Pubdate: Fri, 28 Sep 2001
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 2001 Globe Newspaper Company
Contact:  http://www.boston.com/globe/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/52
Author: David Grinspoon and Lester Grinspoon
Note: David Grinspoon is a planetary scientist and author of "Venus 
Revealed." Lester Grinspoon is associate professor emeritus at Harvard 
Medical School and author of "Marihuana, the Forbidden Medicine."

THIS ISN'T LIKE THE WAR ON DRUGS

His new war, we are being told, will not be like the wars, when we knew 
where to drop our bombs. TV commentators repeatedly make the analogy to the 
"war on drugs."

Unfortunately there is a valid comparison between these two struggles that 
goes beyond the one which the pundits have mentioned. Their point is that 
in each the enemy is shadowy, nonlocalized, shifting, and hard to target or 
eradicate. All true. But there is a reason why the war on drugs is 
unwinnable and, unfortunately, the same may become true of this conflict.

The problem with the war on drugs is that the enemy was misidentified from 
the beginning. The struggle was miscast, and the end result is a "war" that 
has done much more harm than good for our society. If we had called it a 
"war on addiction" we might have won it by now. But instead drugs were used 
as an omnibus enemy in which questionable moral crusades against substances 
that many Americans use to harmless, or even positive, effect, were lumped 
in with the real enemy: addictions to heroin, crack, and amphetamines.

The legitimate rights of Americans to the pursuit of happiness were 
targeted along with legitimate enemies: a smaller list of genuinely 
dangerous and addictive drugs. This imprecise targeting has led to the 
incarceration of millions of innocent Americans and a lessening of freedoms 
and civil rights for the rest of us. It has fostered a lucrative trade in 
illegal drugs, created a drug-industrial complex of testing labs and teen 
boot camps with an economic life of its own, and caused a general erosion 
of trust in our law enforcement, political, and justice systems.

The cynicism, cruelty, corruption, and dishonesty of the war on drugs has 
helped erode the social contract at the foundation of our society. A war 
with a Big Lie at its heart causes massive collateral damage to the society 
which mounts it. This war will never be won because it was originally 
launched under false premises in which unjust goals have been lumped 
together with just ones.

The similarity with this new war is that we are again in danger of framing 
the fight in the wrong terms, thereby creating new enemies and igniting a 
conflict which we cannot win. Only this one could have much more horrible 
consequences. This is a unique moment when we are able to pause and 
contemplate if not the beginning of the war, certainly a well-defined 
moment of terrible escalation.

The people who planned the attacks on Sept. 11 were clearly smart. It seems 
there are some things about us that they have understood better than we 
have understood ourselves. They may also understand some geopolitical 
realities better than we do. They will stop at nothing. The brainchildren 
of Edward Teller may soon be available to them. One of their goals is to 
frighten and shock us. This they have done. But we suspect that their 
ultimate goal is to provoke a world war between Islam and the West.

All the talk of "This is war, let's show them what we're made of" and even 
"bomb Afghanistan back into the Stone Age" causes us to fear that our 
government, with the blessing of a public whipped into war fever, will give 
the perpetrators exactly what they want. Will we, with our response, play 
right into their evil hands?

All eyes are now on America to see how we respond. Our response will define 
our relationship with the rest of the world for generations. If we identify 
specific perpetrators or legitimate targets that threaten more of the same, 
then force is justified in removing these threats. But if we lash out with 
force just to show the world how tough we are, and if we kill many innocent 
civilians, then we may create hundreds of bin Ladens and thousands of 
suicide bombers, help foment radical Islamic revolutions among moderate 
states, and ultimately bring upon ourselves and the world much greater 
destruction.

This war must be against hate, inequity, and blind, unthinking nationalism. 
Along with any military response, we must look honestly at our role in the 
world, at all the sources of anti-Americanism, legitimate and illegitimate, 
and proceed with our eyes open.

Let us learn from the failure of the war on drugs that if we misidentify 
our enemy and frame our struggle incorrectly, we will do harm to many 
innocents and democratic institutions, and we will all lose.
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MAP posted-by: Beth