Java Madness
Craig Goodrich
Rant Magazine
July 1998
The press release was wonderfully upbeat --
UNITED NATIONS, June 8, 1998 -- President Clinton says the United States will set up an international drug fellowship program to allow professionals from other countries to work with U.S. agencies that are fighting drugs..."Such sharing of information, experience and ideas is more important than ever," the president declared... "It will help our nations to learn from one another while building a global force of skilled and experienced drug crusaders."
Following is the text of the president's remarks:
"Nations have shown that with determined and relentless efforts, we can turn this evil tide. In the United States, drug use has dropped 49 percent since 1979. Recent studies show that drug use by our young people is stabilizing, and in some categories, declining."
This is really, really great news, of course. It's wonderful to know we're "turning this evil tide." In 1971, when there were about 300,000 heroin addicts in the United States, President Nixon declared drugs "America's public enemy Number One." Then in 1973 he announced "We have turned the corner on drug addiction in America."
Today there are more than half a million heroin addicts in this country. In 1996 -- the latest year for which figures are available -- there were more than 545,000 arrests for marijuana possession (and another hundred thousand arrests for dealing) -- an all-time record. We've been turning Nixon's corner for more than eighty years now -- Federal drug control began with the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914, and use of prohibited recreational drugs has been rising more or less steadily ever since.
And there sure are some other "determined and relentless" nations out there. In 1975, Malaysia enacted the death penalty for drug trafficking. Then in 1983 it toughened the penalty (making it more broadly applicable), since the drug problem was getting worse. Then in 1987 Malaysia built a 12-foot-high barbed wire security fence along the Thai border. That didn't even momentarily slow the drug traffic.
Our own "determined and relentless" drug warriors in Congress appear to think Malaysia's fruitless policies are worthy of imitation. We now also have the death penalty for drug trafficking and several Congressmen want to string barbed wire along the Mexican border. The Canadian border would have to be next, of course; tons of drugs are coming across annually into Montana...
"Year after year, our administration has provided the largest antidrug budgets in history. Our request next year exceeds $17 [billion]... Our comprehensive national drug control strategy aims to cut American drug use and access by half over the next 10 years, through strength in law enforcement, tougher interdiction, improved treatment, and expanded prevention efforts. We are determined to build a drug-free America..."In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, coffee -- originally from Ethiopia -- was introduced to the rest of the Arab world, and became instantly popular with many pious Moslems because it helped them stay awake during long prayer vigils. But conservative and orthodox religious leaders condemned it as an intoxicating beverage, forbidden by the Koran, and threatened caffeine addicts with severe punishment. In Egypt, notes Dr. Robert de Ropp in Drugs and the Mind, "the 'coffee bugaboo'... caused almost as much fuss as the 'marijuana bugaboo' in [the] contemporary United States. Sale of coffee was prohibited; wherever stocks of coffee were found they were burned.... All this fuss only had the result of interesting more people in the brew and its use spread rapidly." Coffee is now something of a national beverage for most of the Islamic world, in spite of the prohibitionist imams' efforts to "build a drug-free Arabia."
In Constantinople in 1633, Sultan Murad IV decreed the death penalty for smoking tobacco. Even on the battlefield the Sultan would surprise men smoking, and have them beheaded, hanged, or quartered. But the insane cruelty of the Sultan didn't "build a drug-free Turkey" -- nor even reduce smoking there.
In 1634, Czar Michael Feodorovitch also prohibited tobacco. Smokers were sentenced to flogging with the knout. His successor, determined to "get tough" with tobacco abusers, executed them. In 1698 the price of tobacco in Moscow was far higher than in London, wrote an English visitor, adding that smokers would sell their clothes to buy it, "to the very shirt." The first Romanoffs had failed to "build a drug-free Russia."
In 1792 the penalty in China for growing or selling opium was strangulation. Opium smoking continued to grow in popularity. Fifty years later the Chinese market was so lucrative that England went to war to allow Indian opium to be imported. The Divine Emperor had failed to "build a drug-free China."
