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Legend
has it that in the five-thousand year history of marijuana, only
one death has ever been attributed to the plant: Two smugglers
were flying low over Floridian farmland back in the 1970s when
they received a radio warning that the D.E.A.. was waiting on
the ground. They started dumping 20 pound bricks of Colombian
bud out the airplane door and one of the bricks crashed through
the roof of a farmhouse and pulverized a farmer who was kicking
back, having a beer and watching TV.
That small story, probably
untrue, usefully illustrates two points: One, marijuana is benign.
One death, however peripheral, in five millennia is not a bad
record at all. Two, whatever harm that can be associated
with marijuana-- in this case getting squished while sipping a
Schlitz -- comes not from some intrinsically pejorative quality
of the plant, but from it's prohibition (If the D.E.A. weren't
waiting in the bushes, the farmer never would have been flattened).
In the War On Drugs, that farmer is collateral damage; and if
we are going to admit collateral damage then we would certainly
have to include Donald Scott, age 61, wealthy, reclusive and also
quite doomed. His story is definitely true.
On October 2, 1992, agents
from the Los Angeles Police, The Los Angeles County Sheriff's
Office, the Park Service, the D.E.A., the Forest Service, the
California National Guard and the California Bureau of Narcotic
Enforcement -- thirty agents in all -- knocked and announced their
presence at 8:30 am at the front door of Donald Scott's $5 million
200-acre ranch in Malibu, California. Seconds later, the agents
kicked in the door and rushed into the house where they found
Mrs. Scott screaming and Donald Scott holding a gun. They shot
him twice in the chest and killed him on the spot.
Agents were acting on a tip
that marijuana was cultivated on the property but a subsequent
search found no marijuana, no drugs and no paraphernalia whatsoever
anywhere. An investigation conducted by the Ventura County DA
after the raid found that the Sheriff's Department lied, that
it knowingly sought a search warrant on insufficient information,
that much of the evidence supporting the warrant was false while
exculpatory evidence was withheld from the judge. The only way
to explain why seven agencies and thirty agents were willing to
do so much with so little was greed. By their presence at the
raid each agency gained a claim to a portion of the revenues that
would presumably be generated by the civil forfeiture of the Scott's
$5 million property. In fact, the DA's report found that the various
authorities had targeted the property, not the crime and that
two of the thirty agents who raided Scott's home were asset forfeiture
specialists. In addition to coming in with high-powered rifles,
police dogs and battering rams, these guys were also armed with
a property appraisal and a parcel map of the ranch marked with
the sale price of a nearby property.
Civil forfeiture -- the taking
by government of property used in the commission of a crime --
has been broadened in the time of the war on drugs. Authorities
can seize property without filing criminal charges and, if charges
are filed, the property may be retained by the government even
if the accused is acquitted. The owner need not know of any alleged
criminal activity in order to have their property taken away.
Hence, an elderly couple in Connecticut lost their house when
the police founds their grandson in the basement with drugs. This
new breed of forfeiture allows police and prosecutors to decide
who is "really" guilty even if a judge and jury have
determined otherwise. Seized assets give prosecutors enormous
clout in plea-bargaining as in "What are you willing to say
in order to get your house back?" and negotiations always
favor the propertied allowing kingpins to cut deals and leaving
small-fry to swing in the wind. Another drug law modification
allows untainted property to be seized in substitute for supposedly
tainted assets which authorities deem to be unrecoverable or destroyed.
Since the laws were re-written in 1984 authorities have confiscated
houses, cars, bars, boats, jewelry, securities, IRAs, cash, lots
and lots of cash, and, in one particularly galling instance, a
childhood coin collection that had nothing to do with a crime.
The participating law enforcement agencies split the seized assets
to spend as they see fit, raising the spectre of self-funded,
self-regulated law enforcement agencies beholden to no oversight
but their own questionable judgment. There is now close to $3
billion in the Federal Asset Forfeiture Fund and some local police
agencies have seized assets worth many times their annual budgets.
Enhanced civil forfeiture
is but one of many blunt legal instruments which have become crude
weapons in the time of the War on Drugs. At least, the prosecutors
call them weapons; defense attorneys and their clients call them
fundamental abrogations of the Bill of Rights. Fifty percent of
American workers are now required to submit urine and/or hair
samples for drug testing. No-knock policies, warrantless searches
and infra-red heat seeking devices mounted on low-flying military-style
helicopters foreclose our right to privacy; mandatory minimums
and "Three strikes! You're out!" sound bite sentencing
fill the jails to bursting. In thize=me of the war on drugs the
nations prison population has doubled, and, currently, the U.S.
imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world,
perhaps a half-million more than communist China. In the past
two decades thousands of new prisons and jails have been built
resulting in a system that is more overcrowded now than when the
building spree began. Sixty percent of all Federal prisoners are
serving time for drug crimes. The Federal prison system as a whole
now operates at about 40% above capacity, at least 45 state prison
systems are now operating beyond their design, and at least 24
of those state prisons are under court order to relieve the overcrowding.
This is sometimes accomplished by releasing violent criminals
back into society in lieu of non-violent drug offenders whose
mandatory sentencing does not allow for parole; and this is sometimes
accomplished by jobbing the incarceration out to one of a vast
number of private prisons that have cropped up like weeds during
the time of the war on drugs.
