Awareness Wednesday :: Unintended Consequences — War on Drugs
America’s war on drugs has now lasted nearly 50 years without success.
This “war” began in 1971 with President Nixon’s declaration of a war on drugs soon after the passage of the Controlled Substances Act in late 1970. The act put a full prohibition on certain drugs, including marijuana, LSD, and heroin. This act declared that these drugs had high potential of abuse and had no valid medical uses. The prohibition of these drugs made it difficult to procure them, even for pure scientific or medical research. This act was not based on any scientific or medical studies.
Supporters claimed it would reduce drug-related crime, drug overdoses, and disease. They increased spending for federal agencies associated with drug control. They introduced new laws, criminalization, punishments, mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants. They claimed these would reduce the associated organized crime.
While this all sounded like a good idea, none of these claims were based on evidence. Instead, the war on drugs has had unexpected and disastrous consequences with far-reaching effects that have touched many communities in our country. In the end, it has been a war on our own people and families. The following are some of those unexpected consequences.
Incarceration
Since 1971, the number of people in the U.S. who are incarcerated has increased dramatically without a comparable decrease in crime or drug use.
The U.S. now has the highest incarceration rate per 100,000 in the world, with China and Russia having the next two highest rates of incarceration. In our federal prisons, nearly half of the inmates are incarcerated for drug-related crimes. Many of those are simply possession. Minorities and women have seen, by far, the largest increase in incarceration rates.
The challenges that lead a person to drug addiction — especially untreated mental illnesses — are often worsened by incarceration. When these people are released from prison, their family and social ties have often been damaged or lost. Unemployment and poverty are also an enormous problem. It is difficult for them to find gainful, legitimate, employment because many employers do not hire convicted felons. The cost of this increase of incarcerated people is a huge burden to taxpayers.
Disrupted Families
Millions of U.S. families have a mother, father, brother, sister, son, or daughter in prison on a drug charge. It is estimated that 2.7 million minor children have one or both parents incarcerated. This contributes to the number of children in foster care or who are homeless.
The stigma of an arrest, even with no conviction, affects employment. This is especially true for those who cannot afford bail. They must sit in jail as they await trial, even if they are innocent. A drug conviction, even for a relatively minor charge, can cause families to be banned from welfare, food stamps, and subsidized housing. These kinds of instabilities take a tremendous emotional toll on all family members, but this is especially true for children.
The Higher Education Act states that anyone convicted of a drug offense, including misdemeanor marijuana possession, can have their financial aid delayed or denied. This makes it even more difficult for these families to have stable and gainful employment.
These family separations and lack of ability to legitimately provide for their family are a likely cause of parents reoffending and their children later becoming part of the prison system.
Neighborhood Safety
Just like in Al Capone’s era of alcohol prohibition, violence does not come from drug use, it comes from the prohibition itself. The executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said, “The first unintended consequence is a huge criminal black market that now thrives in order to get prohibited substances from producers to consumers. Whether driven by a ‘supply push’ or a ‘demand pull,’ the financial incentives to enter this market are enormous. There is no shortage of criminals competing to claw out a share of a market in which hundred fold increases in price from production to retail are not uncommon.” The profits to be made are great and people are willing to kill for those profits and organized crime in the black market have thrived.
Drug Treatment
Instead of money going to drug treatment, it is being spent on criminal justice and military operations tasked with fighting the war on drugs. Most people that do need rehabilitation and other assistance find it unavailable due to lack of resources to pay for the treatment. Putting people in cages is not solving the problem. Instead, money toward treatment could save billions because it is less expensive than incarceration, those treated are less likely to be arrested again, and long-term health is improved.
Public Health
While the war on drugs was promulgated based on improving public health, it has had the opposite effect. There are greater risks to public health due to unsterile syringe sharing (which accounts for 100,000s of HIV/Aids infections in the U.S.). This puts others, including children, at risk, too. “Yet state paraphernalia and prescription laws limit access to sterile syringes in industrialized nations in refusing to fund needle exchange.”
According to the NAACP, “Infectious diseases are highly concentrated in correctional facilities: 15% of jail inmates and 22% of prisoners — compared to 5% of the general population — reported ever having tuberculosis, Hepatitis B and C, HIV/AIDS, or other STDs.” With such a huge increase in the number of incarcerated people, we have also spread disease to an increased number of people.
Focusing on “harm reduction” is much more cost effective and is supported by evidence in its ability to reduce drug abuse. A focus on harm reduction reduces deaths from overdose and infectious diseases such as HIV/Aids.
The American Journal of Public Health points out that: “Communities of color face an escalating public health problem created by our society’s solution to imprison those arrested for nonviolent drug offenses. Challenges that plague inner cities — from poverty and hopelessness to substance use and increased morbidity and mortality — are exacerbated by high incarceration rates; suburban communities are not ‘harmed’ when nonviolent drug offenders are given treatment and second chances…Substance use treatment can be more effective only in places where the conditions of primary prevention are established.”
Increased Discrimination
Increased discrimination is the most concerning of the consequences. The use of illegal drugs is roughly equal among all races. However, depending on the state, black people are five to seven times more likely and Hispanic people are about twice as likely to be arrested and incarcerated as white people.
There are several ways this has disproportionately harmed and ravaged black communities. These increased arrests and incarceration rates escalate negative perceptions and bias. The high number of felony convictions disrupts minority families and keeps them in poverty, as discussed previously. All of these contribute to increasing negative perceptions and bias toward people of color.
Regrettably, we must ask the question just how “unintentional” this consequence is. In an interview, John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s top aides, said in speaking of the war on drugs, “You want to know what this was really about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying. We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Debra Oaks Coe is the Anti-Discrimination Co-Lead for Mormon Women for Ethical Government.
