toward the most regressive candidates. A few hundred votes in Florida nullified 600,000 in the 2000 presidential election, while at least 525,000 Floridians were denied suffrage.

      The Dope War annuls the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law. It protects users of some drugs while incarcerating users of others. But a person’s drug of choice is largely determined by biochemical individuality. One spectrum of variability divides the subjective experience of minimizers and maximizers. The brains of minimizers subdue incoming stimuli to a whisper, so they crave stimulants—caffeine, cocaine, racecars, speed of all kinds. To maximizers, on the other hand, every sensation is a cannonade, and they go for the downs—barbiturates, alcohol, opiates. Other quirks of physiology and psychology dictate other preferences. New genetics-based methods of drug synthesis will yield higher highs, faster speeds, deeper nods, and more ecstatic ecstasies, truer than ever to diverse needs and receptor sites, but as long as the Dope Wars continue, accidents of history and supply line will determine which side of the law these new drugs fall on.

      Moreover, enforcement is racist and class-based. According to a 1999 Human Rights Watch report on the U.S. prison industry, black drug arrestees in Illinois go to jail 57 times more often than white ones. In the United States as a whole, black male pot smokers are twice as likely to be arrested as are their white counterparts, and five times as likely as white women.

 

 

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Rush of the Fifties: Red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy was a junkie, a morphine addict who fed his monkey with prescriptions authorized by Harry Anslinger, head of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.^[15]

 

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      The war has made hypocrisy and judicial string-pulling too routine for shock. Florida governor Jeb Bush’s daughter, Noelle, got a total of 13 days for crack possession and buying Xanax with a forged prescription, felonies for which the usual sentence is six years. President George W. Bush’s twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna, routinely escape prosecution for doping and boozing that would put others in jail. Dan Quayle’s college pot dealer, Brett Kimberlin, was put in solitary confinement four days before the 1988 election to keep him from talking to the press. “Tough on drugs” Michigan District Court judge Thomas S. Gilbert was allowed paid leave after being caught smoking pot at a Rolling Stones concert. Todd Cunningham, son of California representative Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who advocates the death penalty for smugglers, got 30 months (half the “mandatory” minimum) for smuggling 400 pounds of cannabis. Dan Burton Jr., son of Indiana representative Dan Burton, who also wants death for dealers, was busted with seven pounds of pot, then busted again with 30 plants, but got probation and community service instead of the standard six years. Geraldine Ferraro’s son, known as “the Pharmacist,” got four months’ house arrest for running a cocaine supply service at college, but Joycelyn Elders’s son, set up to sell an eighth of an ounce to a narc in retaliation for his mother’s public opposition to the Dope War, got ten years. And the Tobacco Institute donated $70,000 to distribute the anti-drug pamphlet Helping Youth Say No.

      The Dope War has other horrific economic, medical, and human costs.

·       During alcohol Prohibition, the annual murder rate rose from 1.1 to 9.8 per 100,000 people, then stabilized at about 4 or 5 in the years after relegalization. Today the rate hovers around 12–14 per 100,000. Half of the 35,000 or so murders committed in the United States each year are “drug-related.” In true doublespeak, that means they have nothing to do with the effects of drugs but rather are money-related (turf battles) or law-related (silencing of witnesses). That’s 15,000–20,000 needless deaths per annum.

·       There are an average of 9,000–10,000 overdose deaths from illegal drugs each year, most of them caused by ignorance about safe use, uncertainty about purity and dose, and adulterants from bootleg manufacture. A rash of “Ecstasy” deaths in the autumn of 2000 turned out to be due to impurities, but they were used to justify tougher laws that will cause more deaths.

·       At least 10 percent of AIDS and hepatitis cases in the U.S. result from refusal of access to sterile syringes for fear of encouraging heroin addiction. Kyrghyzstan, where heroin is cheap and abundant, set up a needle-exchange program as soon as AIDS began to appear among its users. As a result, rates of infection there have dropped, but our drug warriors would rather let addicts die, and take others with them, than address the problem honestly.

·       Attempts to add up all of the Dope War’s monetary costs to America generally arrive at figures over $500 billion, about 5 percent of the gross national product. That includes payments to police, courts, lawyers, prisons, guards, bureaucrats, rats, corrupt officials, propagandists, smugglers, dealers, and money launderers, as well as wages, taxes, and productivity lost from arrestees. Per prisoner per day, we spend three and a half times what we spend on each public school student per day. Prohibition’s opportunity costs comprise all the roads we can’t maintain, schools we can’t build, libraries we can’t stock, toxic dumps we can’t clean up, and other human services we can’t provide because the money is wasted on the war.

·       By removing a parent or child from the family, Dope War arrests break up about a million American homes every year. Courts often take children from arrested parents permanently with no evidence of abuse. This attack is led by those who preach “family values” loudest, but no one can argue in good faith that it actually benefits families.

·       The war mentality drives out compassion. It precludes emphasis on honest education and on treatment for most of the people facing real problems of addiction. “The poor go to jail. The rich go to Betty Ford.” Children born to addicted mothers are used to justify more offensives but are actually victims sacrificed to our misplaced priorities.

      Entrapment, eavesdropping, and informers are the only way to enforce victimless-crime laws. Illegal drugs often are blamed for personality changes in individuals, but it is seldom remarked how drug wars can change the character of society. Drug-war indoctrination in schools routinely urges children to turn in their parents, and police bribe them to do so with candy or money, often leading to long jail terms for the parents, loss of custody, and excruciating guilt for the child later in life. Way back in 1979, 16 percent of all requests under the Freedom of Information Act came from prisoners seeking the name of the snitch who put them in jail.^[16] Constant surveillance in the Stalinist empire bred a type of citizen often called Homo sovieticus—paranoid, without initiative, and bent on holding his own by harming others. After collapse of the East German communist government, files of the secret police, the Stasi, revealed that nearly one-fourth of the adult population had been recruited as informers to fink on the other three-fourths. Is this really a road we want to travel?

 

If you don’t trust the people, you make them untrustworthy.

— Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching [Book of the Way and Its Ways], tr. Stephen Mitchell

 

      The Dope War fosters contempt for science and for truth in general. Prohibition is based on certain fundamental lies—“All drugs we say are bad are bad, and are equally bad,” “All use is abuse,” and so on. It can only engender more lies to perpetuate itself. Its proponents have systematically distorted scientific evidence about every popular drug from opium to Ecstasy. They’ve spent millions of dollars to buy junk science in support of predetermined conclusions, and millions more to marginalize real science. The battleground is littered with ignored studies that reached the “wrong” conclusions.

      Nixon had appointed Pennsylvania governor Raymond Schaffer chairman of a commission to study the effects of marijuana on society, perhaps unaware that Shaffer was primed to do an honest job because he’d been made to look like fool by an anti-drug zealot a few years before. He had called for new a enforcement effort against LSD after six college students had gone blind from staring at the sun while tripping—only to find that the tale was a hoax made up by Dr. Norman Yoder of the state Welfare Department’s Office of the Blind. The Shaffer report^[17] found marijuana to be the safest of all popular drugs, including the legal ones, and recommended immediate decriminalization. Nixon ceremoniously threw it in the Oval Office wastebasket without opening it. Shaffer extended the commission’s work past its mandate, and a year later released a supplemental report calling for full legalization of all drugs. Officials and the media met it with a wall of silence.

      In 1982 an 18-member committee of the National Academy of Sciences who had studied the drug laws for four years unanimously advocated  decriminalizing marijuana, and eventually legalizing and regulating it,^[18] only to have Reagan’s science adviser, Dr. Frank Press, repudiate their report and successfully pressure the media not to publicize it. As committee member Daniel X. Freedman put it, “Society very rarely wants to hear what science can say or acknowledge what it can’t say.”

      In December 1997, the UN World Health Organization received a report it had commissioned on marijuana. Unknown officials of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the UN International Drug Control Programme browbeat the WHO into withholding parts of it from publication. The deleted portions stated that cannabis is not addictive, does not lead to use of other drugs, poses no risk of lung damage or other serious long-term health problems, is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco, and would remain so even if it were used as much as these two legal drugs.^[19]

      Lying by the White House drug propaganda arm, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, received congressional endorsement in 2004. The ONDCP flogs disproven health scares and the discredited “gateway drug” hypothesis in every state referendum on easing the pot laws. Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) asked the General Accounting Office to see if this wasn’t misuse of public funds for false advertising. GAO lawyers concluded that since the ONDCP was set up specifically to oppose efforts at legalization, the truth or falsehood of its statements is not an issue.

 

Most men are reluctant to date a narc.

— lament of female agent in New York Times interview

 

      The scariest part is propaganda’s long-term effect on society. On Stalin’s use of the science, Leonard Schapiro wrote, “The true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.” It not only tells lies but eventually makes people angry at the truth. Thus many people reflexively hear any dissent from the Dope War as the sputterings of a drug-addled mind. Daimler-Benz’s PR director, Bernd Gottschalk, once explained why Mercedes ads play along with the widespread belief that Henry Ford invented the automobile: “We try to go easy on the facts, so as not to offend Americans.”

      The Dope War prevents use of valuable medicines. Heroin is the strongest known pain reliever but cannot be used where indicated, in terminal cancer, for example. Cocaine is the best local anesthetic known but can only be used rarely and with great bureaucratic difficulty. Cannabis has a multitude of proven medical uses and is by far the least toxic drug ever tested. The Therapeutic Index, a measure of a drug’s overdose potential, is found by dividing the minimum effective dose into the Lethal Dose 50%, the dose at which half the lab rats die. The higher the number, the safer the drug. The TI of most medical drugs is between 5 and 100. That of alcohol is about 15, but as low as 4 in some people who lack the detoxifying enzyme aldehyde dehydrogenase in the liver. But rats stubbornly refuse to die from the kind weed. Attempts to calculate an exact TI for delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol have been unsuccessful, but estimates range from 10,000 to 28,000,000. Still, Clinton’s ONDCP czar, Barry McCaffrey, took every televised opportunity to make fun of cancer patients, glaucoma patients, multiple sclerosis sufferers, people living with depression or intractable pain, and the doctors who try to help them with marijuana, as proponents of “Cheech and Chong medicine.” Maybe if they don’t inhale…?

 

If they can get you asking the wrong questions,

they don’t have to worry about answers.

— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Proverbs for Paranoids #3

 

      The Dope War diverts attention from government mind-control efforts. Several men given LSD without their knowledge as part of the CIA’s notorious mkultra program committed suicide. Donald Ewen Cameron, president of both the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatric Association, performed many experiments for mkultra. At the Allen Memorial Institute in Montreal, Cameron used unwitting patients in the search for techniques to create programmable drones and assassins. His “Operation Knockout” involved erasure of memory and personality by drug-induced sleep as long as three months at a time, combined with electroshock at up to 40 times the normal current power. Cameron routinely falsified death certificates of the many patients who died. One of the eight victims who later sued the CIA, a man who never recovered any memory before his first “treatment” at the age of 23, recounted being introduced to his parents and children, with no knowledge of who they were. The “psychic driving” portion of the CIA studies included massive doses of LSD or other drugs, then planting suggestions by hypnosis, hidden speakers, or amplitude-modulated microwave beams, which create vibratory “voices” in the subject’s head.

      Experimental proposals discovered in Senator Frank Church’s investigation in 1977 indicate that such experiments were continued long after Cameron’s death in 1967. Dr. Henry Bailey conducted similar research on thousands of people at Chelmsford Psychiatric Hospital in New South Wales, Australia, until 1990. At least 48 of his test subjects died. The methods were exported to spy and torture agencies in Brazil, El Salvador, South Africa, Morocco, Jordan, South Korea, and other pro-American tyrannies.^[20] In 1988, the CIA paid eight victims a total of $750,000 on condition they not speak publicly about their torture. To my knowledge, no anti-dope crusader has ever expressed concern about this form of drug abuse.

      The Dope War exacerbates, though it does not cause, the peculiar Western or capitalist desire to get “more bang for the buck.” Coca leaves deliver cocaine in very dilute form, tempered with related alkaloids and a dozen vitamins and minerals that keep the stimulation at a mild, controllable level. Early coca preparations introduced in Europe, soon after Italian neurologist Paolo Mantegazza’s essay on the plant in 1858, preserved most of the co-factors and contained only about 5 to 150 milligrams of coke per dose. By 1900, many formulas made use of pure isolated or synthesized cocaine, sometimes in amounts approaching a gram per hit, close to the average lethal dose for first-time users. Legislation removed all coca products, including the safe ones, from pharmacy shelves, while pure cocaine became a lucrative black-market item.

 

Q: How many narcs does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Just tell us where you got this joke and we’ll go easy on you.

(Of course, if it’s a colored bulb, you’re really gonna get screwed.)

 

      In response to greater enforcement pressure in the Sixties and Seventies, processers sought more stable forms of the drug able to survive longer smuggling routes. They invented first free-base, then paste, and finally crack. Coca leaves do not cause tolerance (the need for more to get the same effect), and they are not addictive (causing withdrawal symptoms). Progressively more concentrated forms of the drug acquire both of these characteristics, to the point where heavy users may ingest up to 75 times the nominal lethal dose in a day and undergo intense delirium, hallucinations, and paranoia (though not the life-threatening physical symptoms of heroin withdrawal) if use is interrupted for even a few hours.