In 1919, the United States passed the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages. The use of coffee, marijuana, and ether rose; by 1931 per-capita alcohol consumption had returned to pre-prohibition levels. Thousands were killed or blinded by adulterated moonshine. Bootleggers bragged that they "owned" the police and judges in nearly every major city; gang wars doubled the nation's murder rate. In 1933 the 18th Amendment was repealed. The Progressives had failed to "build an alcohol-free America."
100 years after heroin was first synthesized by Bayer Pharmaceuticals in Germany and marketed as a "non-addictive morphine," and 80 years after its importation or manufacture had been made a Federal crime, we find in The New York Times for June 2, 1998:
Mexican drug cartels, long regarded as peddlers of cheap, low-grade heroin that accounted for only a tiny portion of the U.S. market, are now producing some of the world's most potent heroin and are seizing control of a rapidly growing share of the U.S. heroin business, according to Mexican and U.S. law enforcement officials...U.S. officials say the shift in the heroin supply coincides with a disturbing trend in drug consumption in the United States. While the number of cocaine users has dropped significantly in recent years, the number of heroin users has risen from 500,000 to 600,000 over the past two years...
U.S. authorities discovered the dramatic rise in purity levels of Mexican heroin when 14 teenagers and young adults in one Dallas suburb died in 1996 after using "uncut" Mexican heroin so pure that it exploded in their systems like a bomb...
These 14 young people are victims not of drugs but of the War on Drugs:
- Because these drugs are illegal, there are no commercial standards of purity and strength, and no way of holding the manufacturers and vendors responsible for their product. During Prohibition, the average strength of alcoholic beverages increased while the quality became unpredictable. Both returned to pre-Prohibition levels after 1933.
- Because these drugs are illegal, there are no special social sanctions attached to selling them to minors. Do you think friendly Joe the bartender or perky Brenda at the checkout would knowingly let a teenybopper get drunk? Of course not; they're decent family people just like you. But Al Capone would -- and did. During Prohibition, teenage drinking skyrocketed. It returned to pre-Prohibition levels (surprise, surprise) after 1933.
- Because our children are saturated with anti-drug propaganda starting in elementary school, by the time they reach the rebellious teens they're convinced it's a Big Deal because stodgy old grownups are so excited about it. (How would the anti-smoking fanatics react if every schoolroom wall in the country were plastered with Joe Camel saying "DON'T Smoke Camels"? Right: they'd say it was a plot by the Evil Tobacco Companies to affect the kids subliminally.)
- Because our arbitrary drug laws don't reflect any actual medical or psychological facts about the drugs themselves, the kids are ill-equipped to evaluate the actual risks of their experimentation, in spite of years of exposure to anti-drug messages. The Drug War's Ministry of Truth doesn't distinguish between relatively harmless intoxicants like marijuana and highly addictive substances like the opiates and nicotine, or between self-limiting drugs like LSD and those where continual heavy use can induce psychosis, like cocaine, the amphetamines, and caffeine.
So the Dallas 14 joined the thousands of innocent bystanders shot during drug turf wars, the hundreds of thousands of other addicts impoverished by inflated black-market prices and risking death from black-market adulterants, the 400,000 imprisoned on drug charges, the 25 million Americans who use one or another illegal drug, and the 200 million adult citizens whose basic civil liberties have been sacrificed in the hopeless, fanatical quest for an impossible "drug-free America": Civilian casualties of the War on Drugs, trapped between an insane and bloodthirsty Murad IV and a ruthless and bloodthirsty Al Capone.
But in this war, both sides are winning -- the law enforcement bureaucracy accumulates more power and larger budgets every year, while the cartels created by drug prohibition watch their markets grow (thanks to the 'drug bugaboo') and their profits rise.
Who's losing? All the rest of us.
As always, truth is the first casualty of war. But never before have so many sacrificed so much for so long -- for so little.
Computer guru Craig Goodrich lives in a house in the woods in Elkmont, with his wife, two children, and four cats. He is a representative-at-large of the Libertarian Party of Alabama, a smoker, and a gun owner. While writing this, he smoked six cigarettes and drank four cups of coffee.