The U.S. Government currently
spends $17 billion on its Drug War and it needs marijuana to be
illegal in order to play at this level of the game. Consider that
there are perhaps a million heroin users in the U.S.; a half million
are thought to be addicts and only 2,000 die each year of overdose.
The "only" in that last sentence is not as cynical as
it sounds. Drug war rhetoric implies that the death rate among
hard drug users is much greater than it really is. In fact "only"
15,000 people die each year in the U.S. from an overdose of an
illegal drug, and while those 15,000 deaths are tragic, unacceptable
and, for the most part, avoidable, spending $17 billion to spare
the lives of 15,000 individuals does not make financial sense.
Drug warriors will argue that we need to protect our children
and ourselves from the crime and violence that accompanies drug
abuse, but they don't say that almost all of the crime and violence
to which they refer stem from the drug business which is a function
of prohibition (During alcohol prohibition liquor distributors
were criminals, carried guns and killed each other and the police.
After Prohibition was repealed liquor distributors put their guns
away and became a much more civil lot).
The hard drug problem in
the U.S. simply doesn't warrant a $17 billion expenditure, but
add marijuana to the mix and suddenly the drug war becomes feasible,
fungible and fundable. Marijuana is now and long has been the
most popular, most frequently used illegal drug in the country.
It is used more frequently than all the other drugs combined.
There are 14 millions U.S. citizens who consume illegal drugs
regularly but 80% of them are marijuana smokers. So three million
hard drug offenders become fourteen million once marijuana is
admitted to be the "gateway" to other drugs. The drug
warriors point to studies that show a vast majority of hard-core
drug users began by using marijuana, and the drug law reformers
reply sarcastically that, for a lot of drug abusers, mother's
milk came even earlier; but the truth is more complicated. Truthfully,
there is a gateway dynamic between marijuana and heroin. Owing
to its illegality, a marijuana purchase can bring a neophyte consumer
into a dealer's orbit where pills and powders are as prevalent
as weed. In that way marijuana can lead to harder drugs. By asking
junkies which drug they began with, researchers reached a foregone
conclusion. Had researchers asked how many of the 70 million Americans
who have tried pot went on to experiment with harder drugs the
results would be minimal and would not justify an annual $17 billion
war chest.
There is no doubt that the
current Drug War grew out of an anti-marijuana movement organized
by conservative groups in the late 1970s. When Ronald Reagan was
trolling for an anti-drug abuse agenda, these groups provided
the zero-tolerance anti-pot rhetoric that quickly became national
policy. In 1980, before the current Drug War started, 50% of the
inmates entering state prisons were violent offenders; by 1995
less than a third were convicted of a violent crime. Similarly,
the rate of violent crime has dropped by about 20% since 1991,
but the prison and jail population during the same period has
risen by 50%. Non-violent pot offenders fueled the Drug War. And
while there is no doubt that the conservatives in the 1970s were
sincere (albeit misinformed) in the tirade against marijuana,
motivations have morphed in the last dozen years. Today's drug
war is a bi-partisan witch-hunt. The War on Drugs has become an
institutionalized part of our economy and Republicans and Democrats
alike applaud it as no small contributor to our current prosperity.
Enhanced foreclosure extravagantly rewards police officials who
target the drug war. The urine-testing business which didn't exist
ten years ago is now a $350 million piss-mill. The doubling of
our prison population, seen another way, represents an economic
boom to millions of American workers. When we build prisons Wall
Street financiers handle the public bond issues and private prison
investment (a private prison boom in Texas was backed by Shearson
Lehman, Allstate, Merrill Lynch and American Express). Construction
companies, electrical contractors, plumbing contractors, supply
companies, clothiers and all sorts of local labor benefit. Food
services thrive. Trash needs to be hauled. After the prison is
built the institution remains labor-intensive and hires its personnel
from the local labor pool. When the prison boom came to the upper-New
York State North Country, a economically-depressed area was put
back to work. North Country prisons (up to eighteen at last count
with another one on the way) now bring $425 million annually to
the region in payroll and operating expenditures. Politicians
like the North Country's State Senator Ron Stafford can return
to their districts with fat-cat prison construction projects that
are a sure-win with voters wanting jobs. During the ten years
Mario Cuomo was the Democratic Governor of New York State he authorized
the building of 29 prisons; 28 were built in upstate districts
represented by Republican Senators. Prison construction as coin
of the realm. This is political cachet of the first water, and
this is the real reason why we wage a war against marijuana in
the time of the War on Drugs.
Our unfortunate farmer notwithstanding,
there has never been a death attributed to marijuana in
all of history. In fact, it is one of the few pharmacologically
active substances for which there is no quantified toxic dose.
Nevertheless, there were more marijuana arrests in 1997 than ever
before, almost as high as the number of arrests for murder, rape,
robbery and aggravated assault combined. According to one extrapolation,
a male marijuana offender is raped, heads or tails, in the U.S.
prison system once every two hours. Cruel and unusual punishment
to say the least or a Constitutional crisis at worst, listen closely:
that's the sound of Thomas Jefferson spinning in his grave.
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