Pubdate: Mon, 01 Nov 2004
Source: Brown Daily Herald, The (Brown, RI Edu)
Copyright: 2004 The Brown Daily Herald
Contact:  http://www.browndailyherald.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/727
Author: Katherine Cummings
Note: Katherine Cummings '06 is a former Herald columnist.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topics/Higher+Education+Act
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Test)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hr.htm (Harm Reduction)

Taking Their Eyes Off the Ball

THE CANDIDATES IGNORE THE "WAR ON DRUGS."

Perhaps mine is a problem of faith. By which I mean to say that I had faith 
- - too much, to be sure - that the important questions would be raised this 
election season, that the next leader of the free world would have to 
address my specific concerns with regard to our future foreign and domestic 
policies.

But as Bob Schieffer wished America goodnight from Tempe and as I watched 
Laura and Teresa enter stage right and left respectively, I knew the 
opportunity had passed.

I want to talk about drugs. I want to know why we pour billions of dollars 
into a "war on drugs" that has no clear end, a "war" built upon the 
illusion that we can create a drug-free America without policies that 
seriously address or even acknowledge the problems of abuse and addiction. 
I suppose I can understand that some of my points are not entirely 
palatable. No one wants to hear that at the end of 2002, one in every 143 
U.S. residents was incarcerated in a federal, state or local prison, or 
that the current non-violent prisoner population in this country is larger 
than the combined populations of Alaska and Wyoming. No one wants to take 
the time to consider how it is possible for the United States to represent 
4.6 percent of the world's total population, when our prisoners constitute 
25 percent of the world's prison population.

But even if they leave a sour taste, there are a few questions that should 
have been asked of our presidential candidates. In 2003, the U.S. federal 
government spent $19.179 billion dollars on the War on Drugs, at a rate of 
about $600 per second. Is it worth the cost? What have we achieved?

In 1998, at the UN's Special Session on the World Drug Problem, Secretary 
General Kofi Annan declared that the international community's mission was 
"to create the momentum for a drug-free world in the 21st century." Five 
years later, a UN report on Global Illicit Drug Trends found that of the 92 
countries reporting, 85 percent had experienced either an increase or no 
significant change in drug abuse.

The total number of drug users worldwide is estimated at 200 million 
people, equivalent to 3.4 percent of the world population. What accounts 
for the failure of Annan's noble global mission? Maybe we should lock 
everybody up, or maybe, just maybe, we should shift our methods, focusing 
on harm reduction rather than punishment.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that 2.8 percent of all American 
children under age 18 - a total of 1,941,796 kids - have at least one 
parent in a local jail or in state or federal prison, a considerable number 
of whom were convicted for drug offenses. A majority of parents in both 
state and federal prisons are held more than 100 miles from their last 
place of residence.

In 1998, an amendment was added to the Higher Education Act that denies 
federal financial aid to anyone convicted of a drug offense. To date, the 
"drug provision" has obstructed the path to higher education for more than 
150,000 students. Last week in Florida, three third-graders were suspended 
from Pine Hills Elementary School and now face felony charges for 
possession of two nickel bags of marijuana.

In a recent study of high tech industries, researchers found that "drug 
testing programs do not succeed in improving productivity. Surprisingly, 
companies adopting drug testing programs are found to exhibit lower levels 
of productivity than their counterparts that do not." Most employee drug 
testing in American industry happens because of government requirements, 
not because it is deemed necessary by employers. Why do we continue to 
enforce a policy of distrust in the workplace that mandates tests that 
provide no information relevant to job performance?

In order to preserve my faith in our leadership, I'm going to continue 
believing that if the questions are posed, the answers may just follow. 
Unfortunately, our politicians only spout rhetoric about how we are in an 
"all-out war" in response to our drug problem. But if it is indeed a "war 
on drugs" we are fighting, then the drugs seem to be winning. We must 
accept that although we may never live in a world free of drugs, we can 
certainly conceive of policies that reduce the harms associated with 
production, trafficking and consumption. We need some new answers. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake