You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (64 page)

151.
    Andrew Downie, “Brazil’s Drug Users Will Get Help, Instead of Jail,”
Christian Science Monitor
, 4 Jan. 2002.

152.
    Canadian cafés where the open smoking of marijuana is tolerated by the authorities include the Hot Box
Café in Toronto and the Blunt Brothers/New Amsterdam Café in Vancouver.

153.
    Ian Sparks, “Swiss Cannabis Smokers . . .,”
DailyMail.co.uk
, 16 Nov. 2011.

154.
    “Milton Friedman, 500+ Economists Call for Marijuana Regulation Debate,”
ProhibitionCosts.org
, ret. 10 July 2012.

155.
    Larry Elder,
Ten Things You Can’t Say in America (2000)
, p. 260.

156.
    Cronkite was a spokesperson for the Drug Policy Alliance.

157.
    Christopher Hitchens, “Legalize It,”
Foreign Policy
, May/June 2007.

158.
    “International Organization of Law Enforcement Denies UN Claims of Drug War Success,” LEAP, 8 Aug. 2006, ret.
LEAP.cc
, 20 Feb. 2012.

159.
    Eve Conant, “Pot and the GOP.”
Newsweek
, 25 Oct. 2010.

160.
    Jann Wenner and Herb Ritts, “Bill Clinton,”
Rolling Stone
, 28 Dec. 2000.

161.
    “Case for Legalisation,”
Economist
, 28 July 2001, p. 11.

162.
    Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, “This is Your War on Drugs,”
MotherJones.com
, July/Aug. 2009.

163.
    
McLaughlin Group
(TV), Oliver Productions, 26 June 2009.

164.
    “Time for Obama to Join the Debate Over the Failed War on Drugs,”
Guardian.co.uk
, 7 Apr. 2012.

165.
    Largely from
NORML.org
, ret. 6 July 2012.

166.
    Albert Einstein,
World As I See It
(2006), p. 49.

The most severe repercussions of the drug taboo are the by-products of its criminalization. It will be difficult to change the laws as long as the taboo prevents rational debate from receiving public exposure.

The United States of America prides itself on being
the
land of freedom. However, this is a questionable assertion considering that it incarcerates a higher percentage of its population than any other country in the world.

The land of the free houses over twenty percent of the world’s prisoners despite having less than five percent of the world’s population. It incarcerates a percentage of its citizens three times higher than the theocracy Iran, and four times higher than
the Communist state China.
¹
This is attributable to America’s zealous drug war, with there being seven times more drug prisoners in 2000 than there were in 1980.
²
We are incarcerating more and more American drug users to “help them.”

Politicians have gone to the “get tough on drugs” well so many times that the injustice now reaches absurdity. One example is Doug Gray. Gray had a wife, a son, and his own roofing business. He was a Vietnam veteran who lost his leg in the war and was a casual marijuana user. Gray was offered a pound of marijuana at a bargain price. Gray figured he could smoke it and sell the rest to his friends. The seller was paid by drug agents to make the offer and, due to mandatory sentencing, Gray is now serving a life sentence. The Alabama taxpayers will pay roughly $25,000 annually to house, feed, and medically treat Gray until his death.
³

The situation is so unjust that numerous judges and even prosecutors have openly criticized mandatory minimum sentences.
⁴
In 1993, fifty senior federal judges refused to hear any more drug cases.
⁵
In addition, because of mandatory minimum sentences, violent offenders, such as murderers and rapists, are routinely released early to make room for people like Doug Gray.
⁶

The drug war has so perverted the concept of freedom that it is questionable some even remember what it means. In response to a 2008 international study that found American drug use far ahead of countries that had decriminalized drugs, an Office of National Drug Control Policy official rationalized that Americans use more drugs because they live in a “highly free” society.
⁷

Drug Legalization Problems

          1. A small minority of users become addicted. (Most of whom would have found a substance for escape under prohibition.)

          2. A small minority of users act irresponsibly. (Most of whom would have found a substance to facilitate idiotic behavior under prohibition.)

          3. Hundreds of annual overdose fatalities.

Drug Prohibition Problems

          1. Law-abiding responsible people cannot enjoy drugs.

          2. Casual drug users and functioning addicts (the vast majority of drug users) have their careers ruined by criminal records.

          3. The lives of non-functioning addicts and their dependents are destroyed when they become full-time criminals to afford drugs worth more than gold.

          4. The children of incarcerated drug dealers grow up without a parent.

          5. Ten thousand foreign drug war fatalities annually in Mexico and other nations.

          6. Thousands of annual overdose fatalities.

          7. Property crimes of addicts.

          8. Erosion of civil liberties.

          9. Billions of dollars go to domestic gangs and international terrorist organizations instead of to tax-paying, job-creating, private-sector corporations.

          10. Billions of tax dollars are spent on enforcement and incarceration bureaucracies.

          11. No sales tax revenue from a massive industry.

          12. Violence and weapons are a way of life for dealers of all ages.

          13. Militarization of police.

          14. Corruption of public officials.

Our criminal justice system had been developed over the centuries to balance the rights of the accused with the rights of the wronged. The system worked well when there were wronged parties to start the investigation process. This changed with the drug war.

Selling and using drugs are consensual activities. Just as with heresy before the Inquisition, there is not a wronged party to involve law enforcement. Under the prevailing rules prosecuting drug users was difficult.

The police, who before were restrained from participation in crime, provocation of crime, and snooping where nothing was amiss, had to be unshackled and unshackled they have become. As Judge James Gray, a Republican and former federal prosecutor, wrote in 2001, “Nothing in the history of the United States of America has eroded the protections of our Bill of Rights nearly as much as our government’s War on Drugs.”
⁸

This has predominantly occurred in three areas—constitutional interpretation by the courts, the use of informants, and street justice.

The chipping away of our Bill of Rights is a slow but steady process. A few milestones were:

1971
—Previously a search warrant could not be based solely on an anonymous tip. Anonymous tips allow anybody (including the police themselves) to easily set up anybody’s property, such as a car or home, for a search. Since 1971 the courts have ruled an anonymous tip is sufficient.

1986
—Previously police could not go onto private land to seek evidence without a warrant. In 1986 this was limited to land immediately surrounding a home.

1996
—Previously police could not pull a car over for a minor traffic violation merely to search it for drugs. The Supreme Court decided these pretext stops are
constitutional. A Pennsylvania officer admitted to me at a district courthouse in 2005 that with the countless automobile regulations, he could technically stop any car he wished on a minor violation, for example, an improperly illuminated license plate.

The Supreme Court has also allowed rights to be tossed aside by politicians. One of the most egregious has been forfeiture laws enacted by Congress in 1984.
⁹
This breathtakingly medieval concept clearly violates not only the Bill of Rights, but basic principles of fairness. It allows law enforcement to confiscate any property or money they believe to be tainted by drugs. This can be done on mere suspicion. The burden is then on the owner to institute expensive legal proceedings to prove the property is clean. Eighty percent of the people from whom assets are seized are never even charged with a crime.
¹⁰

Even more comically unjust is the fact that the department confiscating the property is allowed to keep the proceeds. This creates a massive incentive to grab property—not big-time drug dealers. As one customs official admitted, “If the locals [police] have a guy with a ton of marijuana and no assets versus a guy with two joints and a Lear jet, I guarantee you they’ll bust the guy with the Lear jet.”
¹¹

In
Drug Warriors & Their Prey
Richard Miller documents the extensive abuse of these Neanderthal laws. A few examples are a forfeited family home where a kid hid his drug use from his parents, a forfeited family car when a son’s
passenger
had drugs, whole apartment buildings forfeited because a tenant had drugs, taking thousands of dollars from people simply because having that much cash was suspicious, and a heinous case where a man was shot dead in a marijuana raid contrived in the hopes of forfeiting his ranch.
¹²

The Supreme Court has done little to rein in forfeiture despite the fact that it was this very practice, along with wanton warrants, that helped launch the American Revolution.
¹³

When someone is arrested on a drug-related offense, the police will often offer to make things “easy” for the defendant if she will set up someone else. The police use this technique to try to move up the chain and catch “bigger fish” in the
drug distribution hierarchy. However, most people are not naive enough to give up bigger fish because bigger fish tend to harshly punish the little fish for ratting them out. Instead they set up relatively harmless fellow users who only sell their stash to friends. In a scenario I’ve heard described by numerous defendants, a non-dealer will tell me how her friend, X, called her up begging for some of her stash five days in a row.
¹⁴
In this manner casual users rot in prison under harsh minimum mandatory sentences, while the authorities can claim they nabbed a “dealer.”
¹⁵