For many on the Far Left a new skirmish in the overall culture war is simply an opportunity to renew old favored battles. In writing for Vox (Why We Should Abolish ICEand DEA too August 14 2018) UC Berkeley Professor Kathleen Frydl not only joins the chorus of irresponsible radicals calling for the complete elimination of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) but seizes the fevered moment of Trumps war on immigrants" to rail against what she considers to be our nations failed drug war" along with its ostensible warriors" in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Aside from her unimaginatively stale arguments that all drug-related social problems and pathologies have been caused by drug prohibition and not the drugs themselves Frydl fraudulently impugns the character motivations and effectiveness of those professional men and women at all levels of government who are called upon to enforce on our behalf the legitimate narcotics laws of this nation.
Never in the history of language has there been a more corrupted and reviled metaphor than the war on drugs." Extreme Leftists who incessantly promote a purely literal interpretation shamelessly harangue the term for its incendiary evocation of government abuse and overreach against its own citizenry. So too is the term deeply despised by its very own warriors" for its colossal oversimplification and militarization of a complex and enduring biological behavioral and criminological struggle. No drug agent cop treatment specialist or drug educator ever refers to him- or herself as one who is involved in the drug war." To do so would be to engage in melodrama.
No the drug war" cannot be won just like it cannot be lost; for it is not now nor will it ever be a true battle against a definable foe against which a martial victory" can be declared followed by anything resembling peace." Those who hype an exacting unembroidered interpretation of a forty-year-old well-intentioned literary figure of speech designed to inspire civic solidarity are at best disingenuous and at worst duplicitous in their own combative and socially destructive campaigns.
To surrender to political forces whose cleverly deceptive arguments are those of limitless compassion unattainable simplicity or imagined government abuse while ignoring all civilizational necessity for order is to succumb to a nave and unthinking existence that will only accelerate our decay. An all too recognizable characteristic of our modern society is our diminishing capacity for analysis. Rather than contemplating a complex issue with a broadly acquired set of facts and experiences we prefer sound bitessimple soothing and instantaneously palatable. Todays culture lacking both the will and the capacity to confront such complexities even as they threaten to devour it instead seeks the palliating blur of moral relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Rather than identifying wrong and destructive behavior at the individual level it is far easier to speak in banal tokenisms that scatter and misallocate blame while offering no solutions.
Purveyors of the theory that the drug war" causes more social harm than the drugs themselves count on what scholar William Gairdner has described as pandemic public ignorance" where the people to believe such misguided recklessness must become dupes of appearances wishful thinking inadequate facts and pseudo arguments." To this intellectual cowardice one could add moral sloth where in the name of tolerance and against its opposite government intoleranceall behaviors become relative even those that are reckless harmful and even evil.
The enforcement of drug lawsfrom local ordinances to international treatiesbrings with it an inherent and historically acceptable restriction of individual liberties. Such is the nature of social trade-offs in any ordered society. To the majority of Americans the legal restraints asked of them concerning drugs are willingly accepted for the greater good. Just as there are with laws against speeding or certain types of firearms there must always be some sense of proportion. Implementing public policy especially as it pertains to restricting access to illegal drugs does not involve choices between bad and good but rather bad and worse. To paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith our response to the perpetual threat of drug use and trafficking is nothing less than the art of choosing between the distasteful and the catastrophic. Therefore how we craft a political and social response balancing individual liberties with the fundamental values and needs of society is the challenge.
The perpetual social and political struggle against those who break the legitimate drug laws of our sovereign states and nations will remain a complex and ever-evolving rationaland constitutionalresponse necessitating both the engagement of the citizens in that struggle and the unfortunate castigation and correction of the few who threaten the public safety. Those who spray about the term war on drugs" like dripping pejorative graffiti in order to denigrate its well-intentioned actors and thus elevate their own sophisticated" position engage in a dangerous and grotesque oversimplification. It is theythis herd of independent elites and uncontrolled dopers alikewho hawking morally lazy banalities seek to blame some outside and warlike" force for every problem related to drugs.