      The prohibition black market tends to eliminate natural forms of drugs—which are cumbersome, perishable, and safer—in favor of more concentrated and more dangerous forms. The chief exception to this rule is cannabis, for which no unnatural synthetic form yet exists. But because marijuana remains bulky and deliciously aromatic (Agents call it the big green elephant!) enforcement really can limit supply to some extent, as well as raise the price.

      The Dope War artificially glamorizes all prohibited drugs with the lure of the forbidden. No one on earth is trying to force or cajole anyone to take drugs—except the pharmaceutical companies. Drug dealers do not advertise, except by word of trusted mouth; otherwise they shun publicity. Users don’t proselytize; they pray to be left in peace. But once young people figure out that authorities are lying to them to about one thing—marijuana or sex, for example—they tend to be skeptical of everything that authorities tell them, even if it’s true. Thus prohibition automatically works against all attempts at honest education about drugs, and the substances become a way to remove oneself from the banal world of conformity and lies.

      The Dope War helps keep people compliant, deters them from questioning their masters, and covers up for loss of initiation. Few phrases are more chilling than “our failed war on drugs.” The thriving underground is an inspiring testament to human ingenuity, but the fact of the matter is that the war can be won, and drug wars have been won in the past. It just takes long application of brutal repression. Drug-war historian David Musto has documented some relatively recent “successes.” The Church’s 1,500-year deletion of cannabis from the West is an earlier example. Social coercion has changed drug-use patterns, even erased social memory of beneficent uses, and modern spy devices and anti-privacy laws make the war more winnable than ever.

      Many people assume that modern civilization has delivered mankind from a constant struggle for survival into a world of relative leisure. Actually, the reverse is true. Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins tested the assumption by studying the work habits of surviving hunter-gatherer tribes and neolithic gardening villages uncontaminated by industrial culture. He found that on average they enjoyed a 20-hour week, and spent their abundant free time napping, dancing, playing games, making art, and making love.^[21]

 

Every time they come up with a new and more powerful machine,

we will find a new and more powerful way to relax.

— Savary Phaeton, San Francisco photographer and aphorist

 

      Opium and coca, when used sparingly in their natural forms, can serve as a temporary respite from the incessant stress of modern life, coca by providing a lift that’s less jitterbuggy than caffeine’s, and opium by providing a short mental vacation. Moderate use of cannabis, with its unique combination of nontoxicity, relaxation, and euphoria, is ideal for both recuperation and creative inspiration. In groundbreaking research with various co-workers from the mid-1960s through mid-1970s, Dr. Norman Zinberg found that modern drug users spontaneously re-create the same cautions and controls that exist among tribal societies. Word-of-mouth, like the Nixon-era “Speed kills” slogan, help limit dangers. By making people afraid to talk and by fouling the air with bogus information, prohibition increases the damage. Even so, Zinberg found, three-fourths of people who use heroin never become addicted but only take it occasionally as a way to chill out and recharge.^[22]

      There’s a hallucinatory quality to the Dope War, as though we’re on the deadliest mind-twister ever concocted. Yet most of us prefer not to inquire what it is (Ring! Ring!) about modern life (It’s for you) that creates such demand (It’s a salesman from Porlock) for escape from the unreal (whose spiel sounds) tedious shrill imperatives (like your boss), inescapable as God (demanding why the hell) but twice as mean (the eNtangle deal is late), which makes you want to rise (even though he can’t) with a sigh of relief (leave you alone long enough) above the morass (to finish it) into a real dream.

      Another characteristic of so-called primitive societies is their universal provision for initiation rites, ceremonies devised to lovingly introduce the young to the complex meanings of adult life. In every culture—except the one spreading throughout the world from the industrialized West—rituals were planned to imbue the new generation with a sense of the beauty and fragility of nature and human dependence upon a harmonious relationship with her. Most such initiations involved an entheogen, a drug plant chosen and used to evoke the god within, so as to help the initiate experience with vibrant immediacy the divine spirits of the world without. Many investigators of psychedelics have concluded that initiatory experience is a fundamental human need and that lack of it forces people to try to reinvent it on their own.

      So the Dope War precludes asking whether the urge to occasionally change our minds with drugs is innate, a desire that, unpersecuted, might stabilize of its own accord at a healthy level. Oakland psychologist Jack Block has studied the question by following the lives of several hundred people from childhood to adulthood. He found that the happiest and most successful are those who experiment or use some drugs in moderation, but don’t make them the center of their lives. In Block’s group, the most frequent users are the most alienated and dissatisfied, but that may be as much a cultural phenomenon as a drug symptom. Those who never try any illegal substances, Block found, tend to be emotionally cold and socially inept, though these traits also may be causes rather than effects of abstention.