Our current ordeal with opioids has been rightfully described as an emergency a plague an epidemic on a national scale. Seemingly overnight prescription pillslegal drugsovertook cocaine heroin methamphetamine and all other illegal drugs except marijuana as the most abused in America. In fact the prescription painkiller phenomenon has not only catalyzed and fueled the current heroin and fentanyl problem it has driven the bulk of the more than 72000 overdose deaths in the United States in 2017. By the way thats nearly 200 drug-related deaths in our country every single day! As our friends in DEA rhetorically and so vividly ask would our media and other elites react with the same serene indifference if the same number of dolphins were to wash up dead upon our beaches each day!
What this somewhat sudden tectonic shift in the preferences and paradigms of recreational drug taking unequivocally displays is that the historical pathologies of illegal drug use and trafficking have absolutely not been due to their illegality. Prescription drug abuse explodes the myth that its the war on drugs" or the criminalization" of controlled substances that has been the problem. It eviscerates the notion that drug laws" prohibition" and the so-called high costs of enforcement are to blame. With a price of up to $80 per pill for black market OxyContin the drugs status as a legal medicine has deterred neither the highly motivated drug-dealing profiteer nor societys ability to regulate it tax it and then pay for treating (or burying) those poor unfortunate souls who find themselves" addicted.
There is no war on drugs." There never has been. The term has become a cudgel used to mock and condemn any law enforcement attempt to protect society. It derives from President Nixons Special Message to the Congress on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control" delivered in 1971 and was designed as a metaphorical call to arms to galvanize and unify the nation against an alarming social problem by employing stirring martial language. In other words it was designed to be the moral equivalent of war in exactly the same way that Lyndon Johnson had done with his war on poverty" and Jimmy Carter had done with his war on cancer."
It is little-remembered today that Nixon began his so-called war on drugs with drug treatment as his foremost weapon. Recognizing the primacy of drug use as the main driver of all other drug-related harms President Nixon increased spending on prevention and treatment 8-fold within two years consuming fully two-thirds of the total drug control budget and dwarfing the monies allocated to the supply-sideor enforcement programsacross the federal government. But Nixon and the nation would come to learn the limitations of governments ability to affect behavior through compassionate and therapeutic means.
Given that the relapse rate was and still is 90-95 following initial treatment most heroin addicts preferred to revert to the tug of psychoactive pleasure a feeling one opioid user has described as godlike." What did make a significant difference in reducing drug use and its attendant problems was a reduction in the availability of heroin brought about through sustained law enforcement efforts against the Corsican-Italian Mafia supplying the vast majority of heroin to Americans at that time known as the French Connection.
To purposely deceive the public into believing the myth that a war" on drugs is being waged against the citizens by its own police forces is to engage in a grotesque manipulation of the truth. Rather than simply rejecting law enforcement methods as punitive" or counterproductive" one should consider the possibility that for society at-large it is perhaps the most compassionate of all the various counterdrug tools. Given the limited ability of government to affect individual behavior the enforcement of legal sanctions not only deters the would-be user of drugs possibly sparing his very life but also deters the dope peddler who may one day target your child. The sentimental urge by some to decriminalize drugs that harm no one" would remove those sanctions the police can employ to maintain public order and in many cases compel substance abuse treatment for the afflicted. Arresting a single person found with a few rocks of crack cocaine or a bowlful of crystal meth may seem unjust." But failing to do anything about a score of crackheads and tweakers can destroy an entire community.
There are numerous and demonstrable reasons why drugs are either illegal or highly-controlled based upon substantial empirical historical pharmacological and sociological grounds. Removing the legal and therefore socially buttressing restrictions on drugs would serve only to tacitly endorse their use. In valuing both freedom and order we sometimes must sacrifice one for the other. Yet once a prohibition has been removed it is difficult and sometimes impossible to restore even when according to Psychologist Theodore Dalrymple the newfound freedom proves to have been ill-conceived and socially disastrous." We must recognize the seeming paradox that some limitations to our freedoms have the consequence of making us freer overall. The freest manor society for that matteris not the one who slavishly follows his own appetites and desires. No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest good warns Dalrymple can long survive."
There is an old historically based admonition that nothing so destroys any regime as a soldiers sentiment that their lives are being toyed with." To that one might add cops and DEA agents. Should the citizens one day be swayed by the misguided emotional and abstract arguments of drug war experts" like Kathleen Frydl and decide that our drug laws should no longer be enforced it will have been because of a pusillanimous response by a government intent upon indulging the base and capricious desires of a shrill minority over its moral imperative to buttress and sustain common virtues through the enforcement of those laws.
Lasting and effective drug control can come only from the cultivation of individual self-control. This of course is seriously lacking in todays society. Furthermore there are no magic bullets no scapegoats no shortcuts in reducing the damage that drug use and trafficking causes in what will surely be a hard perpetual struggle. As we continually assess and fine tune our policy responses in order to achieve that golden mean in balancing personal freedoms with the safety and order of society maintaining and enforcing the illegality of certain harmful substances must continue to be a necessary and valuable tool that complements not competes with education and treatment.
Clearly our current drug-control paradigm falls far short of complete success. It is however like Winston Churchills famous observation about democracy: that its the worst system ever devised by the wit of man except for all the others! Moreover everyone understands that law enforcement bears an immense responsibility for developing and maintaining trust with the community but we should also never forget that the community shares in that responsibility too.
Jeffrey B. Stamm is a 34-year law enforcement veteran having served as a Deputy Sheriff in Sacramento County and a Special Agent in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. He is currently the Director of the Midwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) based in Kansas City Missouri and is also the author of On Dope: Drug Enforcement and The First Policeman."
For many on the Far Left a new skirmish in the overall culture war is simply an opportunity to renew old favored battles. In writing for Vox (Why We Should Abolish ICEand DEA too August 14 2018) UC Berkeley Professor Kathleen Frydl not only joins the chorus of irresponsible radicals calling for the complete elimination of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) but seizes the fevered moment of Trumps war on immigrants" to rail against what she considers to be our nations failed drug war" along with its ostensible warriors" in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Aside from her unimaginatively stale arguments that all drug-related social problems and pathologies have been caused by drug prohibition and not the drugs themselves Frydl fraudulently impugns the character motivations and effectiveness of those professional men and women at all levels of government who are called upon to enforce on our behalf the legitimate narcotics laws of this nation.
Never in the history of language has there been a more corrupted and reviled metaphor than the war on drugs." Extreme Leftists who incessantly promote a purely literal interpretation shamelessly harangue the term for its incendiary evocation of government abuse and overreach against its own citizenry. So too is the term deeply despised by its very own warriors" for its colossal oversimplification and militarization of a complex and enduring biological behavioral and criminological struggle. No drug agent cop treatment specialist or drug educator ever refers to him- or herself as one who is involved in the drug war." To do so would be to engage in melodrama.
No the drug war" cannot be won just like it cannot be lost; for it is not now nor will it ever be a true battle against a definable foe against which a martial victory" can be declared followed by anything resembling peace." Those who hype an exacting unembroidered interpretation of a forty-year-old well-intentioned literary figure of speech designed to inspire civic solidarity are at best disingenuous and at worst duplicitous in their own combative and socially destructive campaigns.
To surrender to political forces whose cleverly deceptive arguments are those of limitless compassion unattainable simplicity or imagined government abuse while ignoring all civilizational necessity for order is to succumb to a nave and unthinking existence that will only accelerate our decay. An all too recognizable characteristic of our modern society is our diminishing capacity for analysis. Rather than contemplating a complex issue with a broadly acquired set of facts and experiences we prefer sound bitessimple soothing and instantaneously palatable. Todays culture lacking both the will and the capacity to confront such complexities even as they threaten to devour it instead seeks the palliating blur of moral relativism and nonjudgmentalism. Rather than identifying wrong and destructive behavior at the individual level it is far easier to speak in banal tokenisms that scatter and misallocate blame while offering no solutions.
Purveyors of the theory that the drug war" causes more social harm than the drugs themselves count on what scholar William Gairdner has described as pandemic public ignorance" where the people to believe such misguided recklessness must become dupes of appearances wishful thinking inadequate facts and pseudo arguments." To this intellectual cowardice one could add moral sloth where in the name of tolerance and against its opposite government intoleranceall behaviors become relative even those that are reckless harmful and even evil.
The enforcement of drug lawsfrom local ordinances to international treatiesbrings with it an inherent and historically acceptable restriction of individual liberties. Such is the nature of social trade-offs in any ordered society. To the majority of Americans the legal restraints asked of them concerning drugs are willingly accepted for the greater good. Just as there are with laws against speeding or certain types of firearms there must always be some sense of proportion. Implementing public policy especially as it pertains to restricting access to illegal drugs does not involve choices between bad and good but rather bad and worse. To paraphrase John Kenneth Galbraith our response to the perpetual threat of drug use and trafficking is nothing less than the art of choosing between the distasteful and the catastrophic. Therefore how we craft a political and social response balancing individual liberties with the fundamental values and needs of society is the challenge.
The perpetual social and political struggle against those who break the legitimate drug laws of our sovereign states and nations will remain a complex and ever-evolving rationaland constitutionalresponse necessitating both the engagement of the citizens in that struggle and the unfortunate castigation and correction of the few who threaten the public safety. Those who spray about the term war on drugs" like dripping pejorative graffiti in order to denigrate its well-intentioned actors and thus elevate their own sophisticated" position engage in a dangerous and grotesque oversimplification. It is theythis herd of independent elites and uncontrolled dopers alikewho hawking morally lazy banalities seek to blame some outside and warlike" force for every problem related to drugs.
Our current ordeal with opioids has been rightfully described as an emergency a plague an epidemic on a national scale. Seemingly overnight prescription pillslegal drugsovertook cocaine heroin methamphetamine and all other illegal drugs except marijuana as the most abused in America. In fact the prescription painkiller phenomenon has not only catalyzed and fueled the current heroin and fentanyl problem it has driven the bulk of the more than 72000 overdose deaths in the United States in 2017. By the way thats nearly 200 drug-related deaths in our country every single day! As our friends in DEA rhetorically and so vividly ask would our media and other elites react with the same serene indifference if the same number of dolphins were to wash up dead upon our beaches each day!
What this somewhat sudden tectonic shift in the preferences and paradigms of recreational drug taking unequivocally displays is that the historical pathologies of illegal drug use and trafficking have absolutely not been due to their illegality. Prescription drug abuse explodes the myth that its the war on drugs" or the criminalization" of controlled substances that has been the problem. It eviscerates the notion that drug laws" prohibition" and the so-called high costs of enforcement are to blame. With a price of up to $80 per pill for black market OxyContin the drugs status as a legal medicine has deterred neither the highly motivated drug-dealing profiteer nor societys ability to regulate it tax it and then pay for treating (or burying) those poor unfortunate souls who find themselves" addicted.
There is no war on drugs." There never has been. The term has become a cudgel used to mock and condemn any law enforcement attempt to protect society. It derives from President Nixons Special Message to the Congress on Drug Abuse Prevention and Control" delivered in 1971 and was designed as a metaphorical call to arms to galvanize and unify the nation against an alarming social problem by employing stirring martial language. In other words it was designed to be the moral equivalent of war in exactly the same way that Lyndon Johnson had done with his war on poverty" and Jimmy Carter had done with his war on cancer."
It is little-remembered today that Nixon began his so-called war on drugs with drug treatment as his foremost weapon. Recognizing the primacy of drug use as the main driver of all other drug-related harms President Nixon increased spending on prevention and treatment 8-fold within two years consuming fully two-thirds of the total drug control budget and dwarfing the monies allocated to the supply-sideor enforcement programsacross the federal government. But Nixon and the nation would come to learn the limitations of governments ability to affect behavior through compassionate and therapeutic means.
Given that the relapse rate was and still is 90-95 following initial treatment most heroin addicts preferred to revert to the tug of psychoactive pleasure a feeling one opioid user has described as godlike." What did make a significant difference in reducing drug use and its attendant problems was a reduction in the availability of heroin brought about through sustained law enforcement efforts against the Corsican-Italian Mafia supplying the vast majority of heroin to Americans at that time known as the French Connection.
To purposely deceive the public into believing the myth that a war" on drugs is being waged against the citizens by its own police forces is to engage in a grotesque manipulation of the truth. Rather than simply rejecting law enforcement methods as punitive" or counterproductive" one should consider the possibility that for society at-large it is perhaps the most compassionate of all the various counterdrug tools. Given the limited ability of government to affect individual behavior the enforcement of legal sanctions not only deters the would-be user of drugs possibly sparing his very life but also deters the dope peddler who may one day target your child. The sentimental urge by some to decriminalize drugs that harm no one" would remove those sanctions the police can employ to maintain public order and in many cases compel substance abuse treatment for the afflicted. Arresting a single person found with a few rocks of crack cocaine or a bowlful of crystal meth may seem unjust." But failing to do anything about a score of crackheads and tweakers can destroy an entire community.
There are numerous and demonstrable reasons why drugs are either illegal or highly-controlled based upon substantial empirical historical pharmacological and sociological grounds. Removing the legal and therefore socially buttressing restrictions on drugs would serve only to tacitly endorse their use. In valuing both freedom and order we sometimes must sacrifice one for the other. Yet once a prohibition has been removed it is difficult and sometimes impossible to restore even when according to Psychologist Theodore Dalrymple the newfound freedom proves to have been ill-conceived and socially disastrous." We must recognize the seeming paradox that some limitations to our freedoms have the consequence of making us freer overall. The freest manor society for that matteris not the one who slavishly follows his own appetites and desires. No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest good warns Dalrymple can long survive."
There is an old historically based admonition that nothing so destroys any regime as a soldiers sentiment that their lives are being toyed with." To that one might add cops and DEA agents. Should the citizens one day be swayed by the misguided emotional and abstract arguments of drug war experts" like Kathleen Frydl and decide that our drug laws should no longer be enforced it will have been because of a pusillanimous response by a government intent upon indulging the base and capricious desires of a shrill minority over its moral imperative to buttress and sustain common virtues through the enforcement of those laws.
Lasting and effective drug control can come only from the cultivation of individual self-control. This of course is seriously lacking in todays society. Furthermore there are no magic bullets no scapegoats no shortcuts in reducing the damage that drug use and trafficking causes in what will surely be a hard perpetual struggle. As we continually assess and fine tune our policy responses in order to achieve that golden mean in balancing personal freedoms with the safety and order of society maintaining and enforcing the illegality of certain harmful substances must continue to be a necessary and valuable tool that complements not competes with education and treatment.
Clearly our current drug-control paradigm falls far short of complete success. It is however like Winston Churchills famous observation about democracy: that its the worst system ever devised by the wit of man except for all the others! Moreover everyone understands that law enforcement bears an immense responsibility for developing and maintaining trust with the community but we should also never forget that the community shares in that responsibility too.
Jeffrey B. Stamm is a 34-year law enforcement veteran having served as a Deputy Sheriff in Sacramento County and a Special Agent in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. He is currently the Director of the Midwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) based in Kansas City Missouri and is also the author of On Dope: Drug Enforcement and The First Policeman